As warehousing spreads across the Inland Empire, San Joaquin Valley, Southern California and elsewhere, it presents a new version of an age-old problem: How can regulators enforce regional air quality standards under the Clean Air Act while at the same time reduce effects at the neighborhood scale?
The San Diego County Air Pollution Control District is the latest to respond to this challenge in its recent report, Options and Considerations for Reducing Indirect Source Emissions at Warehouses, Distribution Centers, and Ports. So far, its actions are not encouraging. They read as an exercise in compliance with Assembly Bill 423 — a 2019 law that requires the district to “consider” adopting indirect source rules — rather than a good-faith attempt to advance its obligations to protect all people, including the region’s most vulnerable, from the impacts of goods movement.
Among the first to grapple with the cumulative impacts of warehousing, which stretch far beyond diesel particulate matter and other air pollutants, are communities covered by Assembly Bill 617, enacted in 2017. They include portside communities, where 84% of cancer risk from air pollution is attributable to diesel particulate matter emissions from the Port of San Diego, freight and rail facilities, and industry; and international border communities, where the PM2.5 and traffic burden in San Ysidro are 95% and 100% higher than in other California census tracts, respectively.
AB 617 marked an admission, by the California State Legislature as well as the California Air Resources Board, that standard approaches to regulating emissions in disadvantaged communities, including “expensive, regulatory-grade monitoring systems in place today,” fail to target and redress the disparate impacts of air pollution in low-income and minority communities. In addition, the Clean Air Act’s ambient air quality standards, which Air Pollution Control District strives to achieve on a regional basis through air quality planning, were not designed to address what the California Air Resources Board calls “localized” sources of air toxics near “ports, rail yards, warehouses and freeways” and other sources.
In response, AB 617 created an air monitoring and emissions reduction planning process that is labor-intensive and, for residents of disadvantaged communities, exhausting. For hundreds of hours, portside and international border community residents served on AB 617 steering committees and produced detailed recommendations for how localized emissions should be identified and mitigated.
Portside AB 617 communities include Barrio Logan, Logan Heights, Sherman Heights and west National City. At the moment, Barrio Logan has 220 warehouses across roughly 5 square miles. Similarly, west National City has 201 warehouses within its borders. Roughly three-quarters of these warehouses are smaller than 20,000 square feet. Zoom in further and so does the intensity of land use. For example, Barrio Senior Villas, an affordable housing complex that is home to residents over the age of 75, is located within 1,000 feet of over 35 warehouses.
Such conditions led the Portside Environmental Justice Neighborhoods’ Community Emissions Reduction Plan under AB 617 to include “reduc[ing] emissions from heavy-duty and medium-duty trucks servicing indirect sources by 100% five years in advance of [existing] regulatory requirements” and “reduc[ing] Diesel PM from 2018 levels by 80% in ambient air at all Portside Community locations” as two among the plan’s seven goals.
The San Diego County Air Pollution Control District’s report (and recent supplement) does a disservice to communities who contributed, in good faith, to what they believed was a roadmap to finally address the cumulative impacts that they face. It gives short shrift to the place of additional regulations within an evolving suite of air pollution control options, ignores the full range of regulatory and compliance options that can be included in an indirect source regulatory program, fails to fully consider the emissions and air quality impacts of California’s decision to withdraw a waiver request to the Environmental Protection Agency for its Advanced Clean Fleets regulation, and paints a less-than-comprehensive picture of the public health benefits of such rules.
More importantly, by focusing on regional emissions reductions and aggregate compliance cost and cost-effectiveness calculations rather than localized benefits, the Air Pollution Control District shows a lack of consideration of years of work by environmental justice communities, through AB 617 and otherwise, to carefully determine how air districts should balance regional air quality and conditions on the ground. Greater care should be taken to acknowledge and engage with their findings.
Macey is director of the Center for Land, Environment and Natural Resources at UC Irvine School of Law and lives in Irvine. Rilli is conservation program manager of Sierra Club San Diego Chapter and lives in San Diego.