By Katy Grimes

Lawmakers are notorious for responding to tragedies and accidents with often unnecessary legislation. It’s a Kodak moment none seem to be able to resist, especially over environmental issues.

It happened again Wednesday in the Senate Environmental Quality Committee. Several bills were passed by the committee, including SB 691 by state Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, a bill targeting large businesses for air quality accidents.

Despite facing legitimate legal and technical challenges, the committee ignored protocol, and allowed the bills to move on with the proviso that work would continue to be done on the bills.

Penalizing business over accidents

Taking aim at Chevron over the August 2012 refinery fire, SB 691 is put forth as the solution to a big problem. It would dramatically increase fines and penalties for businesses which have pollution accidents and air quality violations. Hancock said the bill would “incentivize” air quality compliance. And she added, “incentives are better than mandates.”

Hancock’s bill would quadruple the civil penalties large polluters must pay for air quality regulation violations. But what Hancock did not explain is that local air quality districts will be able to fine businesses for violations to air quality regulations, then pocket the money. The “incentives” appear to be on the side of the government.

“I am introducing this bill because current penalties are far too low for polluters who cause thousands of people to suffer,” Hancock said in a news release.

Under current law, penalties are assessed per day. Hancock said her concern was that, for a one-day violation like the Richmond fire, Chevron may only face a minimal fine.

“Single-day violations of air quality regulations that affect entire communities lack adequate financial consequences,” she explained. “Current penalties are simply inadequate to ensure compliance with the law from large polluters.”

Sponsored by the Bay Area Quality Management District and Breathe California, SB 691 would only “increase the penalty ceiling, and not necessarily the penalty,” Hancock said.

“One-day violations disrupt entire communities,” Tom Addison with the BAQMD said. He concurred that only the penalty ceiling would be increased, not the penalties.

Nuisance or dangerous?

Ed Manning, representing the Western States Petroleum Association, challenged Hancock’s charge of malicious negligence by large companies when an industrial accident occurs.

Specifically, Manning took issue with this wording of Hancock’s bill:

“Prohibits a person, except as specified, from discharging air contaminants or other material that cause injury, detriment, nuisance, or annoyance or endanger the comfort, repose, health or safety to any considerable number of persons, or to the public.”

“Nuisance is not non-compliance,” Manning said. He explained what constitutes a “nuisance” is different in every air quality management district in the state. A “triggered event” can be as small as one household complaining, he said. And air quality districts do not have to prove there was a violation for an official “nuisance” to have occurred.

“The reason nuisance penalties are so low is because the burden of proof is so low,” Manning said. Nuisance claims triggered by a complaint also are a problem for small businesses. “Penalties up to $10,000 are difficult for very small businesses.”

Sen. Ted Gaines, R-Rocklin, asked Hancock, “What about a real accident?” He explained that financially penalizing a business for an actual accident, which is not deliberate or intentional, is not right.

Hancock largely ignored Gaines’ question and Manning’s concerns, and instead just repeated, “It’s a huge public safety problem.” She claimed there appeared to be consensus on the bill. “I look forward to working with the opposition as the bill moves forward,” she said. “I think the bill is really needed, very, very much.”

By Katy Grimes

Wednesday the Senate Environmental Quality Committee passed three bills, despite all three bills receiving credible legal and technical challenges. The committee ignored protocol, and allowed the bills to move on with the proviso work would continue to be done on them.

Taxing vehicles for alternative fuels technology

SB 11, by Sen. Fran Pavely, D-Agoura Hills, SB 483 by Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, and SB 691 by Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, were passed from the Environmental Quality Committee despite gaping flaws and legal problems.

Claiming SB 11 is “a major piece of public health and clean energy legislation, Pavely’s said her bill would merely prevent a vehicle “fee” from expiring.  Despite promises of a sunset date from the fee back in 2007 in the original bill, Pavely justified the “fee” extension because the money goes to funding alternative fuel and vehicle technologies.

The fund was created with a tax on vehicles, car and boat registrations, as well as smog abatement, and goes into the Carl Moyer Memorial Air Quality Standards Attainment Program, for another ten years.

The Carl Moyer Memorial Air Quality Standards Attainment Program is run by the California Air Resources Board, which no doubt, doesn’t want to lose this gravy train of money.

“My SB 11 will help create jobs and attack air pollution, too,” Pavely famously Tweeted when the bill was announced. But I prefer the response Tweet she got:  “‪@SenatorPavley Your SB 11 is a job killer and do nothing about air pollution. Please,stop passing laws, I beg of you.”

Technical, good government bill bills

Beware whenever a lawmakers says “It’s just a technical, good government bill.” Chances are, it’s not.

Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, introduced her bill, SB 483, and said, “it’s a technical bill for dealing with hazardous waste.”

There’s nothing simple or minor when the California Environmental Protection Agency is knocking on the door of a business making inquiries about hazardous waste.

“This makes it easier for agencies to do their work,” Jackson said.

And that’s the crux of the bill – it makes it easier for the CalEPA to harass California businesses.

“This bill would revise and recast the area and business plan requirements and, among other things, would require instead that a unified program agency enforce these requirements,” the bill says.

Jackson’s bill would add onsite inspections of businesses, and bump up the paper reporting requirements businesses have to the EPA.

Interestingly, each of the witnesses who testified in support of SB 483 used similar or the same language as Jackson.

“It is not a very glamorous bill,” said a representative from the California Association of Environmental Health Administrators. And he said they were working through the existing government codes for “good government.”

“It’s a technical bill,” the California Fire Chiefs Association representative said.

The bill clearly needs work given the even farther reach of the EPA into private business.

Be sure to read my story today about Hancock’s SB 691, which would exponentially increase the penalties on business for air quality violations.

All three of the bills passed, including Hancock’s SB 691, needing extensive work. But Democrats will continue to pass the bills along through the committee process, ignoring opposition and legal challenges.

And that’s the way it’s done when the Democrats are in charge.

By Chris Reed

Gov. Jerry Brown’s eagerness for California to be the first state to implement the federal Affordable Care Act is being reported matter-of-factly by state newspapers. Completely absent is any big-picture explanation of what this will mean for health providers, companies and individuals in the Golden State. We’re less than a year away from the state implementing policies that give employers a financial incentive to stop providing health coverage and that give individuals, especially the young, an incentive to not buy health insurance. I wrote about these enormous looming headaches last week for the U-T San Diego editorial page:

• Beginning next Jan. 1, most companies with at least 50 full-time employees have to offer health insurance. But if they don’t, the fine is a pittance -– $2,000 per employee per year –- compared with the cost of providing health insurance. This creates a gigantic incentive for businesses to drop health coverage and push their employees toward getting insurance though government-run exchanges set up by Obamacare. If a struggling company could swiftly become a prosperous one by offloading 70 percent or more of the cost of providing health coverage, many thousands are going to do it. Some might face shareholder suits if they don’t.

• Also beginning next January, individuals without employer-provided health insurance will face fines under an income-based formula that mandates a penalty of less than $1,000 for those making under $40,000 a year. That $40,000 is significantly higher than the median household income for adults younger than 35, a subset that’s much healthier than older adults. All adults will have an incentive to only buy health insurance when they get sick; under Obamacare, they can no longer be rejected for pre-existing conditions. But these young, healthy adults will have a gigantic incentive.

Aren’t these angles, yunno, news? Not to most of the media in the Golden State, which focus on the logistical headaches of setting up the state health exchange in which people shop online for insurance. Why not focus on the larger problems with the Affordable Care Act? No idea, but my working theory is that not just sheep but incompetent sheep follow the herd.

Want an appointment? Tough luck

How bad is this refusal to say a discouraging word about Obamacare? Consider this angle, which should be a front-page story and which invariably surprises people when I mention it to them:

“California already has both shortages of family doctors in most regions and the nation’s oldest cohort of family doctors, with nearly 30 percent older than 60. If you add 2 million people to those being treated by these family physicians –- the minimum California increase expected in 2014 because of Obamacare -– what happens? It becomes far harder to get an appointment, and the headache gets progressively worse as more aging family doctors retire.”

This has gotten some coverage from the Golden State’s media. But given the importance of health care in everyone’s lives, one would think it would get far, far more coverage. We already have a shortage of family doctors in most parts of the state — and it’s a shortage that’s about to get far worse because of physician retirements and Obamacare.

Huge news? Of course.

But not to the sheep in the herd.