The New York state Department of Environmental Conservation is in the initial stages of updating and tightening its air quality rules. It’s part of the state’s compliance with federal air quality requirements.
Three stakeholder meetings are planned at the end of July to gather input on tightening compliance rules for the National Ambient Air Quality Standards.
NYS DEC Division of Air Resources Director Steven Flint notes there are a host of rules that are updated regularly. He says the particular rule being targeted pertains to stationary combustion installations. But he emphasized the process is in the initial phase. “We have a concept how we want to change the rule. We want to make it more stringent. The principle piece is that we want to reduce the allowable emissions levels of particulates from these types of facilities. We can see what technology is capable of doing so we want to update our regulations. We do stakeholder meetings to talk to the regulated community as well as other stakeholders, the environmental community who are interested in additional controls. And then from there we’ll go back and we’ll develop a more detailed regulatory proposal. That then goes through a formal regulatory process.”
American Lung Association Assistant Vice President for National Policy Janice Nolen notes that particle pollution is inhaled and could result in numerous health problems. She points out that New York’s rules would target smaller facilities, but many air pollutants come from out of state coal-fired power plants. “The National Ambient Air Quality Standards is an official limit on how much particle pollution is supposed to be in an area because of its harm to human health. And one of the things we’ve learned is that as we’ve cleaned up more we’ve learned that even lower levels are harmful. So the cleaner levels that we’re looking at now are much lower than they were 5 or 10 years ago in the requirement. But they’re not where we think they need to be. And we know that there’s strong evidence that having even less pollution is important.”
Adirondack Council Spokesman John Sheehan says there are several reasons it is important for New York to tighten the standards. “We still have a very large coal-fired power plant near Buffalo in New York. It’s the last one but its emissions do impact the Adirondacks. Hopefully we’re going to get to the day when we don’t have any more coal-fired power plants in the state and the state can concentrate on diesel fuel as the main source of soot.”
The DEC’s Flint notes that the revised rules would target combustibles beyond coal-fired power plants. “This particular rule is for smaller institutions things like schools, commercial institutions. We see a lot of wood burning now that we didn’t see before as people have moved away from fuel oil and we want to make sure that as these changes are made we just want to keep these rules up to date. We want to keep things operating as cleanly as they can.”
The DEC’s stakeholder meetings are planned for July 26th, 27th and 28th in Albany, Long Island City and Avon respectively.
