As the new home of OSPIRG's environmental work, Environment Oregon can be contacted regarding this article.
Two Ashlanders are in key
positions to either hold up the state legislative budget process or allow Gov.
Ted Kulongoski to move forward with his plan to push Oregon auto emission standards
on par with the cleanest in the country.
But, as the governor begins
to explore ways to adopt California’s stringent auto emission standards,
the state auto dealership lobby has begun to look for ways to prevent this from
happening.
Enter Ashland’s former
mayor and car dealership owner Alan DeBoer.
DeBoer, who owns four new
car dealerships in Southern Oregon while his brother Sid owns 84 all over the
West, wants the Senate Natural Resources Committee to include language in the
Department of Environmental Quality budget that would stymie the governor’s
plans.
Enter Sen. Alan Bates, D-Ashland.
Bates is the focus of DeBoer’s attention because he is the natural resources
committee chairman.
Kulongoski announced in
April that he planned to make Oregon the 10th state to adopt California’s
standards for cleaner car emissions. Rather than support a bill in the legislature,
he said he will implement a task force to decide how best to adopt the standards
and then do so through executive order.
Holly Armstrong, an aide
to the governor, said this could happen by the end of the year.
But DeBoer has plans, too.
“What’s being
attempted is to block the DEQ from spending any money on this,” DeBoer
said. “It’s an end run against the governor’s attempt to make
an administrative rule. If there is no budget for it, I don’t think he
can do it.”
Bates believes such a move
would be unconstitutional. He said the attorney general and the non-partisan
legislative council have told him that adding legislative matters to budget
bills is not allowed in Oregon.
That language will not be
on the Senate side’s bill,” he said. However, he added, “There
is tremendous pressure from the auto dealers on this one.”
Bates said he and DeBoer
have had several conversations about the matter and DeBoer, who donated $5,000
to Bates’ campaign, said he asked the senators for his support on this
matter at a legislative hotline meeting a few weeks ago.
Auto dealers don’t
like the idea of adopting California’s emission standards because they
fear it will drive up the price of their cars, forcing consumers to travel to
a nearby state to purchase the same car for less money.
The American Alliance of
Automobile Manufactures, a trade organization out of Detroit, has argued that
the standards will add approximately $3,000 to each new car sold and the California
Air Agency has estimated the figure to be closer to $1,000 per vehicle.
“Consumers will continue
to buy whatever they want,” DeBoer said. “They’ll just go out
of state to do it. I don’t think they’ll change their buying patterns.
They’ll just go elsewhere.”
Such a hit, DeBoer said,
could severely cripple the new car sales industry.
“Car dealers in this
state employ a huge amount of people,” DeBoer said. “The economic
impact for new car dealers would be huge.”
But Jeremiah Baumann, of
the Oregon State Public interest Research Group, said the standards would provide
a huge environmental boon to the state of Oregon, and the Rogue Valley in particular.
The program would require
cars, light trucks and SUVs to emit less smog and soot in the Rogue Valley,
which Baumann said was out of compliance with the federal clean air standards
almost two years ago.
The standards also require
auto dealers to have a certain percentage of hybrid and/or low emission, high
gas mileage cars on their lots.
“The idea is to try
to get more hybrids on the market,” Baumann said.
Bates believes the standards
are in the long-term interest of environmental health in Oregon and clean air
everywhere. But, he said it would not be in Oregon’s economic interest
to adopt the standards alone.
Even with Washington on
board, which has passed legislation to adopt the California emission standards
if Oregon does so also, Bates feels a multi-state agreement would be a safer
move for the state’s new car economy.
“We’ve got to
do something bigger than one or two states,” he said. “My guess is
it should probably include Idaho and Nevada as well.”
He said the best possible
tack may be to convince Kulongoski to broker a multi-state deal that would impose
the standards all over the far West.
DeBoer, on the other hand,
said he would only support the emission standards if they were applied nation-wide.
He also said he would be supportive of increasing the gas tax as an alternative
measure to meet the same goal. Six New England states, New York and New Jersey
have adopted the California standards.
Ashland’s state representative
Peter Buckley, who drives a hybrid car, said he is adamant supporter of adopting
the standards.
“I think it’s
the right move to make,” he said. “If the entire West Coast agrees
on a standard it could be a good move for the industry. It can be good for the
industry, good for the consumer and great for the environment.”
