Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chairman, right now, the Environmental Protection Agency makes the determination whether a county is what they call a nonattainment zone based on readings, the amount of ozone that various monitors come up with. If you are a nonattainment zone, it results in problems for both individuals and business.

Individuals in counties in my area have two problems. First of all, if you are nonattainment, you might have to have gasoline that is probably a little bit inferior in quality, as well as more expensive.

I always think the price of gasoline is an important thing because it doesn't matter; either wealthy or poor, it is something you have to be able to afford. If you are knocking up your price of gasoline by 5 or 10 cents a year, that can be a very damaging thing for someone who doesn't have that great a salary.

Secondly, if you are a nonattainment zone, every car has to be checked for emissions. Maybe there are some wealthy environmentalists that it is no big deal--if their car fails the emissions test, they can afford to spend another $900 on a catalytic converter or something wildly more expensive. For somebody not well off, it maybe puts you in a position which you have to buy a whole new car.

It is another problem for businesses. Manufacturing is very important to this country. If you crack down on a business and say that you have to do different things to affect the amount of ozone that may be emitted from your factory, it can be very cost prohibitive and put American business at a competitive disadvantage.

These determinations are made by air monitors. In every county, the amount of ozone that is detected by these monitors may vary greatly from one part of the county to another part of the county.

It is our opinion that sometimes in the past, in my district, if you put an air monitor right on Lake Michigan, due to the effect the sun has on the water, you might get disproportionately high readings and wind up having to put your individuals and businesses in a situation which they are in nonattainment.

This is particularly onerous because, sometimes, whether or not you have a high ozone rating or not has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that is going on within your county.

My district, for example, is maybe 70 miles from Chicago, where most of the pollutants come from; so here you are, stuck trying to make your air cleaner and cleaner, and there is very little you can do to affect it anyway.

In any event, it seems fair that you should be able to put an air monitor anywhere within that county. You shouldn't have a situation in which, in the past, an air monitor was placed at an area where you got a disproportionately high reading.

The purpose of this amendment is to say that the Environmental Protection Agency, that I am sure has a budget tight as a drum, should not have to waste any time worrying about where that air monitor is and where we are determining whether or not we have an ozone problem in a county.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, first of all, the gentlewoman from Maine makes a point not about this amendment specifically, but about the overall program.

And that is you have a situation right now in which, apparently, the Department of Natural Resources is making a determination that we have unsafe air based upon fires that are hundreds of miles away that the local people can't do anything about.

Secondly, the gentlewoman says it is tying the hands of local units of government. That is not true. Under this amendment, the local units of government have more flexibility.

The question is can the Federal Government tie the hands of local units of government, which they shouldn't be able to do.

So it is a good amendment. I think it is something that is going to, in the long term, benefit American business and, even more, benefit American individuals, particularly poor people, who don't have a lot of extra money, are stuck spending a lot more money on their cars because of determinations made by Federal bureaucrats in far-away cities who probably have enough money to be able to afford to deal with these problems anyway.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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