Houston area may get new car-emission testing to meet smog deadline

Copyright 2000, Houston Chronicle
Monday, January 31, 2000
By Bill Dawson

A little more than five years ago, Houston-area motorists faced a requirement for strict new tailpipe tests to help comply with the 1990 Clean Air Act's smog-cutting mandates for the Houston area.

But just as the inspections were about to begin, the program set off spirited protests by some residents, elected officials and affected businesses. The Legislature abruptly pulled the plug on the effort.

Twenty-seven special inspection stations — built, equipped and staffed expressly to conduct the emission checks in five Houston-area counties — were shuttered.

Two years later, in 1997, the state reached a $140 million settlement to pay off Tejas Testing Technology, the chief contractor hired to run the program around Houston and other metropolitan areas in the state.

Now, the federal law's smog compliance deadline for Houston is looming in 2007. As a result, state officials are scrambling to identify enough pollution-cutting actions by industries, vehicles and other sources to reach that goal.

One of many measures they are expected to choose is a new tailpipe program for the Houston area that bears some striking resemblances to the one that lawmakers junked.

The public gets a chance to comment on that possibility at a hearing tonight at 7 p.m. at the Houston-Galveston Area Council, 3555 Timmons.

Like the emission test abandoned in 1995, the new one under study at the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, would put vehicles on a treadmill device. (The current Houston program tests vehicles while they idle.)

Also like the never-launched program, the new one being considered may involve the entire metropolitan area. (The old effort was scheduled to expand from five counties to eight. The current program, conducted along with the annual vehicle safety inspection, tests only cars and trucks registered in Harris County.)

But TNRCC officials declare emphatically that they learned lessons from the fiasco the old program became.

Like the inspection program now in place, they say, any new plan would maximize citizen convenience by including many inspection sites across the Houston area, which often offer both tailpipe tests and any repairs they might dictate.

As the TNRCC has already formally proposed for the Dallas area, though not yet for Houston, the cost of the emission-testing fee would rise to $18 from the current $13, which state officials consider a modest increase.

There is no way the state will return to the specific treadmill test stopped by the Legislature in 1995, called IM-240, said Hazel Barbour, the TNRCC's mobile source program manager.

Officials are studying a different, cheaper mechanism known as ASM, but no choice has been made, Barbour said.

"It's very much still in the conceptual state," she said. "We want to ask for the very best equipment."

The IM-240 test that was scrapped five years ago would have tested vehicle exhausts for both major groups of pollutants that form ground-level ozone, smog's chief ingredient. The first group is chemical gases called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and the second is combustion products known as nitrogen oxides.

The testing device now used measures VOCs, but not nitrogen oxides. Since that test was selected, however, TNRCC studies of the smog problems in Houston and other metropolitan areas found nitrogen oxides are now the main pollutants that need to be reduced.

Like the IM-240 device, the ASM test would measure emissions of nitrogen oxides, along with VOCs.

"It will have to be a dynamometer (a treadmill apparatus) to test for nitrogen oxides," Barbour said. "To do that, you have to have the (vehicle's) wheels moving. We're really trying to get a real-life picture of a car in action, with a load on the engine."

Whether they actually launch new treadmill tests, federal rules require that any program must include checking newer vehicles' computerized "on-board diagnostic" systems for exhaust problems.

Along with other states, Texas is seeking permission to use only these systems, without a tailpipe test, for 1996 and newer models.

The current tailpipe tests, plus computer-system checks, would erase about 17 tons per day of nitrogen oxides in Harris County, and about 31 tons in an eight-county Houston area, according to TNRCC calculations.

Combining the computer-system tests with ASM treadmill tests would boost those figures to 32 tons in Harris County and 52 tons in the metropolitan area.

To reach the national health standard for ozone by 2007, federal officials have told the state that the Houston area must eliminate 763 tons of nitrogen oxide a day. The biggest chunk would be a 500-ton, or 90 percent, reduction by area industries.

Officials will not consider any new tailpipe program that involves a so-called "centralized" network of just a few testing stations for an entire metropolitan area, like the plan stopped in 1995, Barbour said.

TNRCC officials estimate it would cost a business offering tailpipe inspections about $25,000 to upgrade one of the currently used machines to include the ASM treadmill, and $40,000 to buy a new ASM machine outright.

The agency realizes some will choose not to incur that cost.

"Some stations may drop out, while others will drop in when they see there's a business there," Barbour said. "The test is what brings in the business for repairs."

But a testing-industry expert is skeptical that it would be easy to maintain a far-flung, "decentralized" network, with many businesses in an area conducting inspections, if the ASM test is added.

Ed Martin, who owns an automotive business in Dallas and is technical adviser to the Texas State Inspection Association, said many businesses now doing tests will balk at paying for treadmill equipment unless the program first has legislative approval.

With "the cover of legislative authority," a higher inspection fee than proposed by the TNRCC, and five years to pay off the extra equipment cost, perhaps half to three-fourths of the businesses now offering tests would continue doing so, Martin said.

State Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, who led lawmakers' drive to kill the earlier, centralized treadmill inspections, is withholding judgment on the new program the TNRCC is considering.

"I'm keeping an open mind, but I will also continue to monitor very carefully, and intend to be involved to make sure (a new program) has a strong element of common sense," he said.

"Regardless of the plan they propose, it has to be one that people can understand and, probably more importantly, respect," Whitmire said.

The three TNRCC commissioners are scheduled to decide whether to impose a stricter tailpipe program in the Dallas area (including four smog-violation counties and eight that do not violate the standard) before they even decide in June on placing it in a formal proposal for the Houston area.

Under federal law, eight counties in this metropolitan area are classified in violation of the ozone standard.

State and local officials believe the commissioners will be hard-pressed to justify excluding a stricter tailpipe program from Houston's smog plan if they impose one in the Dallas area, because it has a far less severe smog problem.

Barbour said if the commissioners do propose a new program for Houston in June, then adopt it in time to meet a federal demand for the area's entire smog plan by the end of this year, it would probably take another year to get the effort started here.

That means, she said, that the earliest the tests could start in this area is probably January 2002.

That would give the Legislature, meeting again in its next regular session in 2001, plenty of time to approve or reject the idea.

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