Hanging on the side of a little red building in Montgomery, which is home to the Morris Creek Watershed Association, is a small dome-like air sensor. It’s one of about 50 air monitors dotting hills and hollers across West Virginia.
They’re all part of the growing community efforts to fill in the information gaps left by limited governmental air monitoring networks.
Currently, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency operates a total of 15 air monitoring sites across 13 counties to broadly measure the air quality in the state and compare against federal air standards. These sites generally screen for only a small number of pollutants, and none of the sites are located in the southern coalfields.
But as West Virginians’ efforts to track their local air quality continues to grow across the state — primarily in communities overburdened by industrial pollution — the state’s industry is looking for lawmakers to pass a measure to limit how that data can be used.
For the Morris Creek organization, there was no question about participating in air monitoring efforts.
“Any data that we can use to improve our own environment is valuable data to us, whether it’s valuable to anyone else or not,” said Mike King, a co-founder of the organization.
The Morris Creek Watershed Association was formed in 2001 by local residents concerned about the creek’s poor water quality caused by acid mine drainage produced by abandoned and unreclaimed coal mines. Since its inception, the organization has cleaned up more than 200 tons of solid waste and restored their local stream to the point where now several species of trout live where there was once none.
“We had a lot of issues going on,” King said. “And as concerned citizens, if you wait for somebody to come do it for you, you may be waiting a while.”
Many of the communities participating in the local air monitoring efforts have been unable to get good information about the possible toxins in their air, largely due to the limited air monitoring networks. However, federal funding initiatives have helped spur the local efforts.
In just over a year, the number of community air monitoring sites has increased from just a handful to about 50 located throughout the Kanawha and Coal River Valleys and around Parkersburg and Follansbee.
“The idea of this community science project is to fill gaps where, essentially, our regulators and our government has not stepped in to do it,” said Morgan King (no relation to Mike King), an advocate with West Virginia Citizen Action Group working to expand the community air monitoring network.
The only other source of information related to air pollution besides the federal and state-run air monitoring sites and now the community monitoring effort is by industry itself. Most air and water pollution permits require companies to self-report their emissions to regulatory agencies to determine whether they are in compliance with their permit.
But even then, companies don’t typically measure air quality, but rather the amount of pollution that is coming from their sites — as in what’s coming from their smokestacks. Although, there are some emerging standards that will require companies to measure pollution at their fence line.
Last year, chemical companies pushed legislation to bar air quality data collected by communities from being used as evidence in government enforcement actions and citizen lawsuits. During the public hearing on the bill, 16 people opposed the legislation. The bill was ultimately unsuccessful.
Now, industry lobbyists are trying again.
In January, Bill Bissett, president of the West Virginia Manufacturers Association, shared that his organization planned to pursue similar legislation this year. The organization represents manufacturing companies across the state and worked with the Delaware-based Chemours Company on this measure last year.
Bissett reiterated that his member companies are only concerned about the quality of the data that citizens — often working with organized environmental groups — are collecting.
“If you’re going to test the air and someone’s going to be held responsible for that information, it should be done by an objective group, not by a group that may have a motivation to either harm a product or a business,” Bissett said in an interview.
This year’s bill will focus just on barring the data from being used in regulatory and enforcement actions, although that is already the current policy.
Last year, Jason Wandling, general counsel for the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, testified that, under its current policies, the agency wouldn’t use data collected by community air monitoring programs for regulatory or enforcement actions. Instead, state regulators would collect their own data if community members notified them of a problem.
Environmentalists have disputed that people testing their own community air are trying to harm business, arguing that they’re looking to help increase the amount of air quality monitoring and data availability, especially in communities overly burdened by pollution.
“Our intent is primarily – people should know the air they’re breathing so that they can make decisions for themselves about their own health,” Morgan King said. “It should be up to people to decide what their risk level is and knowing the air that they’re having their children and families breathe.”
The West Virginia Environmental Council has said that preventing measures that cast doubt on the legitimacy of citizen-collected air monitoring data is a legislative priority for them this year.
“These programs complement the work of state and federal agencies like the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) by providing essential data to inform investigations that aid the implementation of the Clean Air Act,” said Lucia Valentine, a lobbyist for the group.
The new bill, SB 575, was introduced Monday in the Senate and referred to the Committee on Government Organization. Sen. Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, is the lead sponsor.
Unlike last year’s attempt, this year’s bill doesn’t include language barring the community-collected data from being used in lawsuits — the most controversial part of the measure, which largely contributed to its failure.
“Our hope is, with that removed, we should have smoother sailing,” Bissett said.