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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A federal appeals court upheld an Environmental Protection Agency mandate Friday for air pollution reductions along a wide area of northern Utah.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., ruled the EPA can force Utah to crack down on industrial and car emissions that blow into the Great Salt Lake basin from Tooele County on the west and Box Elder County on the north.
Officials for the largely rural counties filed the lawsuit against the EPA, asserting they shouldn't be forced to control or reduce emissions that drift toward more populated areas along the 120-mile Wasatch Front urban corridor.
ATK Space Systems also sued the EPA. The company has operations in Box Elder County, about 65 miles north of Salt Lake City, where it tests rockets fixed to the ground by firing them.
The U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the lawsuits, which were consolidated into one, as "without merit." They had challenged the EPA's reasoning for lumping parts of Box Elder and Tooele counties with the state's more polluted areas for what's expected to be stricter emissions regulations.
The EPA was happy with the ruling.
"EPA's approach seeks to ensure that if sources of air pollution are shown to be part of the problem, that they will be part of the solution," said Matthew Allen, a spokesman for the agency's regional office in Denver. "As a result of this designation, the state and local authorities will be required to evaluate the sources in the entire area for pollution controls, as necessary, in order to clean up the air."
Utah state officials didn't join the lawsuits and continue to work a plan to reduce air pollution that takes in the outlying counties.
"This will have no impact on us because we had to proceed as if those counties were going to be part of the non-attainment area," said Bryce Bird, director of the Utah Division of Air Quality.
The non-attainment designation means Salt Lake, Davis and Weber counties don't consistently meet EPA air quality standards. Utah is writing separate plans for Cache and Utah counties, which have their own pollution problems.
The plans are due to the EPA by Dec. 15. They are expected to call for new controls on industrial emissions.
Another way to reduce pollution is to require vehicles to undergo annual emissions tests, Bird said. In Utah, only Salt Lake, Utah, Davis and Weber counties require them, and they have proven good at flagging vehicles that burn fuel inefficiently, he said.
Yet another measure could be incentives for motorists to trade in old for new cars, he said.
"It's going to take a lot of cooperation and effort," said Joro Walker, a lawyer for Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, which supported EPA against the lawsuits.
"The big picture is that pollution in the Salt Lake City area is significantly harmful to public health. That's why Utah physicians intervened in this case. They wanted to support EPA's decision to protect public health," she said.
(Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
