Reaching for Air: The Salt Lake Valley’s pollution problem can be solved. Will Utah leaders act?

January 29, 2024 by Nicole Masson
State

By Alixel Cabrera and Sige Miller in The Salt Lake Tribune Link Here

When pollution plagues the Salt Lake Valley’s air, everyone in Flor Isabel’s family feels it in a magnified way.

By day, it’s a concert of coughing and wheezing. By night, the tune turns into snores and little gasps for air.

With darker shades of gray in the sky, the burning sensation in Isabel’s throat intensifies. In 2022, in a week with many reports of wildfires, the walk to work became so unbearable that Isabel was forced to remain at home for a couple of days — even if that meant losing income.

“Within the week, it was just stuck in there,” they said. “So gray, so-so gray and at the throat, ardía, quemaba [’it hurt, it burnt’ in Spanish], even in the house.”

Isabel is among dozens of west-siders The Salt Lake Tribune and KUER have interviewed during the past year to hear — in their own voices — what it’s like to live where air pollution can reach dangerous, even deadly, levels.

In previous installments of this series, we’ve covered the history of the west side’s air troubles, and the health and economic costs of bad air. Here, we discuss what experts and officials are offering as potential solutions, and the obstacles to making them happen.

‘It’s messing with our health’

Isabel only has to drive a few minutes from their home to reach Kennecott’s properties. Their family home is also a short drive from the Great Salt Lake — a beautiful, they said, but now haunting body of water where drought would disproportionately affect its neighbors.

Isabel’s son, Xavier, shared their inhaler, an expensive item without health insurance. Isabel got a new job that had health benefits, so their health is improving. But the breathing struggles persist, and with them more headaches and the inability to live a more active life.

On days when Isabel’s health worries them, they calculate the cost of leaving Kearns. But they own their house, and home prices elsewhere in the valley feel out of reach.

“I can’t leave it because there’s nowhere else I could afford a house,” they said. “I’ve been there for nine years. I’m a single parent with four kids, so it’s been our home. It has a lot of sh–ty air, but the neighborhood’s … really, really awesome.”

Isabel is becoming more aware of how their home’s location influences their respiratory issues, and wishes elected officials could help mitigate air pollution. On Isabel’s list: More local air monitors to calculate the area’s air quality index more precisely, installing more air purifiers in schools, and making medication more accessible for those who struggle — because of availability or finances — with scheduling doctor’s appointments.

They also want to see politicians speak about it.

“It’s messing with our health in our daily lives,” Isabel said. “So why not expose it more, so that we — who are never brought into these conversations — can be aware of what’s going on in our community?”

Move out? To where?

Isabel’s concerns about leaving their Kearns home are backed up by research. One of the conclusions of the Salt Lake City anti-displacement plan Thriving in Place is that those forced out by higher rents are unlikely to find cheaper rents in the city. Some of those pushed out have moved to places farther away, such as West Valley City and Tooele.

West Valley City, however, had one of the ZIP codes with the highest increase in rent prices (more than 42%) during the pandemic, a pattern that other municipalities in western Salt Lake County are following, according to a Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute study. The average rent in a Kearns ZIP code also jumped more than 40% in that time, from $1,117 at the beginning of 2020 to $1,645 in 2022. Across Utah, house prices rose 51% from 2020 to 2022.

In the Thriving in Place study, researchers interviewed people who said they were planning on leaving the state or moving in with family to form multigenerational households, said Alessandro Rigolon, associate professor at the University of Utah’s Department of City & Metropolitan Planning.

“Housing affordability issues are actually making the [air] problem worse,” he said, “because more and more people cannot afford to live close to where they [work], and live farther and farther away, and they drive more to get to their jobs.”

Rigolon said he worries about the state’s growth projections. If public transportation is not expanded, and newcomers are forced to use cars, the congestion will rise — and adding more lanes to freeways won’t solve it.

Making a plan and sticking to it

Though the clouds coming out of industrial stacks are impactful visions, there’s a more pervasive issue that contributes to air pollution in the Salt Lake Valley: cars.

Commuters from the suburbs circulate on three major west-side highways to get to the city. Some order food at drive-thrus without stepping outside, creating pollution hot spots. Many are forced to drive their cars because public transportation is not as accessible in many Utah areas.

The transportation sector contributes about 50% of PM 2.5 emissions in the valley during winter inversions, Rigolon said. That’s why the state should take action to reduce the number of car trips, fund public transportation and promote walking and biking.

“Unfortunately, we’re talking about widening the freeway,” Rigolon said, “so the decisions that are made now don’t seem to take that sort of air quality component into account as much as research shows.”

Rigolon pointed to a few solutions some European cities have implemented — such as limits on car traffic on bad air days, or banning older cars that don’t meet emission standards from certain parts of metropolitan areas. Utah, he said, hasn’t shown much appetite for such solutions.

“The car is so predominant everywhere that it is potentially political suicide for people to propose limited car use to that extent,” he said. “In other places where those limitations to car use happen, they have much better public transportation.”

Utah doesn’t have the authority to limit the number of cars on roadways. However, the Legislature rejected efforts for a yearlong free-fare proposal in 2023. Such an action, Rigolon said, would go a long way to remove some cars from the roads — and improve the air.

Rigolon also suggested another place to start: Using regulation or incentives to curb emissions of major polluters, such as US Magnesium — whose bromide pollution increased inversion pollution by between 10% and 25% in January and February of 2017, according to a study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Legislature took a whack at regulating US Magnesium’s bromine emissions during the 2023 legislative session. Rep. Andrew Stoddard, a Democrat from Sandy, sponsored HB220, a bipartisan bill working to combat bromine and other halogen pollution released by the company.

Environmental advocacy group O2 Utah collaborated with Stoddard on the legislation. Eliza Cowie, O2 Utah’s policy director, said the report from NOAA motivated lawmakers “to act on this inversion issue.”

The organization wanted the Legislature to force companies producing halogens in six counties (Box Elder, Davis, Salt Lake, Tooele, Utah and Weber) to reduce emissions by 90%, but after negotiations, the bill fell short of setting a reduction metric. Instead, it requires the Utah Division of Air Quality to conduct an analysis of where the halogen emissions are coming from, then the division will determine the amount emissions should be cut, and set up the “best available control technology emissions reduction plan” for the applicable industries by 2026.

O2 Utah’s work on clean air didn’t end with the watered-down passage of HB220. The organization assembled a “Prosperity 2030″ plan that aims to cut statewide emissions in half by 2030. Cowie said the team is targeting emissions sources from transportation, industry and buildings.

“If we plug away at reducing emissions from those three sectors,” she said, “we’ll be able to accomplish that [goal].”

Though O2 Utah’s plan doesn’t differentiate parts of the Wasatch Front, Cowie said that by focusing on those specific pollution sources, the plan should help the west side the most — because air quality is historically worse on the west side than in other areas of the Salt Lake Valley.

For Rigolon, a sure-fire way to drive down pollution would be to restrict more construction of polluting industries on the west side. He noted, however, that the infrastructure for such polluting industries is already there.

On the west side, Rigolon said, “you have the airports, you have freeways. So you would never build the inland port, for example, on the east side, just because you don’t have all of these other pieces of infrastructure that make something like the inland port make economic sense just near them.”

The question becomes, he said, “how do we change the mindset about distributing those polluting land uses more equitably across the region, and not just in one set of neighborhoods?”

Eyes on transportation

When asked what solutions west-siders would like to see to improve the air they breathe, a fan favorite was expanding access to public transportation. Last year, Gov. Spencer Cox proposed a zero-fare public transportation pilot program. The Legislature shot down the request.

While ditching cars for the bus is on west-siders’ wish list, other modes of transportation, such as heavy-duty vehicles and the trains that run 24/7, contribute to the poor air.

A big concern with the inland port operating on the west side is the additional pollution that comes with increased heavy-duty vehicle traffic. Cowie said O2 Utah is working with the Legislature to minimize the pollution emitted from heavy-duty vehicles, including semis and dump trucks. A 2021 Utah Division of Air Quality report found heavy-duty diesel vehicles make up 7.5% of vehicles on the road but produce more than 30% of the pollution.

“We really want to look at transferring those [vehicles] out,” Cowie said, “because that will have a massive impact on our air quality.”

The goal, Cowie said, is to electrify the fleets or move to natural gas. Advocates hope to get federal funding and implement state incentives that encourage companies to transition to cleaner fuel.

Utah wouldn’t be the first majority Republican state to act on this issue. Texas has instituted an “Clean Fleet Program” aimed at tidying up air pollution caused by heavy-duty vehicles through grants and other subsidies.

Cowie’s group also focuses on updating Union Pacific train switchers, which idle even when a train is not running, to cleaner gas. It’s not required now, Cowie said, for railroads to disclose what kind of gas the switchers or trains are guzzling. Some switchers could be using the dirtiest fuel, Tier 0, and others could be using Tier 4, the cleanest — but there is no mandate on what fuel they have to use. Cowie said lawmakers are willing to negotiate with Union Pacific about updating the switchers, instead of forcing the railroad to comply with regulations.

“There’s a lot of political appetite, and politicians are very interested in this issue,” Cowie said. “It’s a matter of figuring out what is the state’s responsibility to put money towards something, and what is a private company who is making money off of keeping dirtier switchers or older trains on the tracks?”

Transition to clean energy

Logan Mitchell, climate scientist and energy analyst for the nonprofit group Utah Clean Energy, said an energy transition is underway and may arrive sooner than expected: The propagation of clean energy and all-electric homes.

Read the rest of the article here.