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New Recommendations from Clean Air Action Team

Dan Bammes
Polluted air trapped by a weather inversion over Salt Lake City, January 2014

  The Utah Clean Air Action Team – the group appointed by Governor Gary Herbert to look at strategies for improving air quality – wants to see a bigger budget for the Division of Air Quality.  That’s one of three new recommendations this week.  The others are expanding public transit and other alternative transportation and continuing public education campaigns on air quality.

Governor Herbert put two of the team’s earlier recommendations in his State of the State address.  One was making cleaner Tier 3 gasoline more widely available.  Robert Grow chairs the Clean Air Action Team. He wants state lawmakers to find ways to make the new low-sulfur gasoline available in Utah as soon as possible.

“They could do a wonderful thing for the state by getting that new, cleaner gas sooner," Grow tells KUER. "And so there’s a major discussion going on at the legislature, at the governor’s office, in private groups and non-profits about how this can move forward to get Utahns the benefit of what can be the single most important change, which is cleaner cars, cleaner gas.”

The governor also said the state should work to ban wood burning in urban counties all through the inversion season.  The Utah Air Quality Board will hear proposals to implement the ban at its meeting next month.

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