Clean Air for the Charlotte Area: An Action Agenda
SELC helps Charlotte region meet air quality goals
In response to the Charlotte area’s recent ozone “nonattainment” designation and the accompanying deadline for cleaning the region’s air, the Southern Environmental Law Center in 2006 released Clean Air for the Charlotte Area: An Action Agenda, and an update in May, 2007 providing both a “report card” on efforts to address air quality in the area and a “roadmap” that citizens, the business community and local officials in the Charlotte area can use to clean up tailpipe and smokestack pollution.
Click image above to view a PDF of the report.
In April, 2004, seven counties in the Charlotte area (Cabarrus, Gaston, Lincoln, Mecklenburg, Rowan, Union and York, SC) were designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as being in “nonattainment” of the ozone pollution standard. As a result, state and local officials have three years to develop a plan to address the ozone problems by a 2010 deadline or risk sanctions, including the loss of federal highway construction funds.
The report aims to help the Charlotte region meet the 2010 deadline by curbing both “stationary source” pollution such as that from power plants and industrial sources as well as “mobile source” pollution from automobiles. The report proposals include refocusing transportation funding priorities to include alternatives to single-occupant vehicle use; consolidating the area’s four regional Metropolitan Planning Organizations to foster a unified effort to meeting the region’s transportation and air quality challenges; and making land-use planning decisions as a region to help the entire Charlotte area meet clean air standards and ensure healthy air for all its residents.
Air pollution in the Charlotte area is a serious public health threat, contributing to asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses. In fact, an estimated 130,000 residents of the Charlotte area suffer from asthma, about of third of them children. Air pollution has also been linked to increased lung mortality and an increased risk of cardiovascular problems.
Many important strides to address the issues of air pollution have been made in Charlotte by groups such as the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners, the Charlotte City Council, the Centralina Council of Governments and the Mecklenburg County Air Quality Agency. However, Charlotte remains one of the most ozone-polluted cities in the U.S., recently surpassing Atlanta as the smoggiest metro area in the Southeast.
Over the past several years, the Southern Environmental Law Center has worked to bring the city of Atlanta into compliance with the Clean Air Act, through legal enforcement of transportation funding sanctions, and promoting policy changes in the areas of air quality, transportation and land use planning.
