Today's Law As Amended


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AB-985 San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District: emission reduction credit system.(2023-2024)



As Amends the Law Today


SECTION 1.
 The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:
(a) Poor air quality is intimately linked with negative health impacts, including respiratory illness and premature deaths, with recent studies estimating air pollution as the cause of over 100,000 premature deaths in the United States in 2011. However, the distribution of premature deaths is not equal.
(b) Rural communities, farmworker communities, disadvantaged communities, tribal nations, young people, and those living at or below the poverty level often live adjacent to transportation corridors or commercial and industrial facilities with highly localized and severe pollution levels and are at the highest risk of adverse health outcomes.
(c) The United States Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for establishing national ambient air quality standards for a number of criteria pollutants, including oxides of nitrogen (NOx), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide (CO), oxides of sulfur (SOx), and particulate matter below 10 microns (PM10).
(d) When facilities voluntarily control emissions to levels beyond current or future regulatory requirements, they earn emission reduction credits that new sources of pollution purchase to offset the pollution resulting from their operations. Unused emission reduction credits are stored by the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District in banks organized by pollutant.
(e) In 2020, the State Air Resources Board discovered errors that invalidated some of the credits within the banks for oxides of nitrogen (NOx), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). This caused the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District to fail the equivalency demonstrations for these two banks and triggered the federal requirement that all credits in these two banks be valued at the time of use.
(f) It is likely that a similar analysis of the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District’s other emission reduction credit banks and permits issued with those credits will reveal similar errors and should be reviewed.

SEC. 2.

 Section 40714 is added to the Health and Safety Code, to read:

40714.
 (a) (1) The state board shall conduct an analysis of each credit identified in the district’s ledger of available emission reduction credits established pursuant to Section 40709 to determine if any credits were issued in violation of state, local, or district laws, rules, regulations, or procedures in place at the time of original issuance. The analysis shall be completed no later than January 1, 2027.
(2) Notwithstanding paragraph (1), the state board is not required to analyze any available emission reduction credit that was reviewed as part of the June 2020 report.
(b) For all permits in the district issued between January 1, 2004, and December 31, 2020, that require or required the use of one or more emission reduction credits, the district shall aggregate and make publicly available on its internet website information regarding those permits that includes, but is limited to, all of the following information:
(1) Permit applicant information, including information sufficient to identify the scope of the permitted project.
(2) Facility name and reduction site location information for all credits used in conjunction with the permitted project.
(3) Estimated permitted emissions by type and quantity.
(4) Any best available control technology, best available retrofit control technology, or other emissions control measures identified as a requirement of the permit.
(c) (1) Upon completion of the analysis pursuant to subdivision (a), the state board shall submit a report to the Legislature summarizing the results of the analysis.
(2) The report to be submitted pursuant to this subdivision shall be submitted in compliance with Section 9795 of the Government Code.
(d) For purposes of this section, the following definitions apply:
(1) “June 2020 report” means the report published by the state board on June 4, 2020, reviewing the district’s emission reduction credit system.
(2) “District” means the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District.
SEC. 3.
 The Legislature finds and declares that a special statute is necessary and that a general statute cannot be made applicable within the meaning of Section 16 of Article IV of the California Constitution because of the unique need to address air pollution and environmental injustices in the San Joaquin Valley Air Basin.
SEC. 4.
 No reimbursement is required by this act pursuant to Section 6 of Article XIII B of the California Constitution because a local agency or school district has the authority to levy service charges, fees, or assessments sufficient to pay for the program or level of service mandated by this act, within the meaning of Section 17556 of the Government Code.