Sunday, Aug. 23, 2009
Thanks to Skip Slayton, you can still afford a burger or slab of steak grilled to perfection at the mom and pop restaurant down the street. For now, at least.
Slayton, owner of Jake’s Tex Mex, almost single-handedly (my words, NOT his) backed the San Joaquin Valley Air District down from a new requirement that would have forced any restaurant grilling 800 pounds of meat a week to spend potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and install new exhaust systems.
How’d he do it? By getting people involved, researching the issues and collecting actual facts, something the air district did not do on a rather shocking scale.
He said district staffers kept saying they had empirical data to back up their stance, but it never materialized. Someone failed at their job, he noted, and if there’d been no opposition, that proposed rule would be the law of the land.
“We sit in the logic world,” he told me. “They’re in a whole other world.”
The issue first came to the board in with a wholehearted staff recommendation to pass the new rule back in June.
But Slayton rallied the troops, including makers of the exhaust systems being discussed, and showed the board that not only was the staff report way off on estimated costs, but the recommended system simply would not work.
At Thursday’s board meeting Seyed Sadredin, executive director of the air district, recommended the board put the rule on the back burner (so to speak), study the situation over the next year, hopefully find a restaurant willing to test out one of the systems and revisit the issue in 2011.
“Ultimately,” Sadredin told me, “the system worked.”
In his view, it was a close call, but the district opted not to ram the rule down anyone’s throat and, instead, do the leg work.
I reminded him that this proposed rule had been in the works for the better part of a year and the staff report, which I read, made no mention of questions or uncertainties.
Indeed, it listed what I assumed were actual, known costs to install and operate one of these filtration systems — no more than $37,000 to $100,000, depending on the size of the restaurant.
The report also said the only thing a restaurant would need was a HEPA filter, which clears out anything down to six microns.
And, staff said, such systems are already in operation in some restaurants in Bakersfield.
Zip. Zip. Zip! All neatly packaged.
Except all three assertions are flat wrong.
Slayton, and other restaurant owners explained to district staff that the systems often have to be customized to individual restaurants, upping the cost. And maintaining them can cost $26,000 a year or more, again depending on size.
And you can’t just use a HEPA filter without a two-filter system on the front end to remove grease, otherwise it clogs almost immediately.
Oh, and no restaurants in Bakersfield using under-fire charbroilers have these systems.
A couple of newer restaurants were supposed to install them per their use permits, but they never did. That’s something air district staff might have known had they picked up a telephone and called one of the establishments.
Sadredin acknowledged there were shortcomings in the staff report, most notably relying on costs outlined in a similar report by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which approved the charbroiler rule in 2007 to be effective in 2013.
“That was our big mistake,” he said.
But, Sadredin laid some of the blame for the bad info on an initial lack of participation by restaurant owners. Air district staffers aren’t experts in how different businesses operate, he said. They need people in the know to come forward.
That brings up a side rant, which I’ll get to in a sec.
I have to disagree with Sadredin here, though I’ve found him to be one of the most receptive and fair-minded regulators I’ve encountered in the air pollution biz.
If you’re about to cost an entire industry multiple thousands of dollars and you’ve spent months compiling a report, you ought to be pretty darn sure of your facts.
That staffers relied on numbers out of another air district’s report is alarmingly similar to how the California Air Resources Board complied the report used as the basis for the draconian diesel rules, which could cripple California’s trucking and heavy equipment industries for what I believe is questionable good (yet another side rant I won’t go into right now).
Sadredin stood by the district’s overall track record, noting that over the past 15 years more than 500 rules have been enacted under intense scrutiny from multiple sides.
“It’s not like no one’s been watching the district,” he said good-naturedly. “And we did the right thing here, we didn’t push this through.”
OK, extremely grudging kudos.
Now for my side rant:
People who stand on the sidelines and holler about “the government” as if it were some alien, brain-sucking zombie need to stop the noise and get involved the way Slayton did.
I’ll agree that some government agencies are a more than a bit zombie-esque, but the fact is, government IS us unless we abdicate our power by not participating.
These days it’s easier than ever. You can watch City Council meetings at home on KGOV.
You can watch Board of Supervisors’ meetings online in real time, or check them out later.
You can download documents on just about any topic from just about every agency. You can find the name, address, phone number and email of any agency locally on up to the federal level online. And, best of all, you can e-mail your representatives about anything big or small.
As for the “you can’t fight City Hall” nay-sayers out there: Tell it to Skip Slayton.
Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com
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