Regulating wood burning outside of Missoula's Air Stagnation Zone is one matter.
But a proposal to change air quality rules throughout the county to meet new, more stringent federal standards for the soot-like byproduct of combustion is opening a Pandora's box of objections in rural Missoula County.
“A lot of it is being sensitive to the fact that people don't like to be told what they can and can't do,” Guy Hanson said.
Hanson understands new burning requirements are needed. But he doesn't like some of those being proposed, and he freely admits he's biased.
He owns the Axmen, and is in the business of selling wood burners, including a kind that the new regulations would not allow as written.
“I've got about a million dollars a year in sales and three full-time employees who sell outdoor wood heaters,” Hanson said.
The big furnaces, basically insulated fireboxes, are often used on farms and ranches to heat multiple buildings. In very recent years, they've become efficient burners that emit little pollution, according to Hanson.
They're not regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Thus, the City-County Air Pollution Control Board wouldn't allow their installation anywhere in Missoula County under the proposed regulations.
“We have a boiler that sits outside (the Axmen) that produces 160,000 BTUs of heat and 6.4 grams of emissions per hour,” Hanson said. “But you can have a stove that would sit in your house and produce a fourth as much heat but 7.5 grams of emissions and it could be put in.”
“Arbitrary and capricious,” is what he calls it.
It was Hanson who paid to have 1,000 postcards mailed to people in the Frenchtown area, cards that warned them they “may no longer have the right to burn wood” if the new regulations are approved.
The mailers were the impetus for a jam-packed community council meeting April 9 at the Frenchtown Fire Station. It was so crowded, in fact, that it had to be conducted in two sessions because the people who showed up far outstripped the station's occupancy limit of 120.
“A lot of people were pretty mad coming into the meeting, and I think justifiably so,” said Jim Carlson, environmental health director for the Missoula City-Council Health Department. “At least it would be justifiably so if those things that were on the postcard were true. But they're not.”
“Any time people are told they're not going to be allowed to burn, they're not going to be allowed to have barbecues. � Why shouldn't they wrinkle their hackles?” said County Commissioner Michele Landquist, who attended the Frenchtown meeting.
Once Carlson and Ben Schmidt from the health department explained things, “it seemed to calm the crowd down,” Landquist added. “But there were still an awful lot of people questioning the way in which the data was collected for the air quality board to base their opinions or decisions on.”
“They wanted to know why we think Frenchtown has to be involved in this, and that's a good question,” said Schmidt, an air quality specialist. “Because in the past they haven't had to be.”
Now, the EPA wants fine-particulate pollutants - called PM 2.5 - reduced to almost half the levels allowed before December 2006. And those tiny invisible particulates are, under EPA's definition, “regional pollutants.” They stay in the air longer and disperse farther than their big brothers, PM 10s.
Schmidt said existing data indicate that Frenchtown shares Missoula's dirty air, microgram for microgram.
“We affect them, they affect us. We're all in this together,” he said.
Since 1999, filter-based monitors have been placed and replaced at various stations around the county. Every third day, on a nationwide schedule, the monitors are activated to collect particulates for 24 hours. Those are then sealed in a special cassette and, in Missoula's case, sent to a testing lab in Wyoming.
Last year, the EPA approved the beta attenuated monitor, or BAM, that measures and reports PM 2.5 levels in real time. One has been in operation since last November at Missoula's Boyd Park, a block west of South Russell in the Russell School neighborhood. A second BAM was installed in east Frenchtown in January.
The Missoula monitor is connected to airnow.gov, which displays a continually updated color-coded map of all networked BAM readings on the nationwide system.
It's too soon to draw conclusions from the BAMs. But Schmidt said filter-based measurements in the past have indicated air quality in Frenchtown is similar to that in Missoula.
Same's true in Seeley Lake. For years, a filter-based monitor there registered pollutant levels far below the old EPA threshold of 65 micrograms of PM 2.5 in a 24-hour period, and the health department was ready to take it down. But when the standards were lowered to 35, Seeley was on the brink, and so the gauge remains.
“They're a different airshed, I agree with that,” Schmidt said of the Seeley and Swan valleys. “But with the nature of that valley - it's so narrow and everything - they still have inversions, just like all western Montana valleys. We need to take some measures, especially if growth continues, to make sure they stay under the standard.”
Hanson pointed out the proposed regulations leave many questions unanswered. How much will installation permits cost? Who will administer them? What department will enforce them?
He's heard the claim that the licensing of wood burners is a ploy by the county to make money. Carlson pooh-poohed that.
“We've got plenty of regulations to enforce without additional ones,” Carlson said. “It would be our preference not to have to do this, seriously. Enforcement is never fun and passing new regulations is never fun, but it's important.”
If the county is judged a non-attainment area by EPA, large industries that operate under separate emission guidelines would be subject to expensive restrictions, Carlson said. If you think the proposed rules are odious, wait until the federal government takes over the scrubbing of Missoula's air.
“It means a lot of money, a lot of work and a lot of regulations,” he said.
As for the outdoor wood boilers that Hanson sells at the Axmen, Carlson agreed they're worth discussing.
“That's part of the process of adopting regulations. We'll take a good, hard look at the information, and if it looks like those devices are comparable to other kinds of devices that we want people to be able to continue to use, then we'll make adjustments in the proposal,” said Carlson.
A public hearing in front of the Air Pollution Control Board, originally set for May 20, has been postponed until after three open houses are held on dates yet to be determined. One will be in Lolo, one in Seeley Lake and a third probably in Clinton, Carlson said.
“We'll have a number of staff people at these meetings, and people can go around to different stations and get an opportunity to have one-on-one conversations,” Carlson said.
The approval process is “very long,” he added. New regulations must be approved by county commissioners, the Missoula City Council and the state Board of Environmental Review.
“But the key board is the Air Pollution Control Board,” Carlson said. “The others basically have a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.”
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