
                         THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994                    TAG: 9406100009 
SECTION: COMMENTARY                     PAGE: J4    EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: Medium 
DATELINE: 940612                                 LENGTH:

ALLEN OVER A BARREL

{LEAD} Somewhere, deep in the catacombs of the Environmental Protection Agency, it makes sense to force owners of 1.6 million automobiles in Northern Virginia to line up for emissions tests at as few as a dozen government-approved stations, and, if their cars fail the tests, to then drive elsewhere to be fixed. This makes so much sense to EPA bureaucrats, who work entirely predictable schedules and almost can fall into their offices from Washington's heavily subsidized subway system, that they are willing to halt all road construction in Virginia unless Gov. George Allen's administration submits to the EPA's diktat.

EPA Regional Administrator Peter Kostmayer last week decreed that Virginia's more sensible plan to allow people to get their cars tested and repaired at the same places would not pass muster with the air cops. He gave the Allen administration 30 days to agree to his ultimatum or he would cut off Virginia's highway funding. According to EPA theory, a regime of ``test-only'' stations will do more to clean up supposedly dirty air than much more convenient ``test and repair.''

{REST} ``The real issue is the quality of the air the people of Northern Virginia have to breathe,'' Kostmayer says. A test-only program ``would not impose a hardship on Virginia.'' Easy for Kostmayer to say. He is not likely to have to explain to his boss that he needs to take a day off (or maybe two) to get his car tested.

Air quality has precious little to do with this federal assault on Virginians' wallets, time and cars. Virginia's air, for the most part, would already meet even the Clean Air Act's obsessively tidy standards if the EPA didn't fudge the air-quality numbers it uses as its baseline yardstick. The possible difference between test-only and test-and-repair regimes' effect on air quality is not even measurable.

Allen-administration officials have reacted angrily to Kostmayer's bureaucratic bullying, and justifiably so. But in the end, as Virginia Transportation Secretary Robert Martinez has noted, Virginia must comply with whatever the EPA eventually demands. The price of refusal is not only the loss of highway money, but refusal to issue the dizzying number of federal permits required to build roads. Fighting the EPA in court, which theoretically would make a great deal of sense, in practical terms still would leave Virginians stuck in traffic.

So when the allotted 30 days have passed, the Allen administration will submit a revised clean-air plan to Kostmayer, and Virginia will be at his mercy.

This is a federal power grab, pure and simple. The EPA is daydreaming about how, by the end of this decade, hundreds of thousands of Virginians and millions of Americans will be forced, against their will, into car pools and HOV lanes to comply with nonsensical clean-air rules at enormous cost to the economy in lost productivity and misdirected investment. The bottom line will be fewer jobs, which the envirocrats, apparently, care little about.

by CNB