Third in a series
Re “Improving the Air for Truck Drivers”
[img]989|left|Denny Zane||no_popup[/img][Editor’s Note: For more than 30 years, Denny Zane, 63-year-old visionary-philosopher-politician-arch activist in Santa Monica, has been in the forefront of shaping and influencing public policy and environment-related projects. This is a first-person account of that journey. Summing up the way he has morphed through a series of (always-linked) career changes, he said: “I got into the habit of making a living by pursuing my personal political priorities.” Now concerned with mass transportation, accent on light rail, his address is movela.com]
Antonio Villaraigosa, now the Mayor of Los Angeles, and I have had an interesting weaving of our work together, through the 1990s and right up to the present. But it was not until this year that we actually got to know each other. And I should point out, all of it has been positive.
I like his optimism. I like the fact he is not afraid to think big even though sometimes thinking big can make you vulnerable to criticism if you don’t achieve everything you have proposed. By any measure, he is one of the most successful, accomplished political leaders of my generation.
We did not get to know each other much even though we worked together on a number of projects because it was not so much shoulder-to-shoulder as it was across the dais.
Right after I left the Santa Monica City Council in 1993 and became the director of the Coalition for Clean Air, there was a moment very early in my tenure when Metro announced they were giving up on their methanol fleet. They made the decision because of a persistent problem of methanol being too corrosive, especially on the non-metallic parts of the engine. Metro was having lots of maintenance issues and costs. Fifty or 690 busses were involved, maybe more.
But, in giving up on methanol, they were proposing to go back to diesel. A blurb about this appeared in the L.A. Times. One of my Coalition for Clean Air board members, Cindy Horn, called me. She and her husband Alan Horn — he was then running New Line Productions and now is at Warner Bros. — were major supporters of the Coalition for Clean Air. They were probably the single largest donor.
How We Started
Cindy was very much on top of the issue. She was not just a passive donor but a real active board member. When she read about Metro going back to diesel, she called me very upset about it. “This is much too import because the diesel will be polluting,” she said. “We need to push them to stay with alternative fuel. We are in Los Angeles with the dirtiest air in the world. If we don’t lead the way, who will?”
I began to do research. Two bus fleets were on the West Coast that had made major commitments to natural gas. Sacramento Transit was the larger, and the other was Pierce Transit in Tacoma, WA. Pierce had about 40 natural gas busses and Sacramento had 100.
They were pilot programs being tested against comparable diesel fleets for performance indicators. We were getting very, very good results in terms of durability and mileage. The key issue with methanol was the cost of maintenance. Sacramento found natural gas significantly reduced their maintenance costs. There were challenges such as creating high compressed fueling engines for compressed natural gas and the challenge of training the maintenance fleet to know how to deal with natural gas technologies.
At the Coalition for Clean Air, we started to launch a small campaign.
(To be continued)
