Second in a series
Re “An Historic Figure in Santa Monica”
[Editor’s Note: For more than 30 years, Denny Zane, visionary-philosopher-politician in Santa Monica, has been in the forefront of shaping and influencing public policy and environment-related projects. 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]
After leaving the City Council in 1993, I was recruited by friends to be the executive director of the Coalition for Clean Air. I agreed to do it over the summer, only at half-time, while they recruited a fulltime director.
But less than a month later, a big Supreme Court ruling came down in a case that involved my new organization and a lawsuit they had filed 8 years earlier. They had won the lawsuit.
For the organization, when you win at national, it really drives air quality policy. Suddenly, I was having to be a spokesperson for the Coalition for Clean Air. Meetings, meetings, meetings. All kinds of stuff was going on. To shorten a long story, I couldn’t leave in the middle of a battle. So I was the director for the next several years.
A Time to Collaborate
In the mid-1990s, I began working with Cliff Gladstein on air quality strategies. At one time he was president of Heal the Bay and also president of the Coalition for Clean Air. He helped to write the Big Green ballot measure that narrowly lost in the ‘70s.
Cliff had a consulting practice that primarily did the public relations, and community and government affairs work for Clean Fuels.
While I was working with Cliff, I also was working on a project organizing a collaboration between environmental groups and the California Trucking Assn. We formed the California Truck Working Group.
Our mission grew out of the Clean Air lawsuit. It was to negotiate legislation — that we would try to get the trucking industry and environmental communities to both support — to clean up trucks. It was increasingly recognized that the biggest remaining problem for Southern California air quality was diesel technologies, both because particulate matter was a serious problem and because NOx from diesel technologies was about half the inventory of NOx in the air. There had been some federal regulatory schemas adopted in the Clean Air Act. They were very weak, though. Largely, it was an under-regulated area.
Tightening, Clarifying the Rules
Because of the Coalition for Clean Air’s lawsuit, that I mentioned earlier, the trucking industry had come under real scrutiny, both in California and nationally. The California Trucking Assn. was worried about having California-only regulations that might require investments and changes on the part of their members while not requiring any changes for national truckers.
About one-third of trucking in California was out-of-state trucking. So they were concerned about a competitive disadvantage for their members.
When we were working on legislation, Carl Moyer became our engineering consultant. We designed legislation that, eventually, Speaker of the Assembly Antonio Villaraigosa and Minority Leader Jim Brulte co-authored. It emphasized clean fuel truck strategies and cleaning up diesel, alternative fuels mostly.
This was one of Antonio’s big achievements in office. It came to be called the Carl Moyer Program because Carl died, while he w as skiing, in the period when the legislation was being considered. He was a wonderful, wonderful philosophical man.
(To be continued)
