After hearing a dismal annual report on the intractable and toxic Front Range ozone problem, with warnings that Colorado has only three seasons left to make major progress before tougher EPA sanctions kick in, state Air Quality Control Commissioners closed up their box lunches and went out on a field trip.
An hour later, they stood on a rainbow-painted pedestrian bridge overlooking Elyria-Swansea’s concentration of smokestacks, and heard directly from Hispanic neighbors and activists about school days missed because of asthma, and nosebleeds dripping onto homework.
“The air we breathe is completely contaminated by different chemicals,” resident Mercedes Gonzalez, said Wednesday as she faced the towering Purina plant across Interstate 70, featuring a cat chow advertisement, as about 40 state and local officials and a contingent of medical students gathered on the overpass. She pointed to the Suncor oil refinery a few blocks north, and down to the railroad tracks where activists say mile-long trains full of Suncor’s toxin-emitting products frequently divide the neighborhood.
“Please, commissioners, spread the world to the people who control this,” Gonzalez said. “We deserve respect.”
Earlier, the AQCC commissioners were put on notice by a staff report and the Regional Air Quality Council that the summer of 2024 went disastrously wrong as EPA mandates loom.
Colorado’s nine northern Front Range counties are in “severe” nonattainment of EPA ozone limits of 75 parts per billion issued in 2008. The EPA further tightened ozone limits to 70 parts per billion in 2015, and the Front Range is now in “serious” violation of those tighter limits, with a 2027 deadline of making real progress. State officials have only two more ozone seasons to achieve big cuts by implementing AQCC reduction rules already passed, and to vote on new strategies.
State air pollution meteorologist Scott Landes told the commissioners Wednesday that monitors scattered around the metro area registered ozone exceedances early and often this summer. “On eight days in June, we had an ozone exceedance, and we already had four to five exceedances of the 2015 standard by July 1. So really we got off to a bad start as far as ozone is concerned,” Landes said.
Before Wednesday’s annual report, a coalition of Colorado environmental and justice advocacy groups issued a joint letter asking state air pollution officials to push the EPA to immediately further downgrade the ozone nonattainment status to “extreme,” a move that would give Colorado new mandatory tools to cut ozone.
The groups said requesting an immediate downgrade, as Colorado has done before, would help clamp down on pollution by requiring state permitting at any oil and gas site emitting 10 tons of pollution a year, down from the current 25-ton trigger. The downgrade could also give state officials more power to plan commuting limits or mass-transit improvements lowering emissions from another main category of ozone precursors, emissions from gasoline-powered cars and trucks.
“Our ozone problem is still headed in the wrong direction and it appears that an ‘extreme’ classification is inevitable. To come into compliance with the standards, the region will have to achieve unprecedentedly low ozone levels in both 2025 and 2026. While we sincerely hope the region experiences the lowest amount of ozone pollution possible in coming years, it seems unrealistic to believe the region will achieve the exceptionally low ozone levels needed to comply,” wrote the groups, which include the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity and others
“Although some emission reduction measures have been adopted, the state has yet to utilize the fullest suite of tools available to confront pollution under the Clean Air Act.”
In light of the poor summer ozone results, which came even as Colorado enjoyed a relatively lighter season of ozone-enhancing wildfire smoke from the West, the Regional Air Quality Council, a policy advisory group, is rewriting proposals for cuts that it will bring to the commissioners in November 2025, RAQC director Mike Silverstein said.
Silverstein walked commissioners through a discussion of “background” ozone that Colorado cannot control, from both natural sources and industrial pollution around the world that creates ozone everywhere. Those levels are between 40 and 50 parts per billion of the 2015 EPA cap of 70 parts per billion, Silverstein said.
If Colorado’s monitors are routinely showing summer ozone spikes above 75 or even 80 parts per billion, that means “we need to reduce ozone by about four parts per billion to gain compliance, according to the last modeling exercise,” Silverstein said. “Which means out of the 20 ppb that we actually can control, it’s about a 20% reduction in local ozone, which is a big, big job, and that, of course, has to be focused on local emissions.”
One local official at the AQCC meeting suggested RAQC and others more seriously consider proposals to sharply limit oil and gas production in the summer ozone season. Silverstein said such seasonally focused restrictions do need to be part of the policy mix, including the already-passed restrictions on summer lawn and garden equipment use by parks departments and other institutions.
Just an hour or two later on the north Denver field trip, neighborhood activists pointed out surrounding smokestacks and urged commissioners taking the listening tour to crack down on major individual polluters like Suncor.
Harmony Cummings, who helped organize the walking and bus tour from her Green Connection Center nonprofit, a half-block from the tracks, led a contingent of officials up and down the rainbow bridge as a constant stream of diesel trucks ground on local streets below, and roared by on the interstate.
Activists believe Suncor is making $2 million in profits a day from the Commerce City refinery just to the north, the only refinery in Colorado, Cummings said. Given Suncor profits, it’s “ridiculous” that state pollution officials are logging thousands of violations from Suncor and proclaiming $10 million settlements to be effective, she said.
“The neighbors see Suncor as the fire-breathing dragon that is taking the breath away from their babies,” Cummings said.