Colorado has taken action designed to protect air quality and visibility as well as public welfare in our state. The visibility issue is of particular importance to Colorado because of our unique status as a receptor state of air pollution generated in other states combined with our large number of National Parks and Wilderness Areas. I will include in my testimony ways in which federal legislation could make our job at the state level easier while also promoting cleaner air.
Colorado is blessed with 13 (soon to be 14) pristine national parks and wilderness areas. We are proud of these areas and take great pride in our air quality programs to protect visibility and air quality in those areas, and throughout our great state. From Rocky Mountain National Park and Mesa Verde, to Black Canyon and the soon to be Great Sand Dunes National Park, we welcome visitors to our state to enjoy these natural wonders.
These pristine natural wonders are sources of great pride to Coloradans, however, they are also significant sources of air pollution that impair our air quality.
We are also very proud of the improvements we have made to air quality in our cities. The Denver metropolitan area, we are pleased to say, has attained the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Carbon Monoxide, one hour summertime ozone, and PM10.
We have not had a violation of those NAAQS for sometime, and have established programs to continue to improve or maintain our air quality. I would ask that this recent report from the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission be included in the record.
Unfortunately, we cannot claim such good news with regards to EPA's new 8-hour summertime ozone standard. Unusually high measurements recorded during the summer of 1998 have potentially put us back into nonattainment. These high readings, some believe, have contribution from wild-land fires during that hot summer, and again in the 2000 summer.
I would like to point out four areas where we have taken action to improve or protect our current air quality and visibility. These areas are:
1. A smoke management memorandum of understanding between the State of Colorado and local, state, and federal land management agencies that lays out the responsibilities of all the parties to a prescribed burn. The Department of Public Health and Environment is the lead environmental protection agency and their role is to permit the prescribed burns of federal government and state land management agencies.
2. Legislation authored by me and passed by the Colorado General Assembly that will require the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission to establish an inventory of emissions from federal and state lands. This inventory will help Colorado's Air Quality Control Commission develop programs to further protect visibility in our pristine areas.
3. Actions taken by Governor Owens of Colorado, after the disastrous National Park Service prescribed fires in New Mexico, to review existing permits and permit applications to ensure that adequate plans are in place to protect the environment and public safety prior to the ignition of a prescribed fire in Colorado.
4. Legislation passed by the General Assembly, we believe is consistent with Section 118 of the Clean Air Act, that requires land mangers to prepare plans for burns, receive permits from the Department of Health and pay fees for the emissions of criteria air pollutants the same as any other source in Colorado.
The State of Colorado and other Western states are being squeezed with the dual vices of tighter national air quality standards, and new visibility standards while also facing increased emissions from natural, and prescribed fires on federal lands. I would like to ask that this chart which I pulled off of the Department of Interior's web page be included in the record. It clearly shows there has been a dramatic increase in the use of prescribed fires over the past 5 years. In 1995, the USDA and Department of the Interior used prescribed fires on 918,300 acres of land across the United States. In 1996, that total went slightly down to 915,163 acres, in 1997 that total was 1,601,158 acres, in 1998 it_was 1,889,564 acres, and in 1999 the total acres burnt in the United States rose to 2,240,165. This is a staggering increase that we believe is contributing to adverse visibility impacts and regional haze in Class I areas across the country and increased pollution in the areas surrounding where the burns occur.
As I mentioned earlier, we have a Smoke Management Memorandum of Understanding. This agreement was forged in 1994, and updated in late 1999 and provides some framework for the relationship between the state, the federal government, and local governments. This MOU was a productive first step towards compliance by the federal government with our environmental laws. It required them to minimize visibility impacts from their activities, demonstrate that no state or federal air quality standards will be exceeded as a result of the burn, and to maintain a system for establishing an inventory of emissions.
While this was a good first step, many of us at the state legislature believed that more should be done. So, in 1999 we passed two pieces of legislation that protect and enhance air quality and visibility in Colorado.
The first law made the provisions of our state Clean Air Act regarding permitting applicable to the federal land managers. Activities on federal lands are the last clearly identifiable, major source of air pollutants that we had yet to require programs for air quality management. SB 145 legislatively required the establishment of a management program for prescribed burning. It required the federal government to submit a document that describes their future emissions of air pollutants. It required that the federal agencies use, "all available practicable methods that are technologically feasible and economically reasonable in order to minimize the impact or reduce the potential for such impact on both the attainment and maintenance of" state and federal air quality and visibility standards.
To put this law into context, it simply required federal land managers to provide information to the Air Quality Control Commission so they could establish permitting and regulatory programs to meet the same EPA mandated Federal standards for air quality that industry was forced to comply with over 20 years ago.
Another issue we faced in this regard is that western states have not required the federal agencies to inventory the pollution generated from prescribed burns. This leaves states like Colorado with inadequate information about pollutants being transported into the state from wildfires and prescribed burns in adjacent states.
This is important because without the emission inventories from wild land and prescribed fires states cannot adequately prepare the EPA mandated State Implementation Plans for Regional Haze due beginning as early as 2003.
One remedy that I would suggest, is that you, Congress, direct the federal land management agencies to inventory their emissions from both prescribed and wildfires. I would also suggest that you require them to provide those inventories to all downwind states so that we can adequately prepare our State Implementation Plans for Regional Haze and begin to effectively work to demonstrate reasonable progress towards attaining