Clean air repairs legit

State's free offer to bring high-polluting vehicles up to standards is no scam

Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 19, 2005 at midnight

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Ken Andres was skeptical when the letter arrived.

The state of Colorado had identified his 1989 Acura Integra as a high-polluting car. Instead of chastising him, though, the letter offered free repairs to clean up its emissions and a free rental car in the meantime.

Andres' wife, Julie, persuaded him to check it out. He did and a week later the Arvada resident had his car back with $368 worth of repairs that cut the pollutants puffing out of its tailpipe by 90 percent.

Andres is one of 191 car owners in the Denver area who've taken advantage of free repairs through a pollution-cutting program operated since the summer of 2003 by the Regional Air Quality Council.

The $1.5 million program, funded mainly by grants from the Federal Highway Administration, has had its kinks, RAQC officials acknowledge.

Those include a low rate of participation. Like Andres, many of the motorists contacted may believe it's some kind of scam, RAQC officials said, despite the fact that the correspondence appears on state of Colorado letterhead.

Or, they might throw the notice away, thinking it's junk mail, they said.

But the project, known as the Repair Your Air Campaign, has knocked a small dent in the levels of hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides - pollutants that contribute to a tangle of problems, from haze in national parks to smoggy skies downtown - wafting through the Front Range air.

"It shows promise," said Ken Lloyd, executive director of the RAQC, which leads air quality planning efforts in the metro area.

Targeting the highest-polluting cars also has been embraced by a handful of other cities, including some in Southern California, where officials generally cite the statistic that the dirtiest 10 percent of cars and trucks, mostly older models, account for about 50 percent of the air pollutants tied to vehicle emissions.

The repair program is distinct from the "clean screen" program, which uses remote-sensing vans to identify low-emitting cars in the metro area and notifies the owner his car does not have to undergo its biennial emissions test.

That program is expected to excuse 25,000 vehicles from their next scheduled emission test, according to estimates by the state health department.

As for the high-polluters, RAQC officials have notified about 3,700 vehicle owners in the region over the past two years that roadside sensors found their cars' emissions to be dirty.

The owners of those vehicles receive a letter, complete with the seals of the state health department and Department of Revenue, inviting them to take advantage of a free emission test, free repairs of up to $500 and a free rental car for the days the car is in the shop.

Even so, only about 500 people have responded to the offer, a participation rate of just 14 percent.

And even then, RAQC officials have learned, most of those have proved to be "false failures," where follow-up tests find the vehicles' emissions levels within the acceptable range.

The upshot: Only 191 of those 500 cars required repairs, a problem officials are addressing over the next two years as the program expands, Lloyd said.

The most significant change is that cars will be flagged for possible repairs only after failing two separate passes by remote-sensing vans.

"We need more than one hit to get a confident reading," said Lloyd, who is unhappy with the false failure rate during the first two years of the screening effort.

Still, it wasn't a total loss for drivers who brought their car in only to find that their car actually passed the emission test: RAQC provided $20 gas coupons (donated by gasoline companies) to those drivers for their trouble.

RAQC officials, working with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the remote-sensing firm, Envirotest, also want to be more careful, when possible, about placing remote-sensing vans farther away from neighborhoods. That's so that some cars, still sputtering on cold mornings, don't show up as high-emitters when the engine just wasn't warmed up sufficiently.

Air quality regulators also want more remote-sensing vans set up to look for dirty cars, a step that should increase the number of people notified and, officials hope, the number of people who ultimately take RAQC up on the free repair offer.

With these changes, and other tweaks, Lloyd hopes the number of cars repaired in the 30-month period between last summer and the end of 2007 grows fourfold, to about 800.

At the same time, program officials hope to spend less time bringing in cars that don't need repairs.

"We want to dedicate our resources to the vehicles that really need a fix," Lloyd said.

The long-term future of the program came into question last week, when the head of the Colorado health department called for an end to all automobile emission testing by the end of 2006.

Without the need for emission tests, or the remote sensing devices used for "clean screening," screening for dirty cars could go by the wayside as well.

Lloyd said it's too early to determine the program's fate, however. He noted that others have called for replacing emission tests for everyone with a program that focuses more narrowly on the dirtiest cars.

"If you have no (emission) program at all, then you don't do this," he said. "But this is one option for a replacement."

Andres, after his initial skepticism, had only praise for the clean air strategy - and why not?

"It didn't cost me a dime, and they did good work on it," said Andres, whose only inconvenience was a drive to a Broomfield emissions station, where he took his car to meet with technicians after receiving the RAQC's letter.

Air quality council records show workers replaced the oxygen sensor and the catalytic converter, repaired leaks in the distributor and vacuum, and tuned up Andres' Integra.

Andres said he'd recommend the program to anyone, even though he's the first to say he's not the "best citizen" when it comes to keeping the air clean.

"I drive a car that is, probably, borderline for (clean) air standards," he said. "That's probably not a cool thing."

hartmant@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5048

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