Local News in Brief : San Clemente : Council Votes to Seek Pollution Monitoring

San Clemente City Council members, concerned about the effect of increased traffic on the air, voted Wednesday to seek a pollution-monitoring station in the city.

The city will ask the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) to install a station to “keep track of whether the air quality degenerates or remains the same in this region,” said James S. Holloway, community development director.

An AQMD monitoring station in San Juan Capistrano was closed down in 1978 because its results were similar to those of the district’s El Toro station.

A monitoring station in Laguna Beach at the mouth of Laguna Canyon was discontinued in the mid-1970s because “it was not really showing any high levels of ambient pollutants that were areawide,” said William Kelly, an AQMD spokesman. “It basically was picking up exhaust from the cars on the canyon road.”

The closest monitoring stations to San Clemente are in Costa Mesa and El Toro. But their distance from the city makes it “impossible to measure actual air quality in San Clemente” or to track “trends in air quality over time,” Holloway wrote in a letter to the City Council.

“I think there’s desire to try and protect our air quality into the future, and to do that you’ll have to do a lot of planning,” Holloway said.

Kelly said installation of a new station would cost the AQMD $100,000 and operation would cost $100,000 a year.