AQMD Board Chief, Backer of Former Top Officer, Unseated

The embattled leadership of Southern California’s smog-fighting agency received another jolt Friday with a vote to unseat board Chairman Jon D. Mikels.

A San Bernardino County supervisor, Mikels was a supporter of the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s longtime executive officer, James Lents, whose contract was allowed to lapse earlier this summer. In voting to oust Mikels--who served all but four months of a four-year term as chairman--other board members accused him of being unable to mediate between the factions that warred over Lents’ future.

Before the controversy over Lents erupted, Mikels--who will remain a member of the board--was credited with helping reduce the staff and budget of the agency.

The board voted to replace Mikels with Vice Chairman William A. Burke, founder and president of the Los Angeles Marathon. Burke has been on the AQMD board since 1993, when he was appointed by former California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.

Burke becomes the first African American chairman of the AQMD.

The board also appointed Barry R. Wallerstein, an AQMD deputy executive officer, as the interim replacement for Lents during the search for a permanent executive director.

Mikels’ removal was engineered by a coalition of board members led by Cody Cluff, a Los Angeles entertainment industry promoter and appointee of Gov. Pete Wilson. The dethroning of Mikels could be seen as another victory for the mostly Republican pro-business interests on the board, which saw Lents as the mastermind of an era of oppressive regulation.

But the board meeting was also Cluff’s last. The Democratic-controlled state Senate refused to ratify his appointment.

Democratic members of the board who joined in the vote to remove Mikels insisted that their actions did not reflect any desire to weaken air pollution regulations.

“The idea that we want to backslide on clean air is ludicrous,” said Nell Soto, a Pomona city councilwoman.

Burke, a Democrat, said the change in the board’s leadership signals the emergence of a new mind-set more sympathetic to the environmental concerns of poor people and minorities.

Criticizing past policies and singling Lents out as “socially insensitive,” Burke said the AQMD should become more responsive to “poor whites, blacks and Hispanics.”

Burke takes over barely two weeks after the group Communities for a Better Environment filed a federal civil rights complaint against the AQMD, accusing it of fostering a policy that exempted several large oil companies from regulations requiring emissions controls.

As a result, the complaint alleges, toxic hot spots are being created in poor, industrial neighborhoods, threatening the health of people who live and work there.

The AQMD policy at issue allows companies to buy and scrap old high-polluting cars in return for credits that ease requirements on controlling refinery emissions.

Burke said the AQMD staff “will be called on to justify and evaluate the success of the policy.”

The tiebreaking vote to oust Mikels was cast by Richard Alarcon, a Los Angeles city councilman from an east San Fernando Valley district with a large Latino population. Alarcon was just appointed to the AQMD board and was attending his first meeting.

Asked why he voted against a chairman he had never worked with, Alarcon said he had been courted by Burke. “He sought me out more than anyone else and said he would give me every opportunity to play a significant role,” Alarcon said.