available control technology. On the positive side, we found that 

 the Park Service is more involved in reviewing the applications for 

 PSD permits as they are required to under the program. 



Although they haven't dissuaded States from issuing permits to 

 facilities whose emissions could cause visibility impairment, they 

 have had some success in negotiating reduced emission levels or 

 offsets elsewhere. But the Park Service's successes have to be con- 

 sidered against the fact that nearly all, 99 percent, in fact, of the 

 facilities that are located near class I areas are exempt from PSD 

 controls, either because they fell below a size threshold or because 

 they were grandfathered. So not surprisingly, almost all of the air 

 pollution that is emitted near class I areas comes from these ex- 

 empt sources. 



In certain cases, the Clean Air Act allows regulators to take ac- 

 tion against these grandfathered facilities. If they can demonstrate 

 that these facilities are contributing to or are causing visibility im- 

 pairment, authorities can require facilities to install best available 

 retrofit technology or BART. But in practice this provision has been 

 rarely used, only once in 14 years, and it turned out to be very 

 costly and difficult to meet the legal standard of evidence that the 

 government felt was necessary. But perhaps even more important, 

 neither of these authorities, neither the PSD program nor the 

 BART authority, deal with the regional sources of air pollution, 

 sometimes hundreds of miles away, that are also significant con- 

 tributors to visibility impairment in class I areas. 



Even though these long-distance sources could be controlled 

 under the Clean Air Amendments enacted in 1977, EPA has been 

 putting off issuing regional haze regulations, as you said, Mr. 

 Chairman, since 1980, when it said it would wait until it had suffi- 

 cient scientific data. This still seems to be EPA's position. 



During our review, EPA officials told us they were still uncertain 

 that these regulations were needed, and they said they were wait- 

 ing for more information before reaching a final decision but the 

 agency and the Park Service have not been especially aggressive in 

 obtaining this additional information. 



While the 1990 amendments authorized additional visibility re- 

 search and monitoring activities which are in fact underway, the 

 Park Service has actually scaled back its visibility monitoring pro- 

 gram since the 1990 amendments, going from 62 monitors in place 

 then to 37. We are also told that EPA's budget, its budget request 

 for fiscal year 1995, has eliminated funding altogether for an at- 

 mospheric research component related to visibility. 



EPA says it is also waiting for recommendations from the Grand 

 Canyon Visibility Transport Commission before issuing regional 

 haze regulations. This commission was created by the 1990 amend- 

 ments which also authorized EPA to establish other regional com- 

 missions to study and make recommendations to the EPA Adminis- 

 trator on measures to remedy visibility problems, but EPA hasn't 

 established any other commissions, apparently because it wasn't 

 willing to devote the necessary resources and it is not clear that 

 the Grand Canyon commission's recommendations will be of much 

 use for other parts of the country, especially the East where pollut- 

 ant levels and meteorology are quite different. 



