Last week, at a public hearing before the Maine Board of Environmental Protection, no one spoke in support or in opposition to removing nine Maine counties from the federal list of areas with unhealthy ozone levels. Given the lack of conversation, when the BEP votes next month to petition the federal government for removal, the request will likely be quickly approved.

The Clean Air Act – adopted over intense industrial and political opposition – is 35 years old and was crafted to reverse declining air quality nationwide. The quality of our air is much better than it was in 1970, but it is not yet clean.

Removing nine Maine counties, counties that have long been declared areas of unhealthy ozone levels, sounds like good progress, but we must not give this move too much credit just yet. There is more work to be done.

If these nine Maine counties, including Androscoggin County, are reclassified, we strongly suggest that the reclassification carry some instruction for review in 2007.

According to the American Lung Association’s “State of the Air: 2006” report, ozone pollution is the biggest air quality problem in Maine. York, one of the counties the BEP is considering petitioning for reclassification, received an “F” as the most polluted county in Maine. Cumberland and Knox counties, which are also being recommended for reclassification, each received an “F” by the American Lung Association in 2005, improving just slightly this year with Cumberland earning a “C” and, Knox, a “D.”

While slight improvements, these are not high marks and reclassifying the counties without some plan to revisit ozone levels in 2007 will be detrimental to thousands of at-risk Mainers.

In Androscoggin County, 1 percent of residents suffer from pediatric asthma; 7 percent suffer from adult asthma; 3 percent live with chronic bronchitis, 1 percent suffer from emphysema; and a startling 26 percent are living with cardiovascular disease. For each of these 43,912 people – 41 percent of the county’s entire population – breathing clean air is vital to their basic health and quality of life. These people are the reason we must continue to monitor whether shifting unhealthy ozone level classification makes sense each year.

While Maine does regulate air quality in-state, much of the ozone and particle pollution is transported from other areas of the country. We cannot control what happens elsewhere, but we absolutely can control classifications for what we accept as safe ozone pollution levels at home.

The BEP will accept written comments on reclassification before voting whether to petition the feds to take action, so if you’d like to weigh in, submit comments to Jeff Crawford, Bureau of Air Quality, Department of Environmental Protection, 17 State House Station, Augusta, ME, 04333 until this Monday, July 17.

And, in the spring of 2007 when the American Lung Association releases its annual State of the Air report, we ask the BEP to make a point to review pollution levels and be prepared to petition to reclassify Maine counties once again if the ozone pollution levels have crept up. If improvement continues, perhaps then we can breathe easier.