7 years in, Richmond’s ‘Path to Clean Air’ is at pivotal stage

Seven years ago, Dr. Niyi Omotoso, a pediatrician, was looking for ways to help his patients in Richmond avoid developing asthma — something that felt all but impossible in a city known to have some of the highest levels of air pollution in the Bay Area. So he decided to put his background in medical research to use by volunteering with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the regional agency tasked with regulating air pollution. 

California voters had just approved AB 617, a sweeping environmental law intended to improve air quality in the state’s most adversely impacted places, one of which is the Richmond-San Pablo area, and a local steering committee was convened made up of Richmond and San Pablo residents and staff from the air district, Richmond mayor’s office, Contra Costa Health Services, the city of San Pablo and Chevron.

One of the committee’s first steps was to establish air monitoring projects that could identify local pollution sources and specific areas with poor air quality. In the ensuing years, the air was tested, community meetings were held, interviews and surveys were conducted, and the pollution data was collected and mapped. 

When the findings were finally published in a massive report in March, they revealed, among many other things, higher concentrations of pollution in neighborhoods close to major freeways and rail lines, the Chevron refinery and other industrial sites.

Having for years witnessed the health impacts of air pollution on his patients, Omotoso, who’d joined the committee and would eventually become its co-chair, wasn’t surprised. But he was glad to have some concrete data about local pollution. 

He was also eager to move beyond the research phase. In an interview with Richmondside, he recalled feeling a sense of urgency when the data-gathering phase began in 2017.

“Acknowledging the importance of doing air monitoring,” he said, “the big question was: Do we have to wait for the result(s) when we know the air quality is not great to do something about it?”

Now, Omotoso and others on the steering committee are poised to begin an important new stage of their work: taking what they’ve learned and getting local polluters — most of which are regulated by either the state or local air districts — to reduce their carbon footprint and, by extension, move the needle on improving people’s health.

“Even though there is a lot of effort and advocacy for doing more research,” Omotoso said, “a lot of the community is also saying [that] we need to do something preventive to limit exposure, now.”

Richmond-San Pablo plan took a block-by-block approach to improving air quality

Since the 1970s, most of the air quality research used by governments has focused on big regional polluters. But according to Greg Nudd, a science and policy executive with the air district, that approach comes with a blind spot: It ignores small local polluters that collectively impact people’s health, such as restaurants, fuel-burning generators, and marine activities.

One of the things that made AB 617 different, Nudd said, is that it required regional air districts like BAAQMD to partner with people living and working in impacted communities to come up with solutions. 

“This plan [for Richmond and San Pablo] includes specific strategies and actions to reduce the impact of not just fuel refining and related industry, but all of the sources in the area,” Nudd said,  “and really try to pivot that community towards a cleaner future.”

The legislation also veered from previous environmental efforts in calling on air districts and local stakeholders to consider how racist policies and discriminatory housing practices like redlining, which led to greater neighborhood segregation, have played a role in low-income communities facing greater health risks.

“We’re hopeful that this approach will address what we’ve seen, which is an inequitable exposure to air pollution and inequitable health impacts,” Nudd said.

What the Richmond-San Pablo committee learned

From 2018 through 2021, the steering committee and air district held a series of community-listening events where they identified residents’ main concerns. Those included the close proximity of pollution sources to residential areas; frequent exposure to pollutants known to pose health risks; pollution from local fuel refining activities, ships and trains; exhaust and debris from local freeways and diesel trucks; and foul odors and smells regularly produced by local industries.

The committee also collected more than 500 comments from locals who shared how they feel they’re being impacted by bad air. The most common responses involved physical ailments that people attributed to air pollution, such as asthma and other respiratory conditions. 

Because AB 617 provided money for more detailed local air monitoring than had previously been done, the committee also came away with a more clear understanding of what pollutants are in Richmond’s air, and where they’re coming from. For example, it learned that the Chevron refinery produces 65% of the area’s fine particulate matter — an especially harmful variety of pollution for people — but accounts for only 36% of the public’s overall exposure, because residents are more likely to be exposed to toxins from local highways and other sources. 

Richmondside reported in detail about these findings last August and published a narrated video mapping some of the major local pollution sources. 

The problem is clear, but enforcing air pollution laws is difficult

The steering committee’s Path to Clean Air report released in March was one of the most comprehensive documents on air quality in Richmond and San Pablo ever produced. 

But there’s one thing that AB 617 didn’t do, said Nudd: give local and state regulating agencies the power they need to crack down on confirmed polluters. He said this is an important omission, at a time when the pollution and emissions thresholds established by global and national health agencies like the World Health Organization and Environmental Protection Agency, respectively, are becoming more stringent.

“There’s nothing in the law that gives either the air districts or CARB (California Air Resources Board) or local jurisdictions any additional authority,” Nudd said. “We still have to use the toolkits that we have.” 

Every day, Kilbreth said, he’s reminded of the pollution he’s subjected to living in Richmond. 

“We’re half a mile from the refinery and the amount of shit on my car every morning, it’s really significant,” he said of the ashy layer of film. “Your car doesn’t look this way if you live in Palo Alto.”

That’s partly why Kilbreth joined the AB 617 steering committee, and he has been unabashedly tough on the process, something he attributes to his business background. Once you decide something is mission critical, he said, you focus every resource on that outcome. He wants to see the same mindset from the California Air Resources Board when it comes to air pollution. 

“If people are serious about AB 617 and want to reduce pollution in the most polluted communities in the state, then they’re gonna have to figure out how to regulate faster and better,” Kilbreth said in an interview at his home. “What obligation and what expectations should people have about acting on what’s been discovered?”

AB 617 “looks like an incredible step forward,” he added. But its success will ultimately depend on how effective public agencies are at holding polluters accountable to lowering their pollution levels.

Reducing emissions at the refinery will continue to be important, Kilbreth said, but that facility shouldn’t be the only target. For example, the oil tankers idling out on the Richmond Long Wharf are another source of local pollution that residents have been complaining about for 20 years.

Chevron gets most of its crude oil into Richmond via ship, said Kilbreth, and the vessels’ diesel engines must often idle for dozens of hours at the wharf in order to keep the crude warm and viscous enough to be pumped to the refinery. 

“This is very polluting,” Kilbreth said. “It’s DPM — diesel particulate matter — which is both a chronic health problem and a cancer problem. It’s far and away our biggest cancer risk in Richmond.”

State guidelines that took effect in 2023 require these marine vessels to draw electricity from the wharf to warm their crude oil without burning diesel, by 2027. Chevron initially said it could comply with that deadline, but later told state regulators it would need until at least 2034. 

That, to Kilbreth, is just one example of how long it can take to create meaningful change in lowering harmful emissions and improving air quality. 

“If you were some combination of cynical and realistic about the way things work, you would say, ‘We’ll be lucky to get this done in 10 or 15 years,’ and that’s not right,” Kilbreth said. “So do we just sit here and watch as years go by? Or do we instead say we need to regulate differently and not just say, ‘That’s a violation, slap your hand and charge you a fine.’”

Recent settlements with polluters could bring money for public health initiatives

Nudd, the air executive, agrees that any sustained improvement in local air quality is likely to come from strengthened regulations, but said the public process needed to get there is arduous. As an example, he cited the air district’s Rule 11-18, established in 2017 to reduce stationary sources of toxic air pollution like the Chevron refinery.

“Once you get the regulation in place, it sometimes takes a few years to get the pollution controls put on,” he said. 

On the other hand, he said, fines paid by polluters — like the air district’s recent settlement with Chevron and the Martinez Refining Company, which could result in $138 million paid to the district in back penalties for hundreds of emissions violations — are an important way to pay for more immediate environmental improvement projects identified in the Path to Clean Air report, since the settlement money is required to go to communities most impacted by pollution. 

“We’re already putting a lot of attention on Chevron, but is there more that can be done?” Nudd said. “The key thing is to continue this partnership with the community steering committee in figuring out how to prioritize [where to take action].”

At a meeting last June at the air district office in Richmond’s Hilltop neighborhood, the AB 617 steering committee discussed what to do once CARB approves its plan to reduce emissions. Omotoso, the pediatrician and committee co-chair, said that whatever comes next needs to be concrete, something that was echoed by his fellow committee members.

Several committee members at the meeting expressed feeling “informed, but not invited,” meaning they received all the information but weren’t invited to participate more in the process. 

Diana Ruiz, the air district’s community engagement manager, said it was important that the committee be ready to move on their goals, while regulators and government agencies took time to get going. 

“We have a very ambitious plan that has everything as a kind of first priority,” she said. “I think over time people will find that we have to make some adjustments to that,” she said. “Our responsibility right now is to kind of set a strong foundation and do all that backend work.”

At the meeting, Jennifer McGovern, an air pollution specialist with CARB, said much of the power to enact the changes needed to improve air quality in Richmond, North Richmond and San Pablo already lies with the local air district, as they have the authority to see what permitted businesses are out of compliance. 

“Getting facilities into compliance could help immediately,” she said. “It could create healthier air immediately.”

Want to get involved? The Bay Area Air Quality Management District has a calendar of upcoming public meetings and maintains an archive of past meetings on the BAAQMD website.

Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly located an aerial photograph of train cars as being at the Chevron refinery. They are at the BNSF rail yard in Richmond.