Sorry you couldn’t make it to the STA in NC event last Thursday night, but thanks for your interest in what transpired.  We had a pretty good turnout and everyone enjoyed the potluck dinner and the wonderful music of the Silver Wings Band.  Thanks to the Band and to everyone for bringing all those tasty dishes!

So here’s a brief summary of what happened:

First, we thanked Marina for all the incredible work she has done as Director of STA in NC and discussed finding someone to act as her replacement now that she has had to resign as Director to focus more on her new job and her family.  Fortunately, Marina will still be serving on the Board, so we’re all very glad that she’ll still be with us.  We are currently trying to find someone probably from the STA in NC Board or the Committees to take over as Director at least temporarily until we can find a permanent replacement for Marina.  I’m sure there will be further announcements about this in the coming weeks.  Also, we are always looking for new volunteers to help out in different ways, so anyone who is interested in getting more involved is encouraged to contact one of us on the Board.

Ed Welch gave a summary of what the Education and Advocacy Committee has been up to, including providing input to the Sacramento SIP plan and preparing an updated and improved ozone presentation that can be shown to schools, community groups and government officials, etc.  I’ll let Ed fill everybody in more on that and the other things his committee has been up to.

I gave an update on the Science and Monitoring Committee’s activities and accomplishments.  I have a power point presentation that I would love to send out, but it’s 16 MB in size and I don’t want to clog everybody’s email up.  I’ll see if I can get it on our website or cut it down in size a bit.

The gist of the update was that we successfully operated two monitors this ozone season (one at the Nevada City City Hall and the other at the Grass Valley Charter School) and provided the data in real-time on our website.  We found that the ozone levels at the NCCH and GVCS were much lower than the Litton Building (where the official monitor is located) at night, most likely due to down-slope drainage winds at night bringing cleaner air to the NCCH and GVCS locations.  From late morning through early evening the NCCH and GVCS monitor readings were usually pretty similar to the Litton monitor, although slightly lower.

It turns out that this ozone season had the lowest number of exceedance days on record for the Litton monitor, and each of the last three ozone seasons has seen a reduction in the number of ozone exceedance days.  This is all reason for some hope that we are on the right track towards reducing our ozone, but our levels are still far too high and we still have far too many exceedance days.  So we need to keep pushing and advocating for further ozone precursor emissions reduction programs and hold CARB and EPA’s feet to the fire to make sure they follow through on their projections of continually decreasing emissions.

David Fallside also described the more technical aspects of our ozone monitoring system in more detail and outlined ways we hope to improve it and make it more robust in the future.  Also, there are continuing maintenance costs associated with keeping our monitoring system up and running, so your financial assistance is very much appreciated to keep the program going.

Mike Pasner of CLAIM-GV kindly came to give us an update on the status of the Idaho-Maryland Mine situation and related how Emgold is still trying to get the project approved and that they are currently revising the DEIR to respond to all the comments that were received during the public review process last spring.  So we will have to be ready when they come back and submit the revised DEIR in the coming months.  Thanks for the update, Mike!

Please let me or anyone else on the Board know if you have any more specific questions or comments, or if you’d like to get more involved in helping STA in NC work towards its goal of achieving cleaner air in Nevada County.

Thanks for your continuing interest and support, and we hope to see you next time!

Best Regards,
Paul Frederickson
Chair, Science and Monitoring Committee
Save the Air in Nevada County