Comment Log Display

There’s a common saying that when the economy is bad, our
environment loses.

With all those powerful voices from lobbyists and businesses, I’m
worried that your board will not hear about how diesel fumes really
affect our lives.  My husband and I have raised our family in the
worst air quality of the state.  We cannot afford to live anywhere
else.  It’s so expensive in all the other places that have cleaner
air.  Now, we couldn’t move if we wanted to because of the housing
mess.  We may all be stuck here for years.   

Ray and I have watched the number of trucks expand on our local
roads.  Recently, our newspaper reported that over 12,000 cars and
trucks drive through my town every day.  I checked with the local
Highway Patrol scale office and they told me that they have counted
traffic for awhile now.  Almost 50% of the traffic on our roads
comes from trucks that use diesel.  Highway 99 runs right by my
house.  I can hear the traffic every day and it runs all the time. 
Diesel trucks are parked in my neighborhood at night and there’s a
big truck stop about a mile from my house. They come into town from
the farms that surround Madera.  So everyone tells us that
particulate matter and ozone are made worse from diesel fuel.  We
live in the very thing that hurts us, it’s everywhere in Madera
County.

The schools my children attended are within a mile of that
highway.  They played outside everyday in the stuff that was
hurting their little lungs.  Now, I see the local air quality flags
at those schools are almost always orange or yellow.  They are
never green anymore.  Are the flags in your neighborhood always
orange or yellow?   My kids’ asthma and my husband’s asthma have
been getting gradually worse and I know it’s because the air is
hurting them.  Asthma affects almost every family I know, even the
farmers’ kids and the farm workers too.   So when I hear that you
are thinking of letting trucks on farms still be polluters, I need
to let you know how this affects us.  We don’t have money to pay
professionals to speak for us.  

The cost of asthma medicines keeps going up.  We now pay almost
three times what we used to, even with insurance, because there are
no generic asthma medicines anymore.  How much more do we have to
pay before someone votes for us?   The newspaper said that diesel
is a big part of bad air that causes lung cancer or asthma and that
we die 14 years earlier than other places. Where do the lobbyists
and business leaders live?  I bet it's not here.  They would say
that it's too dirty and the air is bad. 

Please don’t change this rule.  I have read it on your website. 
It gives trucking companies and farming companies lots of options
and time to fix their polluting trucks.  They need to do their part
now for the air that’s hurting my family.  Please don’t let them
convince you that our economy will tank, it’s tanking already.  
I’m already making sure that my cars don’t pollute, don’t hurt
other people.  It costs me plenty to do my part.  

As a lifelong Californian, I expect my government to think of
little people like us and not just those who live better than we
do.  My family is the local policeman, the busboy at the Mexican
Restaurant, the printer-press assistant at the factory.  My family
can't afford to wait for cleaner air. I am begging you to consider
our side and keep the rule unchanged.