Emissions Tests To Continue In Nashville For Now

NASHVILLE, TN -- Despite the governor signing in a law broadly prohibiting the practice, Davidson County drivers will still have to submit to auto emissions testing, at least for awhile, following a Tuesday vote by the Metro Council.

With the entire state now in the good graces of the Environmental Protection Agency for air quality, earlier this year, the General Assembly passed a law ending the emissions requirement in Tennessee. The original bill barred counties in "attainment status" from requiring the tests, though it was later amended to allow the six counties which still had the requirement - Davidson, Williamson, Rutherford, Sumner, Wilson and Hamilton - to continue if the county legislative body voted to do so within 30 days of the law's passage. The governor signed the bill into law Tuesday.

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The Metro Council voted 28-7 Tuesday to continue the program until 2022, the end of the current contract with the testing company. Supporters said that window will give Metro leaders and health officials time to assess the effect of ending the program in the other counties.

"The honest truth is we're at 100 percent [attainment]," State House Speaker Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) said in February, according to the Times Free Press. "We really have clean air in this state and it makes sense if everyone's going to do it, but just to have a few counties that do it and not everyone, that doesn't make sense. Because air doesn't stay within a county ."

The newspaper said Harwell described emissions testing as a "hassle" that is disproportionately harmful to the poor.

Tennessee Environmental and Conservation Commissioner Bob Martineau, however, said the idea is to prevent areas from "backsliding" into the bad graces of the EPA and said that some other offset may have to be found to stay on the EPA's good side. For example, he told the TFP, Shelby County was able to end its emissions testing because a number of manufacturers which had contributed to industrial air pollution had closed.

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