Court delays deadline extension for air-quality standards

ATLANTA - A federal appeals court has ruled that metro Atlanta transportation officials cannot plan or build new projects under a more lenient deadline for meeting air-quality standards. <br> <br> A year ago, the state Environmental Protection Division pushed back its deadline for metro Atlanta to meet federal limits on ground-level ozone, the main component of smog, from 2003 to 2004. The first deadline had been November 1999. <br> <br> But a stay granted Thursday by three judges of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means regional transportation planners must continue under the 2003 deadline to meet stricter vehicle emissions standards until a ruling in the suit is reached. <br> <br> If the standards aren&#39;t met, metro Atlanta will be bumped up to a more serious pollution category, a lawyer for the plaintiffs said Thursday. <br> <br> ``They want to avoid being bumped up, but they still want to continue to invest our public transportation revenues in projects that pollute the air or dig the air-quality hole deeper,&#39;&#39; said Wesley Woolf of the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of the Sierra Club and other groups. <br> <br> Such projects, Woolf said, include new highways, highway expansions and the proposed Northern Arc, a $2.4 billion, 59-mile highway that would run from east to west across four counties north of Atlanta. <br> <br> One of the region&#39;s planning agencies said the stay only affects future transportation planning, not current projects. <br> <br> ``The old budget was a little more strict than the one that was stayed, but it doesn&#39;t affect the current transportation program at all,&#39;&#39; said Chick Krautler, director of the Atlanta Regional Commission. <br> <br> ``It doesn&#39;t affect our ability to build anything or cause us to stop building anything we&#39;re building,&#39;&#39; he said.