A proposal to require California’s Santa Monica Municipal Airport (SMO) to measure jet taxi and idle times during a one-year period is dead, according to the National Air Transportation Association (NATA). “Assembly Bill 2501,” NATA said, “failed to gather enough votes for passage out of the California Senate Committee on Transportation and Housing. Failure to pass the legislation effectively kills the bill, although there are some procedural steps that can be taken to revive the legislation.” The effort to require jet monitoring stems from neighbor concerns about the airport. The latest efforts proposed the monitoring to establish pollution levels generated by jets with the goal of curtailing jet traffic.

Jet monitoring programs are already in place at some airports and scheduled for implementation at others. Teterboro Airport in New Jersey has a monitoring system that measures actual pollutant levels. The Rhode Island General Assembly recently passed a bill that will require further monitoring of black carbon and ultrafine particulate matter at T.F. Green Airport in Warwick. A $500,000 study on airport-generated pollutants was recently completed and recommended further monitoring in addition to study of lung cancer data and other medical data that could be related to airport-generated pollutants.