ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — One in 11 New Mexico children suffers from asthma, and a state advocacy group says that's a big reason the state should spend its windfall from the Volkswagen emissions scandal payout to outfit school districts with zero-emission electric buses.

The comment period has opened for residents to have a say in how the state spends $18 million - its share of the VW Beneficiary Mitigation Plan. Conservation Voters New Mexico Education Fund spokeswoman Liliana Castillo said opting for cleaner school buses should be a top priority.

"By using this opportunity to transition diesel buses to zero-emissions electric buses, we're really setting up current kids today and future generations of kid to have a higher quality of life and reduce asthma rates,” Castillo said.

The German carmaker was fined a total of $2.7 billion for cheating on federal emission laws and causing environmental harm. Comments on how New Mexico should use the VW money are being accepted through May 14 at vw.info@state.nm.us

According to the New Mexico Department of Health, 47,000 children in the state suffer from asthma. Castillo said certain neighborhoods, particularly in Albuquerque, are disproportionately affected by poor air quality because of their proximity to lots where school districts park their buses.

"There's hundreds of buses idling next to homes for hours every single week,” she said. “And so the families that live near these sites are disproportionately impacted by poor air quality - specifically diesel emissions in this example."

In the draft plan, the state's environmental department argues that electric school buses are not a cost-efficient use of settlement funds. Other projects eligible include freight trucks, transit buses, forklifts and electric- or hydrogen-vehicle charging stations.


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Some North Dakota school districts are part of a movement that has embraced electric school buses, but the federal funding shakeup carried out by the Trump administration leaves administrators in limbo.

Spending deals approved by Congress in the Biden era committed more than $5 billion to help schools with these big-ticket purchases so they can save on transportation costs and make bus routes less polluted. But President Donald Trump's desire to claw back such funds has created uncertainty.

Robert Lukens, superintendent of Harvey Public Schools, said they'll soon receive a clean bus through the program - but there's no assurances three others will be covered.

"When you lose those federal funds," he said, "it makes it difficult for districts and taxpayers to justify that type of cost."

Lukens said the school district faces a deadline of whether to pursue the additional buses for its fleet. The average cost for a zero-emissions bus is $350,000.

An assistance group reports similar dilemmas around the United States, with districts being locked out of a funding portal. An Environmental Protection Agency memo circulated this week has ordered agency money to flow again, but it isn't clear yet which programs will resume.

Lukens also has a background in agriculture, and said he's seen how technology has brought similar efficiencies to big farm equipment. He suggested it's unfortunate the Harvey school district might not be able to see the full benefits of non-diesel buses.

"Based on other districts that I've talked to before we applied for this, you're seeing a lot of drop in emissions," he said, "and they've seen almost $30 to $40 a day savings in fuel."

Advocates have said the federal funding confusion also hurts bus manufacturers. In some states, funds for cleaner bus fleets have been awarded by legislatures, along with utilities, but federal grants still make up the biggest share. Since his return to the White House, Trump has emphasized production of fossil fuels and scaling back programs aligned with clean energy.


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By Taylor Haelterman for Triple Pundit.
Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Like most tourism destinations, North Carolina's Outer Banks spent decades trying to attract as many visitors as possible. While more and more people flock to its beautiful beaches, historical sites, and thousands of vacation homes, locals question if the advertising was too successful.

"For years and years and years, the tourism industry as a whole was really, really focused on marketing," said Whitney Knollenberg, associate professor and extension department specialist in tourism at North Carolina State University. "The paradigm that the industry followed was 'heads and beds.' That means we want to get as many people into hotel rooms for as many nights as possible, because that is what is going to generate the economic impact that we want from tourism."

In the Outer Banks, the growing industry needs to find ways to adapt to serious environmental impacts to sustain the level of tourism it built. The natural shifting of the sandbars these communities were constructed on is causing homes to fall into the ocean and doubling the length of ferry rides to southernmost Ocracoke Island, which can only be reached by boat, Knollenberg said. Like many coastal communities, the Outer Banks also face fallout from increasingly frequent and severe weather events. The barrier islands were dealt serious damage by severe flooding and high winds from Hurricanes Hermine and Matthew in 2016, Tropical Storm Michael in 2018, and Hurricane Dorian a year later.

Along with adapting to the natural world, the industry has impacts of its own. The wild horse herd that calls the northern beaches of Currituck County home has dwindled from thousands to around 100 horses due to habitat loss and deadly run-ins with humans. Increased visitors also means increased energy demand, water use and consumption, which come with their own environmental consequences and feed into the larger impacts the islands are already trying to manage.

Meanwhile, local workers find themselves pushed out by the very industry that employs them. It's difficult to find affordable housing, and when workers leave, local businesses become too short-staffed to stay open.

The search for solutions led the North Carolina State College of Natural Resources to team up with Twiddy and Company, a family-owned vacation rental business in the Outer Banks, to launch the Lighthouse Fund for Sustainable Tourism in 2021. The fund supported Knollenberg's research on sustainable tourism development in the Outer Banks. She stayed on the islands for two months that summer, having over 40 conversations with residents, business owners, workers, elected officials, and other stakeholders to learn more about the tourism-related challenges they faced and what the region can do to address them.

From destination marketing to destination management

Destination marketing organizations, like visitors bureaus, are typically funded by the occupancy taxes travelers pay when they stay in hotel rooms, which can be anywhere from 6 percent to 17 percent, Knollenberg said. They're incentivized to keep following the same model because the more heads and beds they get, the bigger their budget.

Dare, Currituck and Hyde counties, which make up the 200-mile chain of barrier islands known as the Outer Banks, saw combined visitor spending of almost $2.8 billion in 2023.

Visitation has exploded since the COVID-19 pandemic. Dare County alone reported a 40 percent increase in visitor occupancy at the end of the peak tourism season in September 2020 compared to a year earlier and marked another increase of almost 15 percent the following year.

"We are at insane levels of occupancy. I'm talking in 2021, they were at 97, 98 percent occupancy," Knollenberg said. "Which means even if you wanted to come to the Outer Banks, you couldn't because there's no place for you to stay."

Occupancy numbers in Dare County leveled out after that, then decreased by nearly 12 percent this year. But the county is still seeing hundreds of thousands more visitors than in the years before the pandemic. That trend continues across county lines.

"What happens oftentimes is they do a really good job, and they get a lot of people to come, and they get a lot of heads and beds. Now we're starting to see the consequences of that," she said. "We really succeeded in getting people here. Now what do we do?"

One of the recommendations from Knollenberg's research is to move away from the industry norm of destination marketing, replacing it with destination management.

"That is happening in the industry worldwide at this point," Knollenberg said. "We're starting to say, 'Okay, we're no longer destination marketing organizations. We're destination management organizations.' It's not about this paradigm of heads and beds. It's more about: How do we make sure tourism does the most good for our community that we can? And you're starting to see that change."

"It should happen with the community"

Dare County started considering this shift when the Outer Banks was overwhelmed with visitors during the pandemic. The county's visitors bureau, named the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau, created a Long Range Tourism Management Plan that aligns with this idea of destination management.

"That whole process kind of fundamentally changed the way we go about our business," said Lee Nettles, executive director of the bureau. "Visitors bureaus like ours, destination marketing organizations, have traditionally been all about demand generation. You couldn't help but notice that something had to change, that more was not better, more was not the answer."

Released in 2023, the plan was informed by over 4,500 responses from locals during town hall meetings and through surveys, Nettles said.

"It's kind of terrifying, as the director of the tourism promotion entity, to put a survey out there, but it was really constructive," Nettles said. "The consultant said it was far and away their largest response. And we're a small community. We're only 38,000 or so people ... It said to us that the people who live here, obviously, care greatly about the place. But also, I don't think you respond to something like that unless you believe things can change and your input can make a difference."

The plan calls for creating a dedicated task force to curate the input of thousands of residents and tourism community stakeholders.

"Tourism is something that shouldn't happen to a community," Nettles said. "It should happen with a community."

As organizations shift from destination marketing to destination management, Knollenberg recommends they create a staff position dedicated to advancing sustainable tourism and working with the community.

Dare County created a similar position alongside the new tourism management plan called the director of community engagement, who is tasked with bringing the plan to life, Nettles said. They work with a committee of 22 people from across the Outer Banks - think: residents and representatives from local institutions like hospitals and schools - to figure out the best ways to tackle the goals in the plan and coordinate efforts with community groups.

And the bureau isn't leaving tourists out of the work. One of the key goals of the management plan is to strengthen resident and visitor engagement and keep the gap between the two from widening to resentment, an issue present in other popular destinations. Now, every time the visitors bureau develops a new advertisement or program, it considers how to tie in a local nonprofit or encourage visitors to be better environmental stewards, Nettles said.

Dare County has about 100 active nonprofits that do things like run attractions, work with sea turtles and organize beach cleanups - and the bureau is working to connect them with more visitors for volun-tourism opportunities, Nettles said. Many Outer Banks visitors return to their favorite island spot year after year, some for generations. Volunteering gives them a more nuanced view of what it takes to preserve the place they love and inspires them to become better stewards. And visitors who roll up their sleeves alongside residents help change the local perception of what a tourist is, making it clear they're working on the same side.

It's a lofty challenge to inform and motivate hundreds of thousands of new guests to be more conscious visitors every week during the summer, but Nettles said he's optimistic about what the community can accomplish when it works together. "I would say, yeah, we're definitely having an impact, and people are feeling that," he said.

"On the one hand, we have millions of visitors, which means you have to plan your municipal government and your systems and all that like a big city. But on the other hand, we're small towns and villages," Nettles said. "We all know each other, and that makes us nimble. We can get together behind a shared vision and, I believe, really accomplish it. It's kind of cool. It's part of what makes this place special."

Is destination management working?

The work seems promising so far, but it's too early to know the true impact of destination management in the Outer Banks. Changing the way an entire industry has functioned for decades across 200 miles of different towns and counties is a slow process that takes a lot of energy on top of the day-to-day strain of the tourism sector, Knollenberg said.

"Everyone is exhausted. They've just had a hard three months getting hundreds of thousands of people through their vacations, and they don't want to think about this stuff. They wanna turn their brains off and not worry about it until it's April," she said. "It's going to take time. It's going to be a two steps forward, one step back kind of thing. We should have been doing this a while ago. Let's not go another 30 years .... Let's start doing this now."

Clark Twiddy, president of Twiddy and Company - the local vacation rental business that co-launched the Lighthouse Fund - noticed the destination management idea isn't popular with everyone. A lack of widespread support, especially while the communities were already struggling to keep up after the pandemic, kept the research from having the powerful initial impact he hoped.

"We weren't ready to hear it," he said. "We were so busy getting alligators out of the boat that we didn't wanna think about the alligators on the shore, which is perfectly valid."

It can also be scary to change the way tourism is done, Twiddy said. Some might fear change will bring even more people and the local communities will become unlivable. Others might feel overwhelmed by the problems tourism brings and prefer to look away.

"How do you address fears? Not in a fear-mongering way," Twiddy said. "That's the crossroads we are at as a community, and we're not alone. There are a lot of places in the United States from a destination tourism management side that are really struggling with that."

Twiddy said he thinks research like this would benefit from upfront work like discussing community fears, ensuring people are ready to have a conversation about a controversial topic, and making it a collaborative effort between government agencies, nonprofits and businesses across the chain of islands.

Growing pains aside, Twiddy still believes the work is important. He used some of the Lighthouse Fund findings to inform how he helps his employees access affordable housing and schooling for their children. "I don't regret it," he said. "It was money well spent. The findings were legit. We learned a lot."

There are bound to be skeptics of this kind of work, Nettles said. But it's hard to argue with results. "We have to continue to do the work, and over time, the skeptics and the cynics will become the minority."

Though it will likely take many years to see if this work actually makes the industry more sustainable and keeps the Outer Banks livable, locals seem hopeful that this is the right way forward, celebrating the little wins along the way.

"I really do think that we can change the culture of tourism on the Outer Banks," Nettles said. "We're doing it right now."


Taylor Haelterman wrote this article for Triple Pundit.


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By Elijah de Castro for Keen Sentinel.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for New Hampshire News Service, for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration.

It's 11 in the morning, and the air in Michele Chalice's East Keene neighborhood is crisp and clean. But just three hours before, an air monitor on Chalice's porch reported unsafe levels of fine particulate matter, a group of microscopic pollutants that penetrate deep into the lungs when inhaled and can lead to breathing difficulties, asthma, increased risk of heart disease, and other adverse health outcomes.

"It happens really quickly, as soon as people start burning wood," Chalice said Monday in reference to the wood smoke that frequently fills the air in her neighborhood during colder weather.

Fine particle pollution has been a persistent public health issue in Keene, and attempts at mitigating the City's air pollution have been made over the years by the Environmental Protection Agency, the City of Keene and the American Lung Association. The pollution stems from Keene's local topography, which creates air inversions, a weather phenomenon in which cold air stays close to the ground as opposed to rising. In winter, when Keene residents fire up wood stoves, air inversions trap wood smoke close to the ground, creating unhealthy concentrations of fine particles, posing threats to vulnerable groups like children, the elderly, and people with heart and lung disease, according to the National Institutes of Health.

That's where Chalice's air monitor comes in. As small as a softball and hung from a hook under Chalice's roof, it's one of six spread throughout the city as part of Keene Clean Air, a community air monitoring project that involves Elm City residents taking part in collecting data on local air pollution.

"To me, the most important thing is to find ways of interest to become engaged," said Chalice, who has participated in the project for two years. "This is an extremely easy, no-cost way to be able to provide additional data."

Therein lies the idea behind community air monitoring, an emerging approach to tracking air pollution and informing public health decision-making while engaging citizens of at-risk communities. As the global climate crisis intensifies and fine particle pollution from wildfire smoke emerges as a public health threat, federal and state agencies in the United States have begun supporting community air monitoring projects like Keene Clean Air. However, the approach also has limitations in accuracy and access, particularly for rural communities.

For years, Nora Traviss, a professor emeritus of environmental science at Keene State College who studies Keene's fine particle pollution, saw a need for more data. In Cheshire County, a single air monitor from N.H. Department of Environmental Services submits data on concentrations of fine particles, ozone, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide to EPA. Data from these monitors, Traviss and scientists from the EPA said, is meant to collect background air quality in a large region over extended periods of time, not minute-to-minute updates on air quality in small communities.

With the help of citizen volunteers like Chalice, her students, and a few EPA grants, Traviss began installing commercial air monitors throughout the community in 2016. Using the data they collected, Traviss and her students would go on to launch KeeneCleanAir.org, a website that provides real-time monitoring of fine particle pollution in the community. The project also uses social media to send out alerts of when air inversions create unsafe levels of fine particle pollution in Keene.

"Having a wide network is incredibly important for public safety and public health," Traviss said. "Less expensive units can fill all these geospatial gaps and give really good information especially for wildfires because they can shift direction very quickly."

The EPA has used Keene Clean Air as a model for other community air monitoring projects across the country, and in 2022 announced $53 million in funding for 132 community air monitoring projects in 37 states.

"State regulatory monitors, they meet really stringent standards," said Eric Wortman, an environmental scientist at the EPA. "Then you have community air monitors where none of that applies, that's where it fills those gaps on what's going on at a local level. They help us know what's going on so we can do public health outreach."

The expansion of funding for community air monitoring comes at a turning point for fine particle pollution. Since the Clean Air Act was strengthened in 1970, fine particle pollution has been declining rapidly across the United States. In New Hampshire fine particle pollution declined by 66 percent, which the University of Chicago's Air Quality Index estimates raised the average life expectancy in the state by 1.2 years.

But that progress is now threatened by climate change, according to Jennifer Stowell, an environmental health scientist at Boston University. As temperatures rise and ecosystems dry out, wildfires are increasing in intensity and length, exposing communities across the United States to hazardous levels of fine particle pollution from the resulting clouds of smoke.

"Here in the Northeast, we're going to start seeing wildfires take a bigger and bigger role [in fine particle pollution]," Stowell said, noting that unlike industrial sources of fine particle pollution, regulators can't control particulate matter from wildfires. "It doesn't just affect populations that are in close proximity to the fire because these larger wildfires can travel across state boundaries."

Traviss believes that interest in community air monitoring grew during the summer of 2023, when communities throughout the Northeast were blanketed in fine particle pollution during the worst wildfires in Canada's history.

"For us on the east coast and in New England, it was a wakeup call," Traviss said. Earlier this month, air monitors throughout the Northeast recorded spikes in fine particle pollution as wildfires swept through the region amid an ongoing record-breaking drought in the Northeast; locally, Acworth and Brattleboro have dealt with brushfires. "People really want to know what their air quality is. ... Keene is unique in the sense that we're one of the first, [and] we've got years of experience under our belts."

Unlike agency-led air monitoring that measures background air quality data over longer periods of time, commercial air monitors can be placed throughout populated neighborhoods and collect more diversified data on air pollution within a community. For Keene, where a fine particle pollution event depends on weather conditions, having more targeted data collection allows for better public health decision making, according to Traviss.

That was the idea behind PurpleAir, a startup company that makes the commercial air monitors Traviss uses for Keene Clean Air. After volunteers like Chalice install PurpleAir monitors, the data is automatically uploaded to PurpleAir's network, where it becomes part of a live map of fine particle pollution across the United States.

"We became an essential tool for people experiencing wildfires to decide where to go for the day, or to help track the smoke," said Adrian Dybwad, the founder of PurpleAir. "Schools and fire departments will decide when to shut the school down based on PurpleAir sensors."

Community air monitoring networks proved their value to state and federal agencies during the 2023 Canadian wildfires, particularly in the Northeast. As wildfire smoke drifted across the East Coast and fine particle pollution reached record levels, environment and public health experts began relying on the PurpleAir monitor network to track minute-to-minute air pollution levels, according to Michele Kosin, an air quality scientist at the EPA's Region 1 New England branch.

"The cheap little PurpleAirs actually work better when there's very, very high concentrations of smoke," said Kosin, noting that PurpleAir monitors are not connected to the EPA's Air Quality Service (AQS) system, which collects air quality data from agency monitors across the country. "... This is where the public comes in; we have the PurpleAirs in addition to the ones plugged into the AQS system, so if there are failures we can get a good reading and then get the information out there."

But Traviss also sees limitations in access to community air monitoring, particularly in rural communities, which rely on wood burning more that urban areas.

"In implementing these types of projects in rural communities, there's simply a lack of resources," Traviss said. "There's a conventional wisdom that air pollution occurs in only urban areas, where there's factories and traffic and smog. That's not necessarily true in rural communities all over New England that rely on wood [burning]."

In addition to grassroots community support, Traviss said, community air monitoring projects must be done with the help of trusted local institutions like nonprofits, hospitals, public health departments and universities. In rural communities where institutions have less resources and access, this could be a barrier, according to Traviss. "There needs to be some organization taking the lead."

Other limitations Traviss has encountered are in accuracy and reliability. Occasionally a monitor connected to the Keene Clean Air network will become disconnected when it loses internet connection, or will show a false reading when placed next to a minor source of smoke like a grill.

As a means for adapting to the public health threats of wildfire smoke, "It's definitely the future," Traviss said of community air monitoring. But without deep and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, scientists like Stowell warn that fine particle pollution from wildfires will only worsen as a public health threat.

"It's going to get significantly worse," Stowell said, noting the northeast's lack of experience with managing the public health effects of wildfires. "I've nicknamed the northeast smoke virgins in the sense that we're not used to seeing this."

But Chalice believes that as wildfires increase fine particle pollution, communities can use air monitoring projects to take a larger role in protecting those most vulnerable to fine particle pollution.

"There are kids in the school nearby that have lung issues, and anything we do to make the air quality worse in the winter exacerbates their circumstances," Chalice said. "I'd like to think for that reason with the wildfires, it still can be very helpful."

Elijah de Castro wrote this article for the Keen Sentinel.






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