When Marilyn Jonas was a kid, it was rare to be able to make out the top of Boston’s Prudential Center when driving through the city. A thick haze hung over the skyline.
That’s a memory lost among today’s younger generations, she said, largely due to government regulations that improved air quality.
“I remember before the air was clean, when every city around here was polluted, when there was smog everywhere,” said Jonas, who lives in Wilton. “I feel as though monitoring and accountability is a small price to pay for all of us to be able to enjoy clean air.”
When Jonas found out New Hampshire was ending mandatory car safety and emissions inspections — before securing a waiver from the federal government, and therefore violating the Clean Air Act — she was “taken aback.”
She decided to sue.
Citing her own experience with asthma, Jonas wrote in court documents that the repeal of car inspections has “negatively impacted” her health. She plans to file her lawsuit on Wednesday after giving the state notice in May.
The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Even when she’s driving behind an antique vehicle with poor emissions, she said, her lungs begin to tighten. She fears that ending testing will make that experience more common.
“I am concerned about the effect of future increases on air quality in New Hampshire in nearby states, which could further harm my well-being,” Jonas wrote. “I also travel on New Hampshire’s roads, and I am concerned about the impacts on safety resulting from the suspension of the program both to myself and to my loved ones.”
Jonas, who works as a school speech therapist, has advocated for air quality in her neck of the woods before, including opposing an asphalt plant that was ultimately denied a zoning variance by the town of Wilton in 2019.
Republican lawmakers championed the end of car inspections last year, deriding them as a “sticker scam” that imposes an undue burden and cost on drivers and lets auto dealers run rampant. The repeal was a longtime policy goal for many in the libertarian wing of the party.
Jonas, however, thinks government regulations aren’t automatically a bad thing. They are meant to protect people, she said.
“I was like, ‘Wait a minute. Hold on. Why is air quality no longer a thing?'” Jonas remembers thinking when she heard about the repeal this winter. That sentiment led her to notify the state of her intent to sue. “It’s more just to kind of stand up for the environment and for everyone who needs to breathe.”
She’s not the first to mount a legal challenge to New Hampshire’s end to car inspections. The company that supplied the emissions testing equipment, Kentucky-based Gordon-Darby, sued the state late last year to preemptively stop the repeal. It ultimately withdrew the lawsuit over a “technicality” but threatened to sue again.
New Hampshire is violating the Clean Air Act by ending its federal emissions testing program before receiving a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency, which can carry a penalty of $55,000 for each day the state is out of compliance.
Officials expect the waiver to be issued by the end of the year.
