EPA Gives L.A. Basin More Time to Meet Clean Air Standards : Pollution: Environmentalists criticize the plan. They had hoped for controls as stringent as local efforts.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a long-awaited federal clean air plan Tuesday that gives the smogbound Los Angeles Basin additional time to meet federal air quality standards.

The extended deadlines, contained in the plan that underwent intensive White House review, drew sharp criticism from environmental groups who had counted on the court-ordered plan to be at least as tough as local cleanup efforts.

But the EPA proposal gives the basin until 2010--three years longer than the time proposed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District--to comply with the federal clean air standard for ozone, the principal ingredient of photochemical smog.

Also, the region--which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties--could take four to seven years beyond the Dec. 31, 1997, deadline proposed by the AQMD to meet the federal carbon monoxide standard.

AQMD officials said it is possible that they may let their original deadlines slip to conform to the federal plan, but that the issue was undecided.

Environmentalists were incensed. They charged that the federal plan accomplishes less than state and regional plans approved last year--and takes longer.

“It’s absolutely horrendous. I can’t believe that it took the EPA a year and a half to prepare such a useless document. EPA’s solution is really no solution and the recipe is this: Delay, do little and then change the law to make it legal,” said Mark Abramowitz, a clean-air advocate who brought the original suit against the EPA to force it to issue the proposal announced Tuesday, known as a federal implementation plan.

Jan Chatten-Brown, president of the Venice-based Coalition for Clean Air, said she was “discouraged” by the extended deadlines. The coalition joined the Sierra Club in successfully taking the EPA to federal court in a second lawsuit and forcing it to issue its plan.

Under the current federal Clean Air Act, the EPA is required to impose a federal implementation plan if the region’s own clean-air regulations fail to show that it can meet federal clean-air standards.

James M. Lents, executive officer of the AQMD, generally applauded the federal plan. He said it amounted to an endorsement of local and state clean air efforts.

“Their purpose wasn’t to do anything innovative. Their purpose was to satisfy a clean-air act requirement. . . . They basically chose the control measures we had proposed,” Lents said.

But Lents joined the Southern California Assn. of Governments and environmentalists in scoring the EPA for not using its authority to impose clean-air regulations in areas that state and local authorities cannot control--notably offshore oil rigs in federal waters on the outer continental shelf and pollution from planes, trains, ships and military bases.

Despite the criticism, however, both the Coalition for Clean Air and the Sierra Club said the fact that the EPA had issued a federal plan at all was “an important step forward.”

“We have been very concerned that the local district has been backsliding. . . . This federal plan will send a clear message to our district and to industry that they cannot compromise away our right to clean air,” Chatten-Brown said.

The EPA has long resisted imposing such plans because it lacks authority in many cases to carry out all the measures that are available to state and local governments and because it lacks sufficient personnel.

It also had to consider political repercussions.

The White House reportedly followed the development of the federal implementation plan closely, because of its potential impact on sensitive negotiations in Congress over changes to the federal Clean Air Act.

Among the more controversial contingency measures are “no-drive days” to reduce carbon monoxide levels. The no-drive days would not be imposed until at least the year 2000 and then only as a last resort.

From November through February, motorists would be asked to use other means of transportation one day a week. Cars would be banned in rotation, based on license plate numbers.