The Aggie’s article on Nishi air quality: Some additional information

The Aggie has a great new article on the air quality issue at Nishi, including interviews with Dr. Tom Cahill and myself.  I have just a few things to add.

One is that since the article was published, the amount contributed by the developer to sell Measure J to voters has gone from over $170,000 to over $250,000 (a quarter of a million dollars).  This is eight times the cost of what one air quality test would have cost.

Second, according to the article "Whitcome says there were some issues found at the site, but 'nothing of any real consequence.'"  That's not an accurate statement because the site has not actually been studied, just an adjacent site.  And here is what they found at the adjacent site (from Barnes 2015, the study used in the EIR):

The graph clearly shows the weekend spike of ultrafine particulate matter that Dr. Cahill talks about in the Aggie article — the part of the data that Dr. Charles Salocks, the scientist who the Yes side uses to promote their project, completely ignores.  Ultrafine metal particulates have been shown to be particularly harmful. 

Third, the article states that "the project will be including measures to mitigate the possible air pollutants."  Unfortunately, the promised mitigations are all based on idealizations, not real-life usage, and can be overturned with a 3-2 vote of the Council in any case, since they are explicitly not part of the baseline features of the Nishi project.

I thank the Aggie for the interview and for bringing these issues to students and other readers of the Aggie on campus.  Once again, the Aggie shows itself to be a model of good journalism.  My comments here should not be construed to be criticisms of the article, but rather a continuation of the discussion.