Situated between mountain ranges and undergoing steady growth, Ciudad Juarez suffers a long-standing air pollution problem.  Commercial trucks, city buses,  personal automobiles, brick kilns, and unpaved roads all contribute to the degradation of the air shed.

In recognition of the problem, the new municipal administration of Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz has drafted a set of goals to attack a problem that has dogged previous local governments. The plan was unveiled at a November 8 meeting of the Joint Advisory Committee (JAC) in the border community of Sunland Park, New Mexico. Founded in the 1990s, the JAC is a group made up of government and civil society representatives from Mexico and the United States that promotes clean air on both sides of the border.

"We're trying to take a dynamic direction," said Hector Sandoval, the new director of Ciudad Juarez's ecology department. Sandoval, who ran as the Mexican Green Party's candidate for mayor in this year's election, laid out 13 clean air policy goals established by the Reyes administration.

Highlights of the strategy include installing four air quality monitoring tations, requiring air emissions stickers on private vehicles, conducting nspections of private businesses, promoting a car-pooling lane on the eavily-traveled, international Bridge of the Americas, and bringing the municipal environmental ordinance up to date.

To achieve its goals, the Reyes administration banks on working with the Chihuahua state government and the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez (UACJ) in upgrading air pollution detection technology and in monitoring the old buses that rattle Ciudad Juarez's streets, Sandoval said.  In a similar fashion, the city government is collaborating with the university
and other authorities to promote the use of cleaner brick kilns as well as the construction of an "ecological park" to house the city's brick-making industry.

According to Sandoval, getting older, dirty vehicles off the roads is a priority of the Reyes administration. The environment department chief told Frontera NorteSur that the city government plans a 500-vehicle pilot project similar to "cash for clunkers" schemes in the United States.

Sandoval said the Ciudad Juarez program will offer cash payments to owners of old vehicles that can be recycled or used for parts.  A seller will then be able to use the money from a car as a down payment on a new vehicle, he said. As an extra benefit of the planned vehicle buy-out, Mexico could utilize carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol, Sandoval added. No start-up date for Ciudad Juarez's "cash for clunkers" program has been set.

Sandoval acknowledged that convincing car owners to part with their vehicles won't be easy. A sprawling city with a difficult public transportation system, many low-income Ciudad Juarez residents depend on cheap, used vehicles imported from the United States. The Ciudad Juarez Municipal Planning Department estimates 79 percent of city residents use vehicles which average 13 years in age.  Ana Maria Contreras, air quality chief for the federal Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat), estimates that 30 percent or less of the approximately 450,000 vehicles circulating in Ciudad Juarez have been inspected for air emissions.

Mexican environmental authorities worry that the lifting of restrictions on the importation of used vehicles from Canada and the US  set for January 2008 will result in even greater numbers of  discarded, polluting cars and trucks coming into the borderlands from the North  "This will create a big problem for the city," predicted Gerardo Tarin of Semarnat's Ciudad Juarez delegation.

Tarin said enforcing a Mexican customs regulation requiring that used imported vehicle have an environmental sticker will hopefully curb the worst vehicles from entering Mexico. "It's hard to stop this from day to night, but at least we could stop the polluting ones," Hector Sandoval added.

In Mexico, concerns are mounting about the environmental effects of a new used car import boom happening at the same time of meticulous US security inspections. Some environmental experts say that official air quality monitoring reports, which measure contaminants over relatively dispersed areas during extended periods of time, don't adequately gauge the impact of short-term, air pollution bursts caused by idling traffic near the region's international bridges where crossing times have reached as much as three hours at times in 2007.

lma Leticia Figueroa, twice head of Ciudad Juarez's ecology department and the current coordinator of the biology program at the UACJ, said the health of Mexican and US government workers, vendors, local residents and border-crossing students is jeopardized by the bridge congestion.

"They are all people exposed to an air quality outside the norm," Figueroa said. A JAC participant for nearly a decade, Figueroa recalled attending numerous meetings with officials from Mexico and the US in which a "maximum" goal of 20 minutes crossing time was agreed to for bridge users.

However, the current situation represents a step "backwards from what we proposed," Figueroa said.

In an interview, Figueroa endorsed a special car pool lane, proposed harmonizing export-import environmental standards for used cars and suggested reserving thorough auto inspections at border crossings for secondary stations specifically meant to check suspicious cars and passengers. Figueroa contended that a pressing need exists in the United States for an educational campaign aimed at coaxing people not to dump their old, polluting vehicles on Mexico. Ultimately, she emphasized, Ciudad Juarez's air pollution problem is not confined by a glass barrier at the border.

"El Paso, Sunland and Juarez are in a basin, a common space. We breathe the same quality of air," Figueroa said.