California s fuel producing and marketing system has been increasingly stressed in the past few years. This stress has also been felt by our customers. In short, the watchwords should be flexibility and equivalency, not new stringency. This additional level of consumer risk is not needed to comply with the Governor s Executive Order. There is no statutory or regulatory requirement forcing this Board to go beyond removing MTBE and maintaining air benefits equivalent to the existing CARB gasoline.
Time is short.
Please try to make your decisions today. On Monday, one of our members announced their support for an aggressive phase-out of MTBE and your staff s formula. Two things are important for you to take from this. First, it shows how competitive our industry really is. Second, we are concerned that it appears CARB staff stopped working on our joint efforts as soon as they learned of the announcement.