SALT LAKE CITY — A new bill in the Utah State Legislature would put some teeth in anti-idling laws.
Sen. Nate Blouin (D-Salt Lake City) is proposing to allow enhanced penalties for idling vehicles on bad air days.
Senate Bill 153 would also let cities put restrictions on commercial vehicles that idle statewide.
“His intent here is looking at the vehicles that travel a lot of miles during the day, make a lot of stops,” explained Ashley Miller, the executive director of Breathe Utah.
The legislature has, in the past, restricted the ability for cities to enforce anti-idling ordinances on the books. The laws themselves also aren’t consistent from one city to the next.
“A lot of the local cities around the Salt Lake Valley have idling ordinances like Salt Lake City, Sandy, Cottonwood Heights. They're all similar but they all differ a little bit,” said Miller.
She said this bill would hopefully lay a more consistent foundation for businesses with commercial vehicles when it comes to idling policies.
While the proposed policy circles around Capitol Hill, she said Utahns can do their part too.
“If it's something as simple as 'I'm not gonna idle when I pick my kids up from school' or 'I'm not gonna idle when I'm going through the drive-thru'… If we just take those little steps, it can really make a big difference,” said Miller, “Because we are going to continue to have inversions no matter how clean the air gets just due to our geography and how we have to wait for a snowstorm to come and kind of blow that away in the winter time.”
