When two major American cities discovered dangerous levels of toxic air pollution a decade ago, both tried to crack down despite industry protests.

The air in Portland and Louisville, Kentucky had more than a dozen heavy metals and chemicals above safe levels. Air regulators curbed pollution in one city.

And it wasn't in progressive Portland.

Louisville's local air district made hard choices in the face of strong industry opposition, setting a strict 10-year deadline for major rubber producers, in an area known as Rubbertown, to cut emissions of their most harmful chemicals. The companies delivered a 95 percent reduction with no associated job losses.

In Portland, meanwhile, regulators with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality enlisted more than two dozen advocates, industry leaders and government officials to develop a plan, which they called Portland Air Toxics Solutions.

It didn't solve anything.

The Oregonian/OregonLive interviewed nearly a dozen participants and reviewed scores of emails about the plan, drafted from 2009 through 2011.

The review found the effort was timid, leaderless and consistently influenced by industry interests. Committee members said they were urged to pick low-hanging fruit: easy, voluntary measures that wouldn't cost anything or require legislative action. The Department of Environmental Quality's leader, Dick Pedersen, who resigned March 1, never spoke to the group.

"The message was: If the idea involves changing state law, it's not something we want to consider. That was a big wet blanket to put over things," says Warren Fish, who participated as a Multnomah County policy adviser. "The governor, the legislators - they've made the Department of Environmental Quality more responsive to polluters' needs than to protecting air quality. That was my takeaway."

Since the group finished a blueprint for action in late 2011, the agency has done little to implement it.

Nina DeConcini, the Department of Environmental Quality administrator who oversees the Portland region, says the agency has moved slowly for a key reason: Money. The agency hasn't gotten what it needs, she says.

But she cited only one time she asked for more -- to pay for a new air monitoring station near Swan Island in 2015.

"We've had less success than we'd like. Would I agree that we have fallen short on implementing regulatory fixes? Yes. I will say that," DeConcini says. "But I don't think it's an abject failure."

Agency achievements, she said, included providing technical advice to policymakers, creating air pollution models and performing a survey of wood stove smoke.

When the Portland effort began, the city's air contained 14 pollutants above state safety goals - carcinogens like cadmium, arsenic and diesel soot. The Department of Environmental Quality has done so little work on air toxics since the process ended it can't even say how many remain at unsafe levels.

The consequences of the agency's inaction exploded into public view Feb. 3 when the state revealed the discovery of two cadmium pollution hot spots connected to glassmakers in North Portland and Southeast. The state's sophisticated pollution models hadn't predicted them.

The announcement rattled Portland's very image as a green city.

Gov. Kate Brown acknowledged the public has lost confidence in the state's air agency, which she oversees. The leading candidates for Portland mayor have demanded the creation of a local air district, like in Louisville, to strip away the state's authority to regulate Portland's air.

The agency is once more promising to solve the problem. Advocates say the state already had its chance and shouldn't be trusted again.

The Portland Air Toxics Solutions process gave the state "cover to make it look like they were taking care of it," says Mary Peveto, president of Neighbors for Clean Air, an advocacy group. "I don't have any confidence that this state agency is going to deal with this any differently."

Oregon began with ambitious goals for controlling air toxics, trying to solve a problem the federal Clean Air Act had long ignored.

The environmental quality department adopted rules in 2003 to allow it to crack down on toxic air pollution. It erected air monitors in 2005 and set targets the next year for acceptable concentrations of airborne chemicals and heavy metals.

By the time the Portland air committee started meeting to find solutions in 2009, industry influence had already shaped many decisions.

Amid protests from the Port of Portland and Western States Petroleum Association, the Department of Environmental Quality had adopted an industry-friendly safety standard for diesel soot - 30 times less protective than the one used in California and Washington.

That decision steered the group away from prioritizing high-polluting big rigs.

Another seemingly innocuous choice came when the agency decided the size of the geographic area to evaluate.

Rather than focus on Portland as a city, Oregon officials included the sprawling suburbs and parts of Washington, Clackamas, Yamhill and Multnomah counties. That drew attention to wood stove smoke instead of industrial hot spots, Peveto says.

"It was rigged from the beginning," she says. "The way they set it up, they ensured we couldn't have a driving consensus on one thing."

The agency has struggled for years with allegations that it was too cozy with industry.

Peveto recalled the agency's air administrator, Andy Ginsburg, telling her he'd spent a winter weekend at a backcountry cabin with J. Mark Morford, an attorney who'd represented Associated Oregon Industries, a business group participating in the process. Morford confirmed the story, saying he'd paid the nominal cost of the rented cabin, but wasn't involved in Portland Air Toxics Solutions.

Nine months earlier, Peveto says, she'd offered to buy Ginsburg a cup of coffee. She says he refused, because he didn't want to accept a gift. He didn't return a call.

The department took other industry-friendly steps. It required participants to come to unanimous agreement, which gave veto power to any industry lobbyist on the committee.

"We chiseled back, we used safe language, we didn't go as hard as we could," says Ben Duncan, who represented the Multnomah County Health Department, "with the expectation that we were trying to get to consensus."

By the end, business lobbyists including Associated Oregon Industries still objected. The association and Oregon Metals Industry Council wrote a letter saying additional regulation "will not solve Portland's air toxics issues and could put Oregon employers under unnecessarily onerous regulation."

The two groups supported more air monitoring, one of the only concrete steps to result.

"We have always advocated monitoring and general fund funding for the DEQ," Jay Clemens, president of Associated Oregon Industries, said in an email. "We have been opposed to DEQ budget cuts impacting their ability to carry out this fundamental and necessary work."

Since the committee finished, Oregon environmental quality officials have stifled action even on those limited recommendations in its clean air plan.

Environmental quality officials withdrew a bill they wrote last year targeting high-polluting diesel construction equipment. They took no position on another bill to stop Oregon from being a dumping ground for old, high-polluting diesel engines being phased out in California.

That bill died.

When Portland's clean air effort began, Department of Environmental Quality leaders told participants they had an opportunity to do something historic and provide a national model.

No one has hailed what Oregon did. But Louisville has repeatedly been honored for its work.

Louisvillians who lived around Rubbertown long suspected pollution from the World War I-era industrial complex was harming their health.

They got proof when tests in 2000 and 2001 showed the air contained 18 pollutants above Louisville's safety targets. The sheer number catalyzed action, says Art Williams, who then led the Louisville Metro Air Pollution Control District.

Williams says the mandate was clear: Create a fair program that cleaned up the air and protected public health.

"The framework was, we have chemicals above the benchmark levels and they've got to come down below those levels," he says. "It was kind of simple."

Williams wasn't swayed by industry claims that cracking down on pollution would hurt employment.

"I came to the job knowing that the job was to protect the environment," he says. He'd spent decades as an environmental attorney, representing both industry and citizens.

"I had as clear an understanding as you could possibly have that you could implement these laws on the books and not hurt the economy - and it generally helps the economy," he says.

While Louisville treated its safety goals as hard targets needing immediate action, Portland didn't. Oregon's final report on air toxics said the agency should "encourage" industrial polluters to voluntarily reduce emissions.

From the committee's first meeting in 2009, minutes show, some participants pushed back against strong action.

"Member is uncomfortable with the word 'must' and requested it be replaced with "should try to,'" the meeting minutes read. The notes don't specify who said it.

Portland's missteps didn't simply stem from a desire to keep industry happy. As the process advanced, the agency also botched opportunities to zero in on the hot spots it discovered this year.

Advocates and Multnomah County Health officials sent letters asking for policies that would require businesses to evaluate whether their pollution created toxic hot spots that disproportionately harmed specific neighborhoods.

Had the rules been adopted, they could've addressed emissions from at least one business, Bullseye Glass, connected to a toxic cadmium hotspot recently discovered in Southeast Portland.

But the environmental quality department ignored the request.

Department officials also missed the other glassmaker, Uroboros Glass. When an air monitor found inexplicably high levels of cadmium in the air at North Portland's Harriet Tubman Middle School, the agency concluded that a small, close-by source was likely responsible.

Department officials were worried enough to knock on doors nearby. They visited Uroboros, documenting their visit in a 2010 memo to the Portland air solutions committee. State officials asked to see records showing when the company used cadmium. They didn't find an immediate connection to spikes in the air, the memo said.

The memo suggested the department should buy a business directory to look for the cadmium source.

"No decision has been made," it said.

The source would remain a mystery for six more years.

The failure of Portland Air Toxics Solutions didn't go unnoticed.

While the committee negotiated, a Portland woman named Sattie Clark made a discovery that worried her. It was March 2010.

Her 5-year-old son had developed behavioral problems, a chronic cough and dark circles under his eyes. Tests soon revealed acute levels of arsenic in his blood, so high that her family doctor blamed environmental contamination.

Doctors couldn't pinpoint the source. But Clark knew a 2008 USA Today investigation found Portland's schools had some of the worst air in the country. They lived four blocks away from the state's toxic air monitor in North Portland. Clark checked the data and came to a troubling conclusion.

"We started to realize that the levels in his body appeared to be rising and falling with the levels in the air," she said. "At that point we got spooked."

Clark learned what the Portland solutions group was doing, and quickly decided it wasn't going to solve anything. Not in time for her son to breathe clean air while his body was developing.

"We felt like the process was a farce, a diversionary tactic to create the illusion that there was action," she said.

So she and her family moved to Mendocino County, California, where the USA Today investigation showed the air was in the country's top 3 percent.

They took their decorative lighting business and its 12 employees with them.

-- Rob Davis

rdavis@oregonian.com

503.294.7657