Southern California Air Board Coming for Your Water Heater & Furnace

If a man’s home is his castle, then a single-issue regulatory agency seeks to dictate what appliances can be in your home and control how much you’ll pay to meet their mandates.

It never ceases to amaze us that activist states like California engage in a never-ending agenda to tell private property owners what we can and, more importantly, cannot do with our property.

Look no further than the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD), an air regulatory agency representing four California counties – Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino. The SCAQMD, whose 13-member governing board consists of elected and appointed officials, regulates air quality by passing mandates, which they call rules.

Typically, the SCAQMD focuses on large facilities such as warehouses, ports, railroads, cement factories, and oil refineries.

But not now.

Currently, the SCAQMD is trying to approve two rules (PAR 1111 and PAR 1121) that, unless defeated, would force homeowners, apartment owners, and businesses to replace natural gas-powered water heaters and furnaces with all-electric models.

Let’s be clear: SCAQMD Amended Rules 1111 and 1121 mandate higher costs on all consumers. Both amended rules force consumers to choose a much more expensive option of "all-electric" water heaters and furnaces that cost thousands more than current natural gas appliances or require consumers to pay an indirect fee to continue using natural gas appliances. Switching to all-electric will cost consumers more than $47,000, while keeping what they have will cost at least $1,500 more. These amended rules will burden consumers with over $300 million in costs annually ($7.7 billion over the 25-year life of these appliances).

With California’s soaring cost of living, many consumers are struggling to keep up. Now is not the time to impose additional costs on consumers.

What the SCAQMD conveniently ignores is that upgrading buildings with new electric appliances and wiring is a costly process, with significant expenses that will likely be passed on to tenants. For example: for a building constructed in 2008, the cost of rewiring and retrofitting to support electric appliances would exceed $36,000 per unit. For older buildings, the necessary upgrades could cost over $72,000 per unit. These high costs are likely to lead to rent increases, placing additional financial pressure on tenants in a region already struggling with housing affordability.

Worse still, these two mandates are largely unknown by most residents in the SCAQMD’s four-county service area. Leave it to a government agency to introduce an expensive rule directly targeting consumers and then failing miserably to make them aware of its impacts – until after it’s been approved.

We need your help now to defeat these SCAQMD mandates:

The SCAQMD’s “amended” rules give consumers a false choice: either buy expensive all-electric water heaters and furnaces or pay more for natural gas-powered appliances – a “lose-lose” situation for struggling consumers. We can make a difference. 

We need you to engage now and let the SCAQMD governing board know that Amended Rules 1111 and 1121 are prohibitively expensive and will only make California’s housing affordability crisis worse.

If you need more information, visit www.wecantaffordthis.com.

From this website, you can:

1. Join a broad-based coalition of individuals and groups opposed to Rules 1111 and 1121.

2. Take action by contacting SCAQMD board members to let them know you oppose these expensive mandates.