Right now Tom Brown is probably trying not to get a sticker tangled in between his fingers.

It is the last thing a grown man wants to see happen, especially when there is a hefty fine tagged to the steel-sucking mechanism. The Sierra Pacific West president probably was not going over peeling tactics when I landed him on the phone to talk about the latest on the California Air Resources Board’s (CARB) ruling (see “Cleaning service,” April 2009, p 16), but his mind certainly was preoccupied on how his medium-sized road construction company was going to execute compliance.

The environmental measure, which now requires all lovers of off-highway diesel equipment to log every joystick commodity into a bottomless database in exchange for that mischievous proof-of-sticker, is slowly and methodically taking over the contractor world in California. It will occupy all corners by 2013 and could cost the industry billions of dollars in new or rented equipment.

The drummer boy in all this is the Environmental Protection Agency. It essentially dropped the beat with the Clean Air Act years ago, but so far has stayed clear of these singing bullets of the battlefield.

The American Road & Transportation Builders Association is now sticking the barrel of action in the soft rib cartilage of the federal cleanser. Its new group, the Transportation Development Legal Advocacy & Education Center (ARTBA-TDLAEC), sued the EPA in late April in an effort to force the agency to tend to its troubled kingdom. The fear is that without federal intervention states will look to the California sticker as the next must-have, which also could lead to scattered revisions and an equipment bumper full of sticky clean-air regulation. ARTBA-TDLAEC claimed in its lawsuit to the U.S. Court of Appeals that the Clean Air Act does not allow state control levels.

What’s bothersome is how this CARB mission was carried out. The California body has acted more like a street hoodlum than a good neighbor of the environment. CARB essentially left the contractors bloodied in their own backyard. There has been no first aid offered to these builders. The rule was executed without any care put into the aftershocks. Now, people like Brown are biting a quivering lip. By leaving contractors to pay for the entire expense, most will probably have to surrender the pride of owning their equipment. CARB even chased away the cheap way out—retrofitting these machines creates safety issues because nobody has found a way to bend their eyes around the oddly shaped box clamped down right behind the operator’s station.

I think we should at least throw these guys a concert. We can call it Green Aid, and music groups like Pavement could reunite to pull contractors from the gripping quicksand of financial ruin.

The helpline, however, should run straight to the EPA. There should be a cash or credit assistance program to help with compliance. Brown favored the idea of a tax investment credit.

The time for the EPA to sit back and watch the clean, fluffy clouds go by has long since expired. The ARTBA-TDLAEC should not have had to resort to this tack in the chair. It appears the stickers have evolved into just a lot of legal red tape.