Emissions Program Suspension Leaves Local Testing Site In Limbo

By Kaaren Valenta

Staff at the vehicle emissions station in Newtown was busy this week answering phones and explaining to customers who showed up for their appointments that the state has suspended the testing.

“A lot of people were away because of the school vacation last week so they hadn’t heard that the state suspended the testing,” said Cathy Amaral-Freitas, general manager of Amaral Motors on South Main Street.

State officials announced April 21 the program would be put on hold for up to 90 days, following months of intermittent problems and an independent audit that found several more faults with the six-month-old program. The company hired to run the emissions testing program, Chicago-based Agbar Technologies, responded by filing a lawsuit against the state, calling the suspension unwarranted.

“We found out about the suspension the way the public did, on the 6 pm news on April 21,” Ms Amaral-Freitas said. “Lynn Hyman, our office manager, heard it. I was at a Chrysler meeting so she left me a message on my answering machine at home.”

The next morning, two faxes were received by the local automobile dealership.

“One was from the Department of Motor Vehicles saying the emissions program was suspended until they could look into all the things that have been reported in the newspapers. The other was from Agbar, contesting it,” Ms Amaral-Freitas said.

The emissions testing staff at Amaral Motors was able to test one car that morning, then the DMV shut the computerized system down, she said.

“That has left myself and 278 other emission stations in limbo,” she said. “We are as much in the dark as everyone else.”

The shutdown has forced Amaral Motors to let one emissions staff member go, and to reassign another because no one is sure when, or if, the stations will reopen.

“I invested a couple of thousand dollars [to install the emissions station] but some garages invested a lot more,” Ms Amaral-Freitas said. “Some of them built a separate bay or converted an existing bay. Some renovated their bathrooms or made physical alterations to their buildings accommodate the emissions station.”

The suspension also has affected vehicle owners who spent money getting their cars fixed after the vehicles failed the emissions test.

“We can’t retest now. There is not a single garage in the state that can do it,” Ms Amaral-Freitas said. “I had one person call to schedule a retest and when we told her we couldn’t do it, she was very upset. She had spent $600 to get her car repaired. She said she would have waited and used that money to pay other bills.”

The suspension also means that local garages will not be doing emissions-ordered repairs for awhile.

“Besides the repairs that we do, customers go to Exxon, Care Care, Berkshire Motors, and other local garages,” Ms Amaral-Freitas said. “I know these garages had business from this.”

The DMV claims that thousands of cars have mistakenly failed emission tests due to problems with Agbar’s computer software. The independent audit, conducted by Gordon-Darby and Sierra Research, cited numerous technical glitches and improper calibrations that could cause false readings. The consultants cited poor quality and inefficiencies with some of the monitoring equipment.

The company and DMV dispute some of the auditors’ findings. The two sides had planned to meet next week. A final report was due April 30.

A group of test station operators asked the DMV this week to resume the program. For the most part, they said, the program was working well.

Agbar said it “remains committed to Connecticut’s testing program and the stations who participate,” but warned a suspension will make it impossible to preserve and restart the program.

“This will preclude Agbar from recovering the millions of dollars it has invested in a complex, custom-designed testing system, which, while still in its early stages of implementation, has been operating with nearly 99 percent accuracy.”

No one is sure how the DMV will deal with the backlog of untested vehicles that have reached, or passed, the testing deadline.

Ms Amaral-Freitas said it has troubled her that the communication between the DMV and the test stations is so poor.

“I’ve been reading the news to find out what is going on. That is sad,” she said.