REVISED SMOG PLAN WILL COST $1.7 BILLION.

Byline: Associated Press 

A scaled-back plan for fighting smog in Southern California will cost about $1.7 billion a year, air quality officials said.

Details of the revised plan to clean up the nation's dirtiest air by the year 2010 were offered Wednesday at a South Coast Air Quality Management District workshop.

The 70 regulations - to be adopted by 2001 - govern everything from diesel buses to the way paint is made in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The AQMD estimates that clean air will produce about $1.9 billion a year in benefits, mainly due to a healthier population that would lose less work or school time from smog-related illness.

The agency's board is expected to vote on the plan in November.

The new plan's cost is about a third of that projected for the tougher 1994 original, which business had attacked as too costly and restrictive.

The earlier version estimated a loss of 65,000 jobs over 20 years in the South Coast Air Basin due to the impact on business.

No job losses are expected under the revised measure, which allows a third more emissions into the air and throws out or tables 36 regulations contained in the original.