After spending a couple of good weeks poking into Illinois' auto-emissions testing program, a colleague and I had a little problem. We didn't have a story. Our desks were stacked with tables the agency used to show the program's effectiveness and piles of spreadsheets that had been spit out of the state's database. Our notebooks were overflowing with dozens of interviews. But there was nothing to grab onto, no handhold to pull ourselves up to answer our fundamental questions.
And the questions had seemed so simple. Illinois had a decade of experience with automobile emissions testing and was about to embark on a new program, the most expensive in the nation. Was the program working and would the changes make it better?
Sudden siege
The state's take was that the old program was great and the new one would be even better, allowing them to find three times as many dirty cars.
I recall exactly when the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency decided to take a siege mentality to our reporting, but it got to that sorry stage where all questions-no matter how incidental-had to be submitted in writing, to be followed days later by a written response.
Progress was tedious to say the least. Making matters worse, my partner on the story, Laurie Cohen, took off for a few days, and she was far better than I at extracting information from the state, anyway.
Jump-charting CAR
Having recently finished a CAR course with Sarah Cohen, I decided to create spreadsheets of my own. I can't say I had any great plan. By the end of the day, however, I had a very neat statistical chart of the state's progress, showing how many people had been going through the testing process, how many had been failing at various stages, and how many had been given waivers.
Taped together, the printouts stretched across Laurie's desk, making it look like I did something while she was gone. Scanning my crisp columns, something jumped out at me, like an image you stare at and all of a sudden something pops out in three dimensions.
Over six years, the state had cut its failure rate to one-third of what it had been, and now it was starting up a new program to catch three times as many polluting cars. Cut something to a third, multiply it by three, and you get back to where you started.
Falling in
Everything started to fall into place that random comment from a service repair manager that he doesn't have as much business fixing cars, that anecdotal evidence that people weren't complaining about failing the test anymore. It started to make sense in light of the fact that the state had been dumbing down its testing program. Over the next week or two, this little nugget that seemed to glow so bright on the spreadsheet drove our reporting, leading us to uncover how the state had been quietly dismantling its emissions program while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency looked the other way. Fact is, the failure rate number could have been derived from tables the state provided. "Any moron looking at these numbers would have seen this, and we had two morons looking at them," my colleague later reflected. My point exactly. Which is why that afternoon putting together the spreadsheet was such a good idea.
Pete Kendall can be reached by email at pkendall@tribune.com