By Rob Gurwitt

I’m going to cross an ethical line here and shamelessly piggyback off the work of my sister, Andrea, who’s a reporter for the Herald News, a newspaper that covers Passaic and Paterson, New Jersey. The other day, Zero Population Growth, the Washington, D.C., environmental organization, released a study ranking cities on the quality of life their children lead. Portland, Oregon, got an A+, as did Seattle; Minneapolis and New York City both got As. Paterson, though it rated a C+ overall on the kid-friendly city scale, drew an A+ for its environmental quality.

If you’ve ever driven Interstate 80 through that part of New Jersey, you’ll understand why a reporter — and anyone else with a working pair of eyes — would perk up at this. Let’s just say that you’re not going to find a photograph of Paterson on the cover of Sierra magazine anytime soon. As Andrea pointed out in a story she wrote about the ZPG rating, there are nine public schools within a mile of one of the city’s top air polluters; 160 properties in town are classified as contaminated by the state Department of Environmental Protection; and a study by a state environmental group last year found that 24,000 Paterson students go to school near one or more of the 98 facilities in town that store or emit toxic chemicals. So you’ve got to wonder how ZPG arrived at its ranking.

It turns out the organization used a single variable in determining environmental quality: the number of days on which a city’s smog level rose above the U.S. EPA’s acceptable level. In other words, you could have a city whose playgrounds sit on ground full of heavy metals, but if it doesn’t have a smog problem, ZPG suggests, it’s great for kids.

Except you can’t really say that Paterson doesn’t have a smog problem, because the report based its conclusion on “bad air days” in 1998, and the state DEP’s sole ozone monitor for Passaic County — which happens to sit in the middle of the Ramapo Mountain State Forest, a half-hour to the north — wasn’t even in place for the first half of that year. Oh, and while the federal EPA reported that the region didn’t have any “bad air days” in 1998 (hence Paterson’s enviable ranking), the state DEP measured eight of them after its monitor went in.

To be fair, ZPG understands there are some problems with its variables. As the report itself points out, the organization couldn’t gauge something as important as water quality, because cities don’t uniformly monitor and report contaminant levels, coliform counts and the like. And in looking at education, it relied on census data on such measures as average class size. The problem was, it had access only to statewide data from the 2000 Census; city-by-city data won’t be available until next year. “It is distressing to realize that current policies are being developed based on the situation ten years ago,” the project’s principal researcher wrote.

Yes, and it’s also a bit distressing that a major national organization is pulling out all the stops — press conference at the Children’s Museum in Washington, individual press conferences in cities all over the country — to urge public officials to ponder the deeper meaning of a flawed report. When Andrea asked a ZPG spokeswoman about that, her response was, in essence, that it didn’t matter. “The point of the report,” the woman said, “is to help cities and policy makers look at some of the important indicators for whether or not they are doing a good job.”

You bet. Even now, I imagine, the folks at City Hall in Paterson are sitting down with the ZPG report card and saying, “Golly, these folks sure know what they’re talking about. We’d better pay attention.”

Rob Gurwitt is a staff correspondent for Governing.

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