Rolling coal is becoming a crisis in Silver City, but nobody’s talking about the permanent solution. At a recent town council meeting, three citizens from among the many who regularly protest at Silver Heights Boulevard and Swan Street complained that coal-rollers try to disrupt their events by emitting black clouds of sooty smoke from their diesel trucks.
We’re all familiar with teenagers and young adults acting rebellious to upset the old fogeys. This case is unusual in that the old people are rebelling against the government, and the young people are defiantly supporting the status quo. That seems backward to some of us, but we’ll ignore that and get down to basic definitions.
“Rolling coal” means using certain add-on equipment to diesel pickups to deliberately bypass emission control and send up smoke with incompletely combusted fuel. There are various methods of achieving this dysfunction, often activated with a switch near the dashboard.
Wikipedia says the modifications cost from $200 to $5,000, but the friendly young man on YouTube telling you how to do it says it might cost $10,000 to do it yourself or up to $20,000 if you hire a mechanic. Any amount sounds like stupid to me.
Rolling coal is often a protest against environmental regulations. Coal-rollers spew their pollution onto electric cars and bicyclists. But here in Silver City, it has recently been used to oppose the crowds of older citizens protesting the actions of ICE in Minneapolis, and of Trump policy in general.
What the citizens at the council meeting didn’t specifically mention is that it is not technically illegal to roll coal in Silver City. There is no ordinance against it.
Coal-rolling appears contrary to the New Mexico Administrative Code 20.2.61.110, which says: “No person shall permit, cause, suffer or allow the emission into the open air of any smoke having an opacity greater than 40 percent for any period greater than 10 seconds from any diesel-powered vehicle. …” This is a regulation, not a law, and no penalty is listed, but more importantly, if you read the text carefully, it essentially says you can roll coal all you want for up to 10 seconds. It’s unenforceable.
Some states, such as Colorado and New Jersey, have laws with penalties against coal rolling, as do municipalities such as Cheyenne, Wyoming. Other areas have used existing ordinances against public nuisance, although you can imagine that such vague rules might be hard to prosecute.
If Silver City wants to stop coal-rolling, we would need our own ordinance. Do we want this ordinance? You might disagree with protesters, you might say climate change is a fraud and you might dislike electric cars or even bicycles — although opposing bicycles in the home of the Tour of the Gila seems unpatriotic.
But the point of an ordinance is that coal-rolling is uncivilized.
You’re essentially attacking people you disagree with. It’s like scrawling graffiti on someone’s house or business. You can add that coal-rolling pollutes the air, but we won’t get into that controversy in this column.
An ordinance must be specific and enforceable. There are two ways to address it. First, the act of rolling coal could be forbidden and penalized. This is easy. Many people have taken pictures of coal-rolling incidents. They include license plates. It is no problem to write tickets for verified incidents. You could just use license information to mail them citations. A $500 fine sound appropriate.
You could also penalize bypassing required anti-pollution equipment. If a coal-rolling vehicle is identified by license plate, police could go to the owner’s home and check to see if it has the equipment. If so, a fine and a notice to fix the vehicle within 10 days. At the end of the time, the vehicle is checked again. You can imagine how this would infuriate people who have spent big bucks to make their point.
Fine. Ordinances have public hearings, and this one would be exciting. We’d hear from the people who claim it is their all-American right to pursue happiness by spewing pollution on godless communists. The old folks would claim to be more American than the coal-rollers. The council would decide.
The alternative comes from a comment I found on Reddit: “I had a distant neighbor in California with one of these obnoxious trucks. It had vertical pipes, big fat ones. Wouldn’t you know it … a small watermelon fit in there perfectly.”
Well, vigilante versus vigilante sounds like poetic justice. Anti- coal-rolling vigilantes could find and punish coal-rolling vigilantes. But wouldn’t a pro-civilization ordinance be safer?
Bruce McKinney is a Silver City business owner, close observer of local government and occasional troublemaker. In his columns, which appears whenever something upsets him so much that he can’t shut up, he tries to address big questions from a local perspective. Send comments and ideas to [email protected].
