Leadership: The California Air Resources Board is led by Chair Liane M. Randolph, who was appointed Dec. 9, 2020, by Gov. Gavin Newsom to lead the 16-member organization — replacing longtime Chair Mary D. Nichols, whose service began during Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration in 1979. On Nov. 18, 2021, CARB dedicated its Southern California campus in Riverside, naming it for Nichols. Randolph, who holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California, Los Angeles and a doctor of law degree from its school of law, served as chairman of the Fair Political Practices Commission from March 2003-February 2007 before heading to the private sector. She rejoined state government in May 2011 as general counsel for the California Natural Resources Agency, then served as commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission for six years before joining CARB.
On the executive side, CARB is headed by Dr. Steven S. Cliff, whom the board appointed executive officer on Aug. 12, 2022. Cliff was previously administrator at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and, prior to that, had been CARB’s deputy executive officer from September 2017-February 2021. He holds a bachelor’s and a doctorate degree in chemistry, both from UC San Diego.
CARB’s chief information officer is Rachel Rosenberg-White, whose state career dates to March 2017; she has been CARB CIO since December 2021. She was previously a senior IT project manager at InterVision Systems from March 2019-December 2021, where her clients were the California Community College Technology Center and the Los Rios Community College District IT Office. Rosenberg-White’s earlier roles include serving as IT project manager to the California High-Speed Rail Authority from March 2017-March 2019. “I focus regularly on building strong future leaders on my team, coaching them on both IT strategy and leading with empathy and vulnerability,” she told Industry Insider in June 2023 in a One-on-One interview.
Budget: $1.295 billion according to the enacted 2023-2024 Fiscal Year state budget. (All numbers are rounded.)
Total staff: As of July 1, the start of FY 2023-24, CARB was approved for 1,899 staff, up from 1,803 in FY 2022-23. The Board’s IT division, its Office of Information Services, had about 100 employees and a budget of $37 million — plus 20 to 30 contractors providing support services, Rosenberg-White said in June.
One of six entities under the umbrella of the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA), the California Air Resources Board (CARB) is charged, generally, with keeping the public safe from air pollution’s harmful effects, while taking action and developing programs to combat climate change. A merger of the state Bureau of Air Sanitation and the California Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board, CARB was established Aug. 30, 1967, with Gov. Ronald Reagan’s approval of the Mulford-Carrell Air Resources Act. The federal Air Quality Act of 1967 empowered the state to create stronger air quality rules and, among the acts in its early history, CARB in 1971 adopted the nation’s first nitrous oxide emissions standards for motor vehicles, leading the way to the development of the catalytic converter, per its website. Other milestones include the nation’s first tailpipe emissions standards for particulate matter from diesel vehicles in 1982; “check engine” lights, starting with 1988 cars; zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) regulation requiring car makers to produce an increasing number of ZEVs, in 1990; and the Advanced Clean Cars Program in 2012, which reduced greenhouse gas pollutant emissions from automobiles.
CARB’s modern mission centers on promoting and protecting public health, welfare, and ecological resources by reducing air pollutants. CARB is the state’s lead agency for climate change programs and oversees all air pollution control efforts to attain and keep health-based air quality standards. Its 11 divisions and four offices cover everything from community air protection to sustainable transportation and research; and from air quality planning and science to industrial strategies and enforcement. The board’s Northern California offices are in the Joe Serna Jr. CalEPA Headquarters Building, which was built in 2000 and was the nation’s first building to be certified at the Platinum Level, the highest designation in the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. The Mary D. Nichols Campus of its SoCal headquarters was designed to be the largest Zero Net Energy building in the U.S. and also has LEED Platinum certification.
Technology infuses CARB’s online presence. In November, the board released an update to its Section 177 States Regulation Dashboard, which is interactive and provides information on states that have adopted California vehicle regulations under that particular section of the Clean Air Act. Its 2022 Enforcement Activities Annual Report, released Aug. 15, arrived as an interactive portal, the Enforcement Data Portal, with easy-to-extract, customizable data. It had previously been a PDF. Earlier that month, the board debuted a Spanish language version of its California Smoke Spotter app, which it had originally released in 2021. The AirNow Fire & Smoke Map, created by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Forest Service and which is available on CARB’s website, uses data from sensors to track and rate air quality and wildfire conditions by location. And in May, CARB marked 10 years in use for its California Communities Environmental Health Screening Tool, CalEnviroScreen. Version 4.0 of the tool had arrived in October 2021. CalEnviroScreen is a screening methodology to help identify areas of California with multiple sources of pollution.
In June, the CIO highlighted several top IT priorities:
- Modernizing and securing legacy systems at CARB.
- Continuing a migration to the cloud.
- Services for methane satellite data.
- A program for mobile monitoring data.
- Creating expanded services across CARB’s newly implemented Salesforce platform, and in ServiceNow.
- State Senate Bill 210, the Heavy-Duty Vehicle Inspection and Maintenance Program, which compelled creation of a “comprehensive heavy-duty vehicle inspection and maintenance regulation to ensure that vehicles’ emissions control systems are properly functioning when traveling on California’s roadways,” per CARB.
- State Assembly Bill 617, the Community Air Protection Program, which aims to reduce exposure in communities most impacted by air pollution.
- The California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which led in 2009 to CARB adopting a regulation creating the Refrigerant Management Program. The program aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources, via refrigerant leak detection and monitoring, leak repair, system retirement and retrofitting.
