A revision to Missoula County's wood-burning regulations is still crawling toward the finish line, but a Thursday meeting on the regs took a detour.

The proposed regulation changes, which first surfaced in April, involve wood burning outside the air stagnation zone, which is basically Missoula proper.

Health officials say the changes are needed to keep Missoula in compliance with federal health standards regarding the fine particulate pollution caused by wood burning.

Missoula is on the threshold of violating those particulate standards, and now the EPA is expected to lower the standards, making a violation more likely.

In general, the proposed regs would require people who live outside the stagnation zone and want to install a new woodstove to get a permit and install a newer, clean-burning stove. The proposals also would regulate in some way wood-fire boilers and biomass heating systems.

The discussion of how best to regulate such systems provided the avenue of detour at Thursday's meeting of the Air Pollution Control Board.

The detour wasn't so much a discussion of what pollution threshold ought to be applied to biomass heaters - although there was some of that - as it was talking about the basics of Missoula's air quality.

The gist of that conversation concerned divergent viewpoints held by Missoula County health officials and state and federal officials whose jobs essentially revolve around burning wood.

The crux of the issue is this: Both the U.S. Forest Service and the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation have programs that promote biomass heating systems.

The DNRC's Angela Farr, for example, works with the state's Fuels For Schools and Beyond program, which has put biomass boilers in 10 school systems.

She thinks the health department is considering particulate standards that would make it nearly impossible for school districts to install biomass systems.

At the same time, the county allows at least 1,000 inefficient woodstoves in private homes to continue burning. Homeowners have to scrap such stoves if they sell the home, but otherwise their use is grandfathered.

Why not create a swap program that would get rid of those old stoves and solve part of Missoula's particulate problem, Farr asked?

That would create room for biomass heaters, both Farr and Dave Atkins, who works for the Forest Service said.

Farr stressed the merits of efficient wood burning, noting the financial savings to schools and the lack of reliance of fossil fuels.

Still, at least part of her argument struck pollution control board member Alan Gabster, a Missoula cardiologist, as questionable.

Why, he asked, would you advocate building a biomass heater in a place where wood burning already causes health problems?

"Might some places be better for burning than others?" he asked Farr.

Of course, Farr said, but Missoula could go a long way toward meeting federal particulate standards by shuttering its remaining inefficient woodstoves. And that, she said, would leave room for the new technology in more efficient woodstoves and biomass heaters.

"I believe they're being too strict," she said of the proposal to regulate biomass with one of the nation's strictest particulate standards.

Of course, the discussion over those standards isn't closed, and the department has already made changes to other proposals deemed too heavy-handed.

"We've still got a ways to go there," said Ben Schmidt, an air quality specialist with the health department.

Off the table for now at least is creation of some sort of program that would swap inefficient woodstoves operating inside the stagnation zone for newer, cleaner-burning stoves.

It's not that such an idea doesn't have merit, Garon Smith, chairman of the air pollution control board said.

It might, particularly if money was available to finance such a program. But that discussion was never on the table in the first place and would require a whole new set of meetings and hearings.

"But I think out attention has been drawn to that," Smith said.

For now, though, the board and health department will continue working on regulations on wood burning outside the stagnation zone.

The board's next meeting will be in September.

Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.