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Which is more important, a company's expenses and profits, or public health? When we boil down all the rhetoric in the fight over an air-pollution bill in the state Legislature, that's the question, and one politicians love to ignore.

But it's the question that members of the Arizona House of Representatives must answer before they vote on a bill that limits the ability of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, or ADEQ, to regulate the emission of 73 toxic chemicals classified as hazardous air pollutants, or HAPs.

The bill, SB 1356, was introduced by Sen. Carolyn Allen, a moderate Republican from Scottsdale who frequently votes against the more conservative leaders in her party. She introduced the bill at the request of industry lobbyists.

The bill has already passed the Senate. The House should reject it. The bill worries more about an industry's profit margin than it does about the link between toxic chemicals and serious health problems. It protects industries from the expense of having to install new pollution-control equipment every time they expand or alter their operations in a way that increases pollutants.

The Legislature in 1992 took a very different approach to this issue when it passed the Hazardous Air Pollutants statute. It basically ordered ADEQ to protect society from those sources of emissions not covered by federal regulations. The federal laws affect major polluters. The state wanted to regulate midsize industries that emit more than 1 ton of a single hazardous material or 2.5 tons of a combination of hazardous substances.

Had they been adopted, state regulations would have affected circuit-board manufacturers, paper mills, shops that produce plastics, wood-manufacturing companies, mining operations and sheet-metal fabricators, among others.

But the state's ability to control those polluters has been in limbo since 1993 because specific regulations were never adopted. The job was pushed aside by previous administrations and bureaucrats who knew it would be controversial.

Steve Owens, ADEQ director, described Allen's bill as "terribly ambiguous and very poorly written." It is also unnecessary because ADEQ's authority to control hazardous air pollutants comes up for discussion April 4 before the Governor's Regulatory Review Council. That commission reviews statutes to ensure they are not overreaching. The bill's supporters should take their concerns to that regulatory council.

Allen's bill, in effect, questions the science that goes into determining the levels at which various industrial chemicals have a toxic impact on human life. It presumes that members of the Legislature have the scientific background to determine the potential long-range health effects of various air pollutants.

The Senate made that assumption when it approved the bill on Monday, presumably ignoring the earlier observations of Sen. Jake Flake, R-Snowflake. It was Flake who last week lobbied on behalf of a constitutional amendment to prevent the Legislature from adopting laws affecting agriculture. Agriculture, Flake reasoned, was too complex to be regulated by non-experts in the Arizona Legislature.

These same non-experts, however, evidently feel comfortable acting as chemical engineers. The bill says ADEQ can require an industry to install new equipment only if it can prove that the incremental increase of a specific toxin — not the total amount of material pumped into the air — is by itself harmful to human health.

Such a regulation is counterproductive. It ignores the intent of environmental regulations, says Owens, which is "to prevent people from being harmed in the first place."

Industry lobbyist Roger Ferland said in a story in Tuesday's Star, "That's the silliest argument I've ever heard."

Buried just below the surface in this fight is the notion that the state should wait until human health has been acutely and unquestionably affected by a toxic material before it acts.

We suggest that lawmakers look out their windows on one of Phoenix's many air-pollution-alert days this winter, and then tell us how much longer they're willing to wait before they decide that breathing is more important than the profit margin of a polluting industry.