by Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
New Hampshire drivers haven’t had their cars sniffed for pollution since January. On Aug. 6, the EPA proposed making that permanent — signing off on the state’s request to drop mandatory vehicle emissions testing from its federal air-quality plan entirely. Six New Hampshire outlets covered it within a day. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called it a step toward “cooperative federalism.” New Hampshire’s attorney general called it bringing federal rules “into alignment with state law.”
Maryland had a version of that same bill. It had bipartisan sponsors. And it’s dead — it died in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee after a single hearing in February, and the 2026 General Assembly session has since adjourned. Any repeal effort now has to be refiled from scratch in 2027, after Marylanders vote in November.
Maryland had a version of that same bill. It had bipartisan sponsors. And it’s dead.
What New Hampshire actually did
New Hampshire’s repeal wasn’t a standalone environmental fight — it rode through as a line item in the state’s 2026-2027 budget, signed by Gov. Kelly Ayotte in June 2025. That ended the inspection mandate at the state level immediately. The harder part came after: New Hampshire is one of several Northeastern states bound into the Ozone Transport Region (OTR), a Clean Air Act structure requiring member states to keep emissions-control measures — including vehicle inspection and maintenance programs — in their federally approved air plans, regardless of whether they’ve already met air quality standards on their own.
So New Hampshire had to ask permission. In December, the state formally petitioned EPA to strip the inspection requirement from its State Implementation Plan and to let it exit the OTR altogether. EPA Region One’s administrator had warned lawmakers that repealing the program without federal sign-off would put the state in violation of the Clean Air Act. New Hampshire did it anyway, then asked forgiveness in the form of a formal petition — and this month, got a preliminary yes. A public comment period is now open before final approval.
New Hampshire did it anyway, then asked forgiveness in the form of a formal petition — and this month, got a preliminary yes.
The sequence matters for understanding where Maryland stands: legislature repeals, governor signs, state petitions EPA, EPA rules. Maryland hasn’t filed any comparable petition, and there’s a simple reason why — it never had anything to petition about. New Hampshire only had standing to ask EPA’s permission because its legislature and governor had already acted. Maryland’s repeal bills never got that far.
Maryland’s version, and where it actually stands
Sen. Justin Ready (R-Carroll & Frederick), the Senate minority whip, filed SB106 to repeal Maryland’s Vehicle Emissions Inspection Program outright, which would have taken effect this October had it passed. It picked up seven Republican co-sponsors and one Democrat, Sen. Clarence Lam of Anne Arundel and Howard counties — genuine bipartisan sponsorship, not just a talking point. A cross-filed House companion, HB183, came from Del. Christopher Bouchat.
Both got hearings in early February. Both died in committee without a vote. The 2026 session is now over — Maryland’s General Assembly doesn’t reconvene until January 2027, after this November’s elections — so SB106 and HB183 are gone. Whatever their sponsors want to do next, it starts over as new bills in a new session, in front of what could be a somewhat different Judicial Proceedings Committee roster depending on how the elections shake out.
A third bill, HB806, took a slower path: instead of ending VEIP, it would shift testing to certified private facilities — but not until July 2035, nearly a decade out. That bill died in committee too.
Testifying before the Judicial Proceedings Committee, Ready leaned on Maryland Department of the Environment’s own numbers: the vast majority of vehicles tested pass, and MDE data cited by Ready puts the failure rate at around 6%, with most of those failures tied to mechanical issues rather than genuinely high tailpipe emissions. His framing to the committee: “The state should declare victory, we should say great, we cleaned up the air quality, let’s not keep nickel and diming our ratepayers.” Modern vehicles, he argues, are built to standards that make 1979-era testing largely redundant. The current VEIP fee is $30 per vehicle, charged every two years, and is now indexed to inflation under a 2025 state budget law — meaning it rises automatically unless the whole program goes away.
The state should declare victory, we should say great, we cleaned up the air quality, let’s not keep nickel and diming our ratepayers.
The case that doesn’t make it into the press release
Here’s the part a straight repeal argument tends to skip, and it’s worth putting on the record because it’s Maryland-specific in a way New Hampshire’s fight wasn’t.
Maryland’s air quality problem is not purely a Maryland-driving problem.
Maryland’s air quality problem is not purely a Maryland-driving problem. The state’s own environmental agency has estimated that a majority of Maryland’s ground-level ozone — the smog that vehicle inspection programs target — blows in from upwind states, not from cars registered here. Maryland has spent real political capital on that argument: the state joined eight other Northeastern states, New Hampshire among them, in petitioning EPA to force more upwind states into the Ozone Transport Region, arguing those states’ pollution was reaching Baltimore and Washington regardless of what Maryland itself did. There’s a real tension between “our emissions testing barely matters because the pollution comes from Ohio anyway” and “we spent years arguing Ohio should join our pollution-control compact, alongside the same state now leaving it.” Both arguments can be true at once, but a fair piece has to sit with that tension rather than pretend it isn’t there.
MDE Secretary Serena McIlwain testified against HB183 directly, arguing VEIP remains tied to federal ozone-compliance obligations under Maryland’s OTR membership — the same legal mechanism New Hampshire had to work around, not ignore. The state’s own fiscal analysts back that concern up independently: the Department of Legislative Services’ fiscal note on SB106 warns that because VEIP is written into Maryland’s EPA-approved State Implementation Plan, repealing it “will likely incur federal penalties that could result in the withholding of otherwise eligible federal aid dollars” — the same SIP process New Hampshire had to formally petition its way out of before EPA would sign off.
Repealing VEIP isn’t just an environmental-policy decision. It also blows a hole in Maryland’s transportation revenue.
There’s also a fiscal hole that New Hampshire’s fight, run through a budget bill with its own offsetting provisions, didn’t have to answer in the same way. That same fiscal note projects Transportation Trust Fund revenue would drop by roughly $46.5 million in the first year and $67.1 million annually within five years, once late-fee revenue is factored in. That’s real money in a transportation budget that is not exactly overflowing at the moment — MDOT’s five-year plan is already tight enough that losing VEIP revenue could push the department below its own debt-coverage policy limits, per the fiscal note.
Why the EPA move actually matters here
Set the merits aside for a second and look at the mechanics. Before this month, a state proposing to just stop federally mandated vehicle inspections was operating on a theory — Ayotte’s team argued it, but nobody knew if EPA would actually go along. Now there’s a real answer, and it’s yes, at least preliminarily, and at least for New Hampshire. That’s the actual news value for Annapolis: the legal and political path Maryland’s bill sponsors have been describing in hearings — repeal at the state level, then work out the federal compliance question after — has now been walked by another state, with EPA’s blessing rather than its opposition.
The legal and political path Maryland’s bill sponsors have been describing has now been walked by another state.
Whether that’s enough to get a refiled version further in 2027 is a separate question, and one that depends on things New Hampshire’s fight doesn’t answer: whether Maryland’s ozone numbers can support the same argument New Hampshire made, and whether the Democrats who control Annapolis’s committee gavels — the same ones who let this year’s bill die without a vote — read New Hampshire’s outcome as validation or as a cautionary tale from a state with a very different air-quality profile. That answer won’t come until a new General Assembly is seated after November’s elections.
Sources: U.S. EPA news release on the New Hampshire Clean Air Act submissions (epa.gov, Aug. 6, 2026); New Hampshire Bulletin and Valley News reporting on the EPA’s proposed approval; Maryland General Assembly bill pages and fiscal/policy notes for SB106, HB183 and HB806 (2026 Regular Session); committee testimony of MDE Secretary Serena McIlwain on HB183; WMAR-2 News and WJLA reporting on Sen. Justin Ready’s testimony and floor comments; Maryland Department of the Environment’s Clean Air Act Section 176A petition materials on the Ozone Transport Region; U.S. EPA’s 2017 response to the nine-state OTR expansion petition; Maryland General Assembly member roster confirming Sen. Ready’s District 5 seat and minority whip role.
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