A new ordinance designed to save money and reduce air pollution flew through the Salt Lake County Council Tuesday on a unanimous vote.

The anti-idling policy requires drivers of county-owned vehicles to turn off their engines if idling for more than one minute consecutively or more than five cumulative minutes in an hour. The new rule also applies to off-road, heavy-equipment operation, but with slightly less stringentless-stringent guidelines. County fleet management director John Webster said he and other county representatives researched similar policies in other states that have proven effective.

"We looked at the policy results in Maryland, the Puget Sound area of Washington and other places," Webster said. "They've had great success ... and just having a basic policy in place in Salt Lake County should show tremendous returns both financially and environmentally."

Those returns were explored in research submitted to the council by Webster's office before Tuesday's meeting. Two calculation categories compared savings potentials of reducing idling by 15 and 30 minutes per day for three classes of county vehicles. The savings were computed based on reductions for 400 light-duty vehicles (6-cylinder sedan), 40 medium-duty vehicles (1-ton pickup truck), and 40 heavy-duty vehicles (sanitation truck) and a per-gallon fuel price of $3.25.

• 15 minutes/day idling reduction nets more than $100,000 annually.

• 30 minutes/day idling reduction nets more than $200,000 annually.

Emissions reductions, calculated on just a fleet of 400 light-duty vehicles, indicate a 15 minutes/day idling cut would keep 364,000 pounds of CO2 out of the air every year, and 30 minutes/day less idling would reduce particulate by 728,000 pounds.

April Townsend, director of Salt Lake County Administrative Services, said a monitoring test was conducted before establishing the parameters of the new ordinance that found that county vehicles in all three classes idled an average of almost 7 hours a week. This finding, Townsend said, seems to indicate that a goal of 15 or 30 minutes per day is a conservative goal.

County Council members registered some qualms about the cost of monitoring devices — $400 per vehicle plus a monthly data fee — but Townsend clarified on Tuesday that monitoring would be an option left up to department heads and not required under the guidelines of the new ordinance.

Salt Lake County joins Salt Lake City among local governments that have adopted anti-idling rules to reduce fuel costs and CO2 emissions.

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