Leave it to bureaucrats to make an issue out of air. No, really - air.

A brewing battle at City Hall pits those who help write Toledo zoning codes against those who enforce them. At issue is the requirement that gas stations built or renovated since 1990 must provide “free air to the traveling public.”

In reality, a lot of them don't.

“I've had representatives of the gas stations ask me, `Name another industry that has to give away product for free,'” said Steve Herwat, executive director of the Toledo-Lucas County Plan Commission.

“Come on,” he added. “It's air.”

Take the Kroger gas station at Jackman and Laskey roads, where patrons who don't have a Kroger card are charged 50 cents.

Plan commission administrator Gene Naujock recently honed in on the station after his a tire on his Honda sprung a slow leak. “It's 100 bucks for a new rim,” he said. “I'd rather just keep filling it up.”

He's since sent a flurry of memos to Shad Williams, Toledo's acting commissioner of neighborhood revitalization. At first, Mr. Naujock cordially asked for an inspection of air pumps at stations citywide.

With no immediate results, his memos eventually took a turn for the nasty. “This may not be important in some person's scheme of things, however the requirements of ordinances are law,” he wrote in a memo Monday. “If they are not enforced even-handedly, they are ignored with impunity.”

Mr. Herwat said the requirement falls under the stations' special-use permits that allow them to operate. Failure to follow the code is a fourth-degree misdemeanor punishable by $250 each day of the violation.

Certainly, gas stations these days are far from the old neighborhood service stations that used to provide even a free window washing, Mr. Naujock said. “But that need is still there,” he said. “You've got kids riding bicycles who don't carry 50 cents in their pocket and poor people who don't carry 50 cents in their pocket.”

It's not that Mr. Williams doesn't know the law.

But as head of 10 inspectors who are charged with enforcing laws for all of Toledo illegal garbage dumping, dilapidated buildings, junk cars, and other nuisances, air simply isn't high on his priority list.

“We're really overloaded, and sometimes you have to decide what's most important,” he said. “Air at the gas stations? Would you rather have rats?”

Kroger representatives said they were aware of no such requirements. Spokeswoman Marcia Siemens said she faxed a copy of the zoning requirements to corporate Kroger offices yesterday after an inquiry by The Blade. “We might have to change out some equipment,” she said. “But we'll make it right.”

First Published August 24, 2002, 4:00 p.m.