Coalition of Enviros Pragmatically Approaches Sunset
Leading up to next year's legislative session, Texas environmentalists have adopted an avowedly pragmatic strategy for winning tougher control of industrial air pollution through the Sunset Advisory Commission's review process: They teamed up with a consummate state government insider — a former commissioner of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality — to craft recommendations. They’re speaking with a unified voice. And they’re pursuing what they say are limited changes to existing practices, not ideal goals.
Bowing to political realities, a coalition of environmental groups, known as Alliance for a Clean Texas, or ACT, is concentrating on attainable improvements ...
Comments (1)
ChicoMendez
I like Bill Dawson. He writes good articles. This is not one of them.
This is a press release for ACT and Air Alliance Houston.
But as such, it's unwittingly instructive about why there's not much grassroots traction to ACT's Sunset "strategy."
I've never met Matthew Tejada, and have no idea when he showed up in Texas doing environmental organizing. But as someone who's been here 40 years, I can assure him that Texas environmentalists rarely, if ever, have the luxury of "making things perfect." My God, we're lucky to hear about the done deals within a week of their being made. We're hardly ever in the room when they're made. We don't even get the scraps. We scramble to get the crumbs from the scraps. Unless you're in certain zip codes in Austin, Texas environmentalists just can't afford to be Divas.
Moreover, ACT and Tejada have such a tin ear for what's going on in the field, that there's actually bragging about only wanting to tweak the TCEQ at a time when it's become totally, utterly an extension of Rick Perry's perpetual campaign machine. People who've been here for decades agree that things have never been worse, never so dysfunctional, and yet ACT just wants to take the agency in for an oil change.
In contrast, most citizens who actually have experience in dealing with the TCEQ want to blow-up the whole damn thing and start over.
Read my text: No amount of tweaking can redeem this agency as long as Perry and his cronies are running it as a political shop. Give TCEQ everything ACT lists here and put the same people in charge and you get...exactly what you have now.
ACT and Co. are touting the "reasonableness" of what they want in hopes of convincing the Republican-dominated Sunset Committee and Lege that they're not like those perfection-seeking GreenPeacers, or whatever. Good luck with that given who's doing the deciding.
And here is where Dawson is at fault. Why not list exactly who's on this Committee, or who would be holding hearings in the Lege? Everyone reading the Tribune will see those names and know that nothing that ACT wants will be included in any TCEQ Sunset bill without the express consent of the Texas Chemical Council. The votes were already counted before their "Don't upset the Masser" strategy was hatched.
I do appreciate the coverage the Tribune is giving environmental/public health issues. But please, more diversity of green opinion and more "pragmatic" political analysis.