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CEC ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS UPDATE 8/29/03 CEC Notes Synergy winners chosen CEC would like to congratulate the following winners of the 2003 Synergy Awards for Environmental Excellence: Environmental Education Please join us Tuesday, Oct. 7 at the Crown Plaza Hotel Medical Center to honor these distinguished groups and individuals. Opportunities are also available to organizations and businesses. If you would like more information on sponsorship, email synergy@cechouston.org or call (713) 524-4232. Coalition Notes Sierra Club Training Academy The Sierra Club will host its annual Training Academy Oct. 3-5 in Hubert Hills, Oklahoma. The training will help attendees assess their conservation goals, choose the best strategies to achieve them, maximize your volunteer time and energy, and get the word out in the media. Experienced organizers from around the country will be on hand to network with fellow activists, and offer hands-on experience developing a written plan to organize communities to protect and preserve the environment. For more information on how to register, contact Liz Pallatto at liz.pallatto@sierraclub.org or (415) 977-5674. Registration deadline is Friday Sept. 5. Voters Against Flooding meet to plan candidate's forum Houston Voters Against Flooding will host its next meeting Thursday, Sept. 4, 2003 at 7:00 pm at the First Unitarian Church, 5200 Fannin (@ Southmore). The purpose of the meeting is to organize and prepare for the Candidate Forum to be held on Sunday, September 28, 2003 from 3:30 - 6:00 pm. The group seeks input on developing a candidate screening process, including some basis for evaluating the various candidates. If planning to attend, RSVP by e-mail to Jim Blackburn at jbb@blackburncarter.com. Environmental leadership conference coming up The Texas Environmental Leadership Conference will be held at the University of Houston on Saturday, September 6. The state’s top environmental researchers, advocates and attorneys will be in town to discuss how to make real social change happen in communities. Network with other community and student activists. And find out about volunteer, internship and career opportunities in the Texas environmental movement. The conference will include workshops on a variety of skills like how to start a community garden or a local recycling effort; testing the quality of our air with little more than a bucket; building your organization through fundraising and volunteer recruitment; getting your message out to the media and lobbying decision-makers; using art and music in your organizing and much more. The conference is $10 if you register by Wednesday, September 3 and $15 afterwards. To register or for a current list of speakers, go to www.texpirg.org. Local NSR change means more pollution for Houston area by Erika McDonald The Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday an exemption to the Clean Air Act that allows power plants and oil refineries to increase pollution, without applying for federal permits. Several local companies will benefit from the rule change and local communities say they will suffer the consequences. Natural Resources Defense Council, is the D.C. based environmental group opposed to. NRDC’s John Walke called the decision a "scandal." Lone Star Sierra Club's Neil Carmen called the NSR change a federal "grandfathering" similar to the Texas measure that resulted in so much pollution, a conservative legislature convened in 2001 to close the Bush loopholes. "This is just a rerun of what we saw in 1999 and what we saw then was that voluntary compliance doesn’t work," Carmen said. The question of when to require plants to install pollution control devices has been a source of internal conflict for the Bush administration for the last two years. While Vice President Dick Cheney’s clandestine energy task force met with industry pushing for the new source review change, then EPA director Christie Whitman resisted the same lobbyists demands to drop clean air lawsuits. All of these were against defendants who would now qualify for the 20 percent exemption. "Imagine if the government had prosecuted Enron
for all of its accounting fraud and then went back and changed the law
to make all of Enron’s activities and practices legal," Walke
said. "That’s exactly what’s going on here except its
pollution fraud." Carmen said Houston may be spared increased emissions if Texas regulators enforce the State Implementation plan to clean the city‚s air by 2007. That is small comfort to outlying areas like Port Arthur where homes and schools sit on the fence lines of power plants and oil refineries. Port Arthur resident and community activist Hilton Kelly said he thinks his comments, and more than 200,000 others submitted against the NSR rule change during the public comment period were ignored. "This is a violation of our civil rights," Kelly said. "They tried to just sneak this past us." For residents like Kelly, living on the fence line, the new NSR rule is more than just administrative maneuvering; it is a question of public health and environmental justice. Report says state lax on clean water enforcement by Renee Feltz, KPFT News The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality failed has failed to deter illegal water polluters, according to a report released by Texas Clean Water Action released a report last Friday. The report found that only 12 percent of illegal dischargers were fined by the state and only seven percent of facilities that exceeded permit levels for highly hazardous chemicals by 1000 percent or greater were fined. Many of these instances dealt with repeat offenders. Part of the problem, says the group’s spokesperson Sparky Anderson, are low fines for violations. In Texas the average fine amounts to $1,000 for illegal dumping in waterways. Anderson said companies view this minimal fee as a "cost of doing business." Meanwhile, nearly half of the state’s waterways are unsafe for swimming and fishing. Though the lack of enforcement makes Texas a magnet for chemical and other polluting industries, Anderson said this economic success brings consequences like impact to tourism from beach closings. The high cost of cleaning up the state’s contaminated waterways is most often passed on to consumers. "The waters belong to you and me, not the polluters who discharge into them," Anderson said. According to the CWA report, the increase in contaminants leads to greater amounts of disinfectant chemicals like chlorine being used in order to get water back to a healthy state. One of largest dischargers cited in Friday’s report was Houston-based ExxonMobil. In January of 2000, one of the corporation’s local plants discharged more than eight times the legal limit of hexachlorobenzene into the San Jacinto River. The chemical is known to cause skin sores and arthritis, and if ingested for long periods of time, can damage the liver and immune system. The San Jacinto River welcomes thousands of recreational boaters, anglers, and swimmers each year and is a major source of drinking water for the city of Houston.
GBCPA says Port of Houston burdens Harris County taxpayers by Catherine Rentz-Pernot, Gulf Coast Growth News More than half of the Port of Houston Authority’s reported revenue from 1995 to 2002 came from Harris County property taxes, according to a study by the Galveston Bay Conservation and Preservation Association. According to the group, only 28 percent of the Port Authority’s reported net income for that period was operating income, with the balance coming from state subsidy and net interest income. The amount of the total tax levy paid by property owners in Harris County has climbed steadily over the same years. Through ad valorem tax levy, Harris County property owners paid the Port a cumulative total $208.6 million for fiscal years 1995-2002, said Larry Tobin who conducted the GBCPA’s analysis. Net revenue from operations during the same period was $83.8 million, and the Port Authority's other two income sources were $8.22 million in state subsidies and $38.6 million from "financial intermediation," or net earnings from interest on their liquid investments in bonds and other financial instruments, according to GBCPA. "This is an agency consuming a great deal of public money," Tobin said. "Where is the fiscal responsibility in this?" GPCPA has added these financing concerns to its list
of complaints against the Port Authority’s proposal to build a new
container facility at Bayport.
ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION CEC Environmental News Update is a weekly publication by the Citizens' Environmental Coalition, a 501(c)3 dedicated to fostering dialogue, education and collaboration about environmental issues in the Houston-Gulf Coast Region. Visit the CEC online at www.cechouston.org. To subscribe or unsubscribe, or to suggest items for inclusion,
send your request via e-mail to David Gresham at david@cechouston.org. |
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