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Chemical Council’s Political Agenda  

This section presents environment-related planks of the Chemical Council’s 1997-1999 legislative agenda and identifies key lawmakers who  either supported Chemical Council-backed legislation or who challenged the Chemical Council’s agenda by seeking environmental protections.²²

Grandfathered Air Polluters
As discussed above, 171 grandfathered industrial sites owned by 37 Chemical Council member companies produce 27 percent of the grandfathered air pollution in Texas skies (240,842 tons annually). Chemical Council members have supported Governor Bush’s industry-designed CARE Program, which invites grandfathered polluters to voluntarily reduce their emissions and to obtain air permits on emissions-indulgent terms. The grandfathers’ best friends in the Legislature have been Senate Natural Resources Committee Chair Buster Brown and House Environmental Committee Vice Chair Ray Allen.²³

In 1997, critics questioned the TNRCC’s legal authority to exempt grandfathered facilities from air permit requirements. To resolve doubts, the Legislature passed Brown and Allen legislation that expressly granted the TNRCC this authority.²⁴

In 1999, Brown and Allen shepherded the industry-designed, Bush-backed CARE program through the Legislature. Amendments added to the House version of the bill would have closed the grandfather loophole within two years and mandated the use of modern pollution-control technologies. But Rep. Allen stripped out these provisions in the House-Senate conference committee.²⁵ While separate legislation that deregulates electric utilities closed the grandfather loophole for that industry, the loophole survived intact for other major polluters, led by Chemical Council members.

Finally, Senator Brown and Representative Allen failed in their attempts to pass 1999 bills that would have given tax credits to grandfathered polluters for any belated pollution-control investments that they opted to make.²⁶

Evicting the Public from Permit Hearings
While the grandfather loophole exempts dirty old plants from air permit requirements, new or retrofitted industrial plants still must obtain such permits from the TNRCC. To ease this process, the Chemical Council wants to eliminate the right of citizens to contest pollution permits in legal hearings, a deprivation that the Chemical Council calls “enhanced public participation.” The Chemical Council says contested case hearings are “expensive and time-consuming.” Yet research by the Texas Center for Policy Studies (TCPS) found that less than three percent of all permit applications get contested. “Contested cases occur on those permit applications that present a real and substantial concern to the surrounding community or local governments, and that deserve the higher level of scrutiny provided by the hearing process,” TCPS concluded.²⁷

House Environmental Committee member Robert Talton unsuccessfully pushed a bill to evict the public from these hearings in 1997.²⁸ In 1999, Senate, Natural Resources Committee Vice Chair Ken Armbrister and Rep. Tom Uher led the charge, introducing similar bills.²⁹ Pressed by citizens, county officials, public interest groups and the media, Uher amended his bill to preserve the public’s right to contest permit applications.

Other 1999 bills, however, sought to rob the public of some of the gains it won in the improved Uher bill. The public lost the ability to contest permit applications by big water polluters under a Chemical Council-backed proposal sponsored by Sen. Brown and House Natural Resources Committee Chair David Counts.³⁰  This law authorizes the TNRCC to issue blanket general permits for daily wastewater discharges of any size, doing away with site-specific permits for heavy water polluters. Rep. Ed Kuempel and Sen. Teel Bivins failed in their efforts to pass bills that would have deprived citizens from contesting permit applications by air polluters.³¹

Polluter Flexibility
In 1997, Senate Natural Resources Committee member Tom Haywood and Rep. Robert Talton went to bat for another Chemical Council-backed polluter loophole that authorized the TNRCC to exempt permit applicants from any state pollution-control requirements so long as such an exemption would not be “inconsistent with federal law.” Although the EPA warned that this could prompt the federal government to stop delegating regulatory powers to the TNRCC, the Haywood bill became law in September 1997.³²

Limit Environmental Protection
While PACs affiliated with the Chemical Council generously financed politicians who carried their water, they provided little or no support to members who advocated environmental protections.

In 1997, two current House environmental committee members unsuccessfully pushed environmentally friendly bills that the Chemical Council opposed. Rep. Zeb Zbranek, introduced a 1997 bill providing for the recovery of some attorney fees from losing defendants in certain environmental enforcement suits.³³ Similarly, Rep. Robert Puente carried an unsuccessful 1997 bill that would have created a toll-free hotline  to report suspected environmental violations. Between them, Reps. Zbranek and Puente received $850 from Chemical Council PACs. Finally, Rep. Dawnna Dukes, the leading House critic of attempts to eliminate contested case hearings, received no money from Chemical Council PACs.

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