Dirty Air, Dirty Money: Grandfathered Pollution Pays Dividends Downwind in Austin

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Recent clouds of health-threatening smoke blowing over Texas from Mexico and Central America have added wind to the sail of the environmental slogan, "We are all downwinders."

Everyone is downwind of somewhere and grandfathered industrial polluters crisscross Texas, spewing hundreds of thousands of tons of pollution into public air spaces. The message that these companies transmit along with their smog is that the public should sacrifice its health to inflate the profits of corporate polluters. That powerful special interests elevate their needs above those of the public is hardly surprising. But that public officials should so encourage private gain at the public's expense begs an explanation—especially when so many public officials talk so much about the need for "personal responsibility."

This report concludes that money—and lots of it—has turned numerous state politicians into lapdogs of grandfathered polluters. In recent years, grandfathered air polluters and their PACs:

• Spent $2.5 million in PAC expenditures to influence Texas politics;
• Contributed $193,500 to the campaign coffers of Governor Bush;
• Supplied 9 percent of all money raised by six members of the House grandfather subcommittee (including 21 percent of Environment Committee Chair Warren Chisum's funds); and
• Spent between $9.7 million and $20.6 million on an army of 359 registered lobbyists.

If these corporations hoped that such heavy political expenditures could turn Texas politicians into co-dependents of grandfathered air polluters, they have not been disappointed. Grandfathered polluters have been exempted from complying with permit requirements under the state Clean Air Act since 1971, having had 27 years in which to voluntarily comply. Nonetheless, political leaders in the Governor's Mansion and both houses of the Legislature have limited the government's responses to grandfathered air pollution to encouraging voluntary industry measures.

Just how much are Texas politicians willing to bend over to accommodate the state's leading grandfathered air polluters? Draft recommendations that the House grandfather subcommittee is considering to implement the voluntary CARE program¹¹ offer some clues. The subcommittee draft seeks to maximize voluntary participation in the CARE program, evidently concluding that the best way to get polluters to enroll is to minimize what the program requires of them.

Polluter-friendly recommendations that the draft entertains include:

• Amnesty programs for polluters who broke Texas law by not disclosing that they retrofitted a grandfathered facility and, therefore, were supposed to get it permitted;
• Tax abatements, with which grandfathered plants that failed to comply with the Clean Air Act for 27 years would shift their belated compliance costs to taxpayers;
• Waiving application fees (so taxpayers—not polluters—fund the program);
• "Streamlined" applications that minimize health-effects reviews and sharply curtail public hearings and involvement;
• Complicated pollution-trading schemes, whereby facilities that reduce their emissions beyond what is required get brownie points that they can spend by producing excessive emissions elsewhere.  

At the public's expense, Texas' grandfathered companies have enjoyed a 27-year pollution bender that was rationalized with the argument that polluters gradually would come into compliance on their own steam. Now it is time to require grandfathered facilities to comply with the Clean Air Act at their own cost; the public has already paid more than its fair share. Few Texas politicians, however are willing to demand personal responsibility from corporations by forcing grandfathered polluters to comply with a 1971 law. Too many Texas politicians appear to be working for polluters rather than the public. Records filed with the Texas Ethics Commission indicate that—to a large extent—they are. 

¹¹ The CARE program (the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission's "Clean Air Responsibility Enterprise Committee") is charged with developing voluntary responses to the grnadfathered air pollution problem.

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