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

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This report links data on grandfathered air pollution emissions to data on political expenditures in Texas.

Although the Texas Legislature grandfathered industrial facilities from compliance with the Clean Air Act in 1971, the state government has never provided a full accounting of the smog that these grandfathered smokestacks emit³. Frustrated by this inaction, environmental groups⁴ used the Open Records Act to obtain 1995 Texas Natural Resources Commission (TNRCC) data (the most recent available) on 1,070 plants that are responsible for the most grandfathered emissions. These 1,070 plants are owned by 356 different companies. Data on these emissions appear in the environmentalists' recent report, Grandfathered Air Pollution: The Dirty Secret of Texas Industries.

Facilities that emit "non-permitted" emissions have not received a permit from the TNRCC, a process that often mandates emission controls. The TNRCC allows "non-permitted" facilities to pollute without such permits under two loopholes: the grandfather loophole and the "standard exemptions" that the TNRCC grants to facilities that produce relatively few emissions. Grandfathered Air Pollution found that the grandfather loophole accounts for the overwhelming amount of "non-permitted" emissions.

The pollution data presented in this report comes from Grandfathered Air Pollution. In many cases, however, the pollution data attributed to a given parent company underreports that company's total grandfathered air emissions due to limitations in Grandfathered Air Pollution and its underlying TNRCC data. In focusing on facility and plant emissions, these data rarely account for all of the emissions of a given parent company. Texas Utilities (TU), for example, appears in these data as the leading source of grandfathered air emissions. But these data do not provide the full story. This is because the grandfathered emissions of TU subsidiaries, such as Enserch and Lone Star Pipeline Co., are reported separately. This tendency to underreport the total grandfathered emissions of large, diversified parent companies lives on in this report.

The second set of data in this report covers political expenditures made by the 356 companies that own the 1,070 grandfathered plants analyzed in Grandfathered Air Pollution. These political-expenditure data come from several kinds of disclosure reports filed with the Texas Ethics Commission:

• Contribution reports filed by Governor Bush and all six members of the House subcommittee on grandfathered facilities;
• Expenditure reports filed by registered political action committees (PACs) that are affiliated with grandfathered polluters; and
• Registration reports filed by lobbyists who work for any of the 356 grandfathered polluters.

For this political-expenditure data, investigators did more research to link parent companies to their subsidiaries and affiliated PACs. This report counts as "grandfathered money" any expenditures made by PACs affiliated with:

• A parent company that owns one of the 1,070 plants that produce most of Texas' grandfathered air emissions; and
• A parent company's subsidiary, if that subsidiary owns any of the 1,070 plants.

For example, Lockheed Martin owns facilities that spew grandfathered emissions, but subsidiary Lockheed Information Management Services (IMS) does not. So, the PAC money of Lockheed Martin counts toward grandfathered PAC expenditures, while that of Lockheed IMS does not.

³The TNRCC, which issued a 1986 report that ommitted numerous grandfathered facilities, is reportedly still collecting this data.
⁴The Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club and the Galveston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention (GHASP).

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