More Evidence Of Problems At TCEQ

Yesterday, we told you about some current problems at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality with regard to the agency and even its scientists cozying up to big business and urging the feds to allow for exemptions to pollution regulations.

As you’ll recall, we noted that this appeared to be symptomatic of a much larger problem within the agency. Lo and behold, Bloomberg News Service manages to verify it this morning by telling us that garbage like this at the agency has gone on for years. At issue in the Bloomberg story, about ongoing British Petroleum litigation, is a revolving door allowing regulators to work on permits from both directions.

BP Plc violated Texas’s “revolving door” law in 2003 by hiring a state environmental engineer to work on the same air pollution permit he’d supervised as a regulator, lawyers suing the company claim.

The permit, which governs BP’s Texas City, Texas, refinery, allowed the company to operate its largest refinery without replacing outdated emissions controls, such as the one that exploded in March 2005, killing 15 workers. Texas law requires applications be rejected when the people involved worked on both sides of the permitting process.

The engineer “changed sides and worked on the other side of this same thing for BP, representing BP against the state?” a lawyer for some of the injured workers asked Watson Dupont, a safety manager at the Texas City plant in a Nov. 15 deposition, portions of which were made public in court filings Nov. 23.

“He worked for BP in 2003 on the third draft of the flex permit, yeah,” Dupont replied, referring to BP Senior Air Engineer Rueben Herrera, a former permitting engineer at Texas Council for Environmental Quality. The group regulates industrial emissions.

Sure, you can’t get away from the fact that BP is the bad guy in this situation, but the fact remains that TCEQ is as well. Why did TCEQ not manage to catch that one of their own was working on the same application, but on a different side of the fence? Surely, there are not so many TCEQ permitting engineers that they don’t recognize each other’s names when one happens to pop up as a contractor for a permit applicant.

Also, of course, blame for all of this lies squarely in the laps of Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Texas Governor George W. Bush. Both have appointed nothing but a series of stool pigeons to the board of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (formerly the TNRCC).  Their stool pigeons have, in turn, managed to hire administrators who have more of a regard for big business than for the state’s environment.

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