TCEQ & The Sunset Commission: Texas Environmental Groups Try Working Together

The Texas Sunset Advisory Commission, made up of 12 state legislators who evaluate state agencies every dozen years, is examining the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and will make a recommendation during the next legislative session whether to renew, tweak, or abolish it, and start over from scratch.

In response, environmental groups throughout Texas are banding together like never before to make sure their voices are heard.

Earlier this month, numerous Texas environmental groups issued detailed
recommendations to the Sunset Commission on ways to improve the
TCEQ and its policies relating to air pollution, such as permitting and
enforcement.

It was the first time all the major clean-air advocacy
groups in Texas collaborated on a single position paper, says Matthew
Tejada of Air Alliance Houston, who helped spearhead the project.

“This is unprecedented for the environmental community in Texas,”
Tejada tells Hair Balls. “It’s been a massive cooperative effort that’s
been hard to pull off but we’re slowly pulling it off. These are
everyone’s recommendations all in one place, and that just doesn’t
happen often.”

Tejada says the report touches on hot-button issues, such as revising the penalty process by raising penalty caps, and how to revamp permitting now that the EPA has begun taking over the permitting program. Most of the report, however, is less extreme.

“The majority of recommendations are not the huge, coming-out-of-left-field, environmentalists-want-to-turn-the-world-on-its-head, recommendations,” says Tejada. “The majority are very specific, very well thought-out minor fixes that will have a major impact. They are things that will not make TCEQ do a different job, but do the job it’s already doing, better.”

Tejada attributes the collaboration between environmental organizations to having former TCEQ commissioner Larry Soward on board helping develop and craft the recommendations, as well as practical politics.

“People realize that we absolutely must, especially with Rick Perry still in the Governor’s Mansion, pull together and have a united front,” he says. “Telling the same story with different voices hasn’t really worked.”

The advocacy groups will release similar reports examining water and waste policy issues later this year.