By Taylor Goldenstein AUSTIN BUREAU
After three chemical fires ignited in a three-week period in the Houston area — spewing plumes of noxious black smoke into the air for days, shutting down schools and sending entire cities indoors to shelter in place — lawmakers say it’s too soon to know whether new laws are needed to improve prevention or emergency response.
Instead, state Sen. Carol Alvarado and Reps. Ed Thompson and Mary Ann Perez will wait on the results of investigations by agencies such as the Harris County Fire Marshal and U.S. Chemical Safety Board. The fire marshal’s office has said it’s too early to guess how long the inquiries may take. In five weeks, the legislative session ends.
“We can speculate all we want, but I want to see the report and then try to make whatever changes I view are necessary to keep the constituents safe,” said Perez, D-Pasadena, whose district includes some of Deer Park, where apetrochemical storage facility caught fire on March 17.
Still, environmental advocates say the lawmakers should be doing more to support existing bills that would increase accountability for polluters — and to quash bills the advocates say would decrease oversight of chemical companies and restrict local governments’ abilities to take them to court.
While the timing of the fires happened to coincide with the legislative session, advocates pointed to Houston Chronicle reporting from 2016 that showed there’s a major chemical incident in the greater Houston area every six weeks.
“It doesn’t seem like the Legislature has gotten the memo that people are demanding action,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, an Austin-based environmental advocacy group. “Unfortunately, as they have in previous sessions, rather than strengthening environmental safety programs, they seem to be going in the opposite direction, working to further erode some of the safety standards we have in place.”
At least one gap highlighted in recent legislative hearings about the fires will get immediate attention: lawmakers are backing a budget request for more air monitors to detect pollutants and provide the public with more timely information.
As levels of cancer-causing benzene spiked after the Deer Park fire, city officials said there was at times a three-hour delay in Texas Commission Environmental Equality readings from handheld monitors, which the agency’s employees have to transcribe from paper to a computer.
The tenor of some members of the Houston delegation was decidedly more aggressive at legislative hearings last month on the Deer Park fire.
‘Urgency’ cited
After hearing reports of slow reaction times to the fire and hours of delay in providing air quality information to the public, several lawmakers said they saw a need for legislative action.
Perez criticized the amount of time it took Intercontinental Terminals Company to report which chemicals were burning in the Deer Park fire, delaying notices to the public.
Since then, though, she said she’s spoken to company officials, including ITC CEO Bernt Netland, who assuaged some of her concerns and reassured her the company “cared awhole lot.” She added she still believes some procedural changes need to be made to improve their reaction time.
“We talked about leaving the water cleaner than it was before the spill, making everything right,” Perez said. “And he agreed. OK, well, time to dust off the knees and keep walking and everything will heal. But we’ve got to do whatever we can in order to make it right.”
Rep. Ed Thompson, R-Houston, who had also suggested a need for legislation at the hearing, said this week that his questions about the fires, including what caused them, need to be answered first.
“I understand the urgency of this,” Thompson said. “That’s not lost on me at all … I hesitate to do something that later on we might look back and say, ‘Well that was a little premature to do that.’”
Alvarado agreed and said until the investigations wrap up, her focus is on TCEQ budget requests for a new mobile air monitoring van and updated software. She said she also plans to encourage local authorities to build a fire station closer to the Houston Ship Channel, where the ITC facility is located. Now, the nearest fire station is about 15 miles away.
With six weeks remaining in the legislative session, some bills that environmental advocates say would increase accountability for companies like ITC have stalled in committee.
The bills would cut out exemptions for polluters, mandate better protections for above-ground storage tanks and require penalties be at least equal to the economic benefit of a company’s noncompliance.
Under present laws, the penalties are not enough of a deterrent in some cases, Rep. Erin Zwiener, D-Driftwood, said at the hearing on the Deer Park fire. For example, in 2017, ITC was issued a fine about $3,000 less than the economic benefit of not fixing a leak, she said.
As those bills stagnate, advocates point to legislation that they say will weaken controls on polluters, which has recently passed out of committees.
House Bill 2826, sponsored by Rep. Greg Bonnen, R-Friendswood, would give the attorney general, rather than the comptroller, the power to approve or deny state agencies’ and local governments’ contracts for outside attorneys retained on a contingency fee.
It also requires that the public receive notice of the meeting at which the contract would be approved along with information about why it’s necessary. Bonnen said at a March committee meeting that the bill’s goal is to increase transparency.
Adrian Shelley, director of the Texas office of the nonprofit Public Citizen, said local governments already abide by many of the bill’s disclosure requirements under existing law and called the bill “paralysis by analysis.”
Existing bills blasted
“There should be oversight over how public dollars are spent,” Shelley said. “It’s just that when you combine a whole bunch of seemingly good kinds of transparency elements together into a large, onerous, prescriptive process … the actual intent of such legislation is to hamper those political subdivisions from operating in nimble ways.”
Just one week after the Deer Park fire, Harris County filed suit against ITC for failing to prevent the incident and the resulting pollution from hazardous chemicals that flowed into the air and waterways.
Rock Owens, Harris County’s chief environmental prosecutor, said the bill would likely cause a delay in the filing of such suits.
Owens said the county seldom needs to hire outside attorneys in environmental cases as it already employs lawyers with specialized knowledge. The Deer Park suit did not require outside attorneys.
Certain larger cases, however, such as the one it launched against German car manufacturer Volkswagen for enabling emissions test cheating, do require them, he said. In that case, Attorney General Ken Paxton had requested the county drop its suit so he could pursue two suits of his own, but the county declined.
Environmental advocates are also sounding alarms about House Bill 3114, sponsored by Rep. Kyle Kacal, R-College Station, which would give the TCEQ the ability to hire administrative law judges to preside over permit and enforcement dispute hearings.
The cases are currently heard by judges employed by the independent State Office of Administrative Hearings.
That set-up would create a conflict of interest by giving the TCEQ the ability to choose judges in its own cases, Shelley said.
“A SOAH opinion is advisory,” he said. “TCEQ gets the final say anyway. But you still have to believe an independent agency is going to conduct a better hearing, and that better hearing is going to lead to more accurate recommendation.”
Kacal says his bill would allow the agency to hire judges with a “greater level of subject matter expertise” and lead to more consistency in the judges’ findings. taylor.goldenstein@chron.com