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Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition
Background
On June 30, 2006 Mayor Robert Cluck of Arlington held a meeting with a group of Texas mayors at UT-Arlington.
The purpose of the meeting was to organize a new group called Texas Cities for Climate Protection, with the help of a national group called ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability USA, based in California.
The mayors received presentations on global warming, Best Practices for cities on various environmental issues, and an issue overview from Richard Greene, Regional Director of the EPA.
One urgent issue discussed was the current request by seven different electric utility companies to build 17 coal-burning power plants in Texas. At the time, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) had started reviewing the utility companies’ permit requests to build these plants.
The environmental consequence of building coal-burning plants has become a national issue. In Texas, according to environmental groups engaged in the issue, the 17 additional coal plants would add 30,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, over 115 million tons of CO(2), and nearly 4,000 pounds of toxic mercury each year.
Dallas Mayor Laura Miller began calling other mayors around the state to ask them to do something that had never been done before. She asked that they band together, as a group of concerned Texas cities, to formally intervene on this case before the TCEQ.
Formal intervention means providing the TCEQ with thoughtful alternatives, expert testimony, and sworn depositions of fact. This can be done, with the help of outside consultants who do this for a living, at an estimated cost of $300,000 to $1,000,000.
In a letter, Miller told the mayors “WE ARE NOT ASKING THE STATE TO DENY THE PERMITS. We know that the utility companies need to provide more electricity for people, and we know that they need to build more power plants to do that. But there are companies outside Texas that are using more modern, cleaner technologies than coal-burning to do it. And we would simply like to research this thoroughly and present all the alternatives to the TCEQ for its consideration. (Coal gasification, for example, is the cleanest technology available and could cut emissions by 60-90 percent, yet in a December ruling the TCEQ said Texas utility companies do not have to consider this option.)”
