I'll try to type out and post some excerpts from Jane Kay's book if I have time. Looks like not too many Texans have read it, to say the least:
nytimes.com
April 10, 2000
IN AMERICA / By BOB HERBERT
Take a Deep Breath
At the beginning of 1995, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and a couple
of other smog-choked urban centers in Texas had a fledgling
emissions testing program in place that was designed to curtail pollution
from cars and trucks. Ground-level ozone readings had reached alarming
levels, especially in Houston, and the testing program was developed by
the state to meet federal clear-air requirements.
But even though the air in Houston was changing the perception of
children about the color of the sky and the experience of breathing, the
testing program was not popular with motorists. It was inconvenient.
Texans, like most Americans, like to gas up and go. No time for
inspections. And the program was anathema to the chattering hysterics of
talk radio. If there was one thing they understood, it was polluted air.
Houston might have had a problem in 1995, might even have been
disappearing in an increasingly toxic haze, but that was a matter best
dealt with later. Sure, some of the weaker types -- the asthmatics, the
elderly -- were gasping and wheezing, but that happens. The immediate
issue was how to get rid of the tests.
Enter the brand new governor of Texas, George W. Bush. He was now
in charge of appointments to the agency that had gone through the
excruciating and expensive work of gearing up the emissions testing
program, the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission.
Mr. Bush agreed with the angry motorists and the talk-radio crowd. It
wasn't that he was against clean air, he said. He just didn't think motorists
should be inconvenienced. And he sure didn't like the federales in
Washington telling Texans what to do.
The first legislation Mr. Bush signed as governor was a bill that put the
emissions tests on hold.
It didn't matter that the program was ready to go, that the contracts had
been signed and an enormous cadre of workers hired by the contractors,
and that dozens of gleaming new inspection stations were all set to open.
Meant nothing. The state legislature passed the moratorium and the
governor signed it. And that was just the beginning. The program would
soon be killed. Texas was not yet ready to grapple with the reality of air
pollution.
At a legislative hearing in March of 1995, the Rev. Aubrey Vaughan,
head of a group misleadingly called Citizens for a Cleaner Houston, railed
against the emissions tests, claiming, according to an account in The
Houston Chronicle, that there was no evidence of an ozone problem in
Houston, and no scientific evidence that ozone is a health threat.
The reverend declared that God is the "only one who can control
pollution problems." And he observed that "a good, hard, steady rain
would help us all."
When the state formally scrapped the testing program later in the year it
not only turned its back on an increasingly serious health hazard, it
reneged on its multimillion-dollar contract with the lead contractor for the
program, Tejas Testing Technology, which would eventually go
bankrupt.
Tejas sued and won. A settlement of $140 million was worked out, and
the way the state raised the money said a lot about the way Governor
Bush and other top state officials view the environment in Texas. They
raided the state's environmental programs -- critical programs like the
superfund for cleaning up contaminated sites and the Texas clean air fund
-- for $130 million of the $140 million they were forced to pay to Tejas.
In other words, the environment in Texas was twice punished -- first,
when the inspection program was killed and again when the lawsuit was
settled.
Since then the air quality problems in Texas have only gotten worse.
Houston is now the smoggiest city in America, having roared past the
longtime champ, Los Angeles, for that gruesome distinction. The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency has rejected as inadequate the latest
clean air proposals from Texas and is threatening to cut off billions of
dollars in highway funds and impose Draconian cleanup measures.
And get this -- state officials now think it might be a good idea to come
up with a stringent vehicle emissions testing program.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush is running for president, declaring himself
an environmentalist and promising to do for the rest of us what he has
done so well in Texas. |
