By Randy Lee Loftis / Reporter - The Dallas Morning News - August 16, 2012
The Obama administration’s only hearing on its proposal to give the cement industry more time to meet a looser clean-air standard is under way at Arlington City Hall.
But the jury is already back with a verdict. The Environmental Protection Agency is getting shredded — literally.
Some opponents of the move — that is, all but one of the speakers so far — are feeding EPA handouts into a shredder as they present their case.
The four EPA officials running the hearing are hearing everything from quiet, compressed anger (“This is outrageous,” declared state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth) to table-pounding and shouts.
Jim Schermbeck, director of the North Texas environmental group Downwinders at Risk, said he was speaking in the place of group founder Sue Pope, who has campaigned to slash cement plant pollution for 20 years. Pope, he said, was too sick to appear.
The debate isn’t really over EPA rules or industry rules, Schermbeck said, but whether the EPA was going to keep insulting people who have worked to protect public health.
“These are Sue Pope’s rules that we are debating today,” he said, “and we shouldn’t be messing with them.”
Following years of inaction, the EPA in 2010 moved ahead with rules to cut air pollution from cement-making plants. Midlothian has the nation’s biggest concentration of cement plants.
People jammed a 2009 EPA hearing in Dallas to hail the move. But on June 22 this year, the Obama administration said it wanted to soften some requirements.
One change would amend the way particulate matter — microscopic bits released from smokestacks — is counted. The effect would be to give plants more leeway, essentially boosting emissions compared to the 2010 rules.
Another would give the industry two more years to comply. The deadline would move from September 2013 to September 2015.
The EPA offered engineering explanations that closely mirrored the industry’s position.
Gary Stuard of Dallas left no doubt about how that struck him.
“People have been dying,” he told the EPA. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
There was one early voice for the industry. Andrew O’Hare, vice president of regulatory affairs for the Portland Cement Association, opened the hearing by endorsing the proposed changes.
“New compliance strategies take time to implement,” he said.
Time has been a major complaint of the opponents. The EPA gave the public just two weeks’ notice of Thursday’s hearing, which goes on until 7 p.m., and the deadline for written comment on the proposal is tomorrow.
In a hurry to be heard? Read details and submit comments at www.regulations.gov. Enter doceket number EPA-HQ-OAR-2011-0817.