Naked City

The State Auditor's Office released a report in December showing that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality does a poor job of issuing enforcement orders to and collecting penalties from environmental polluters. The report makes recommendations on how to improve enforcement, including a suggestion that could increase agency revenue by $25 million per year.

One might think that Gov. Rick Perry would applaud a report that advances two stated Republican Party goals: rooting out government waste and inefficiency, and increasing state revenues without taxes. Instead, he angrily leapt to the defense of corporate polluters, telling the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, "It appears to me that the State Auditor's Office has now gone from auditing to trying to make statements on public policy. That's not the state auditor's function in my humble estimation."

Among the key points of the audit:

Failure to pursue enforcement in a timely fashion both allows violations to continue and slows penalty collections. The TCEQ does not have an effective process for collecting delinquent penalties.

Mishandling of "supplemental environmental projects" reduces benefits owed to the state. SEPs are options available to violators to offset all or part of a penalty. Only SEPs that have a "direct environmental benefit" -- such as cleaning up an illegal dump site -- qualify for one-to-one dollar offsets. SEPs with "indirect benefits," such as educational projects, allow an offset of only $1 for every $3 spent. The SAO alleges that the TCEQ sometimes misclassify "indirect" projects as "direct."

The report also suggests that recent changes to TCEQ penalty calculations aren't punishing polluters harshly enough, making it cost-effective for companies to simply pay the fine and continue polluting, and that the agency needs to improve its public input process. Most importantly, the SAO says that eliminating caps on fees for air emissions could both decrease emissions and increase potential TCEQ revenue by $25 million per year. Currently, "a facility that reports emissions of 4,000 tons of air pollutants pays the same fee as a facility that reports emissions of 85,990 tons."

Unlike Gov. Perry, the TCEQ itself "generally agrees with our recommendations and has agreed to implement them," the audit says, only noting major objections on the issues of SEPs and public comment. Commission spokesman Andy Saenz told the Star-Telegram that the report vindicates the TCEQ because it contains "no huge bombshells or surprises." Environmentalists would at least partly agree with that statement -- they have charged for years that the commission is a lapdog of the industries it is supposed to regulate.

"The State Auditor's report ... is just the latest indictment in a string of evidence that shows TCEQ is regularly giving sweetheart deals to law-breaking polluters," said Luke Metzger of the Texas Public Interest Research Group, a leading commission critic, in an e-mailed statement. "It's time for TCEQ to get its act together and appropriately punish those who are poisoning our air, land and water and literally making Texans sick."

The report is available on the Web at www.sao.state.tx.us/reports/2003/04-016.pdf .