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TCEQ: recommendations to improve accountability

tschuetz

The Sunset Advisory Commission is tasked with evaluating the efficiency of over 130 Texas state agencies. A November 2022 news article points out that the group has not reviewed TCEQ's operations for over a decade (Douglas & Martinez 2022). The article also summarizes the Sunset Advisory's recommendations to improve regulation of polluting industries in Texas: 

  • suspending a company's compliance history after major accidents (complicating approval of future permits)
  • increasing of non-compliance penalties from $25,000 per day to $40,000 per day
  • increasing the notice for public hearings and possbility to submit comments up to 36 hours after the hearing


Read more in the Sunset Advisory Commissions 2022–23 staff report.

TCEQ's mission and scope

tschuetz

"TCEQ regulates air, water and land pollution and had a $429 million budget in 2021; it oversees more than 250,000 permits ranging from small-scale landscape irrigation to major petrochemical plants." (Douglas & Martinez 2022).

"TCEQ Commissioner Jon Niermann said the agency’s permitting decisions could not be racist because the TCEQ does not choose the location of industrial facilities." (Douglas & Martinez 2022)

Data direct us

tschuetz

"Instead of treating data as independent sources, we should be asking, Where do data direct us, and who might help us understand their origins as well as their sites of potential impact? The implications of these questions are threefold. For practitioners who want to work with data, understanding local conditions can dispel the dangerous illusion that any data offer what science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway calls “the view from nowhere.”For students and scholars, attention to the local offers an opportunity to compare diverse cultures through the data that they make or use. Finally, local perspectives on data can awaken new forms of social advocacy. For wherever data are used, local communities of producers, users, and even nonusers are affected." (p. 3)