Behind-the-scenes, many factors are driving the action between the City of Frisco and the owners of the Exide lead smelter that sits in the middle of town. We can only speculate for now. Meanwhile, let's look at some pressure points that entered the public record this last week on a collision course, and make the smelter's exit seem inevitable, no matter how much the state tries to stave it off. On Wednesday, for the first time in 20 years, the federal government lowered the recommended limit for lead exposure in young children, where it can often do the most harm. And it wasn't just decreased by the Centers for Disease Control  - it was slashed by 50%, from 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood to 5. If those sound like tiny amounts, that's because they are. But the bad news is that the overwhelming consensus of environmental health specialists is that numbers even below this amount are doing cognitive and behavioral harm to children. Even the CDC itself states that there is no known safe level of lead exposure. Not that any amount will do harm necessarily, but that any exposure is statistically capable of doing harm based on the field studies coming in. CDC estimates there are 450,000 kids nationwide that don't meet the new standard for a poison that will not honor it. We don't know how many children in Frisco fall into this category, but we do know, thanks to Dr. Howard Mielke of Tulane University, that the children the state health services agency tested for blood lead showed that 1.6 times more kids living in Frisco had blood lead levels above 2 micrograms per deciliter compared to the state as a whole - 60% above the norm. Meanwhile, new monitoring results from around the Exide smelter show that it failed for a second month in a row to obtain the new federal standard for lead particles in air of .15 micrograms (Look under "Monitoring Data" and download). In March the three month rolling average for March was.19 and .22 for April. This would mean more if TCEQ had not granted a 13 month free pass to break the standard instead of enforcing a deadline in November of this year. Did we mention that the new air-lead standard is of course based on the science behind the old blood lead level of 10 micrograms per deciliter, and therefore instantly obsolete even before Exide has to comply with it? The regulations are forever chasing the science. It might take another 4 to 10 years to lower the lead-air standard. And then more research will show even more subtle effects of lead at lower levels of exposure and so on. People who live around facilities like Exide can never win. And sooner or later, Exide lawyers or its insurance companies will be explaining why its a really bad idea to keep operating a lead smelter in a densely populated area that includes gated communities where people can spend a lot of money on attorneys themselves. We hear that things are proceeding apace in some kind of "peace with honor" resolution to this train wreck between the city and he company. Surely this last week's news can't help but spur those discussions.   Read More

Instead of enforcing a November 1st, 2012 deadline for lower levels of lead pollution, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality will allow the Exide lead smelter in Frisco to violate the more protective air quality standard until January 6^th 2014 as part of a plan for the facility the state agency is submitting to EPA later this month. The decision is a reversal of policy in place as recently as last summer, and came with no opportunity for public hearing. It also makes it clear that TCEQ is siding with Exide in its on-going battle over zoning regulations with the city of Frisco. In pushing back the compliance date, the TCEQ specifically noted Exide's lack of building permits from the City of Frisco, an unresolved zoning battle that might have kept the smelter from meeting the November 1^st deadline, and eventually forcing its closure. In giving the extension at the last minute, the state is allowing the smelter regulatory breathing room it didn't have before.  Frisco Unleaded, the residents group devoted to closing the 50-year old smelter that Downwinders is sponsoring is calling for its supporters to be at Tuesday's city council meeting to demand City Hall protest the extension and help persuade EPA not to endorse it. Once the new deadline passes, Exide will still be getting a break. Despite assurances from Frisco's Mayor and City Council that the smelter's new permit would be "first class" or they wouldn't support it, the TCEQ will also allow Exide to spew ten times as much lead as a similar Exide smelter operating in Vernon, Californianot require that Exide spend money to install pollution control equipment could reduce emissions from 1-3 tons to 1-3 pounds of lead a year because it's "unnecessary" to meet the new standard. According to Jim Schermbeck of local clean air group Downwinders at Risk, "The TCEQ is telling Frisco residents that the "first class" controls they want are too good for them; that they're too effective at getting rid of lead, a poison we know is capable of doing harm at any level of exposure. These controls work. TCEQ just doesn't think Frisco residents are worth the cost." Released late last Friday, the TCEQ plan, called a State Implementation Plan, or SIP, will be voted on by the agency's three Commissioners at their May 30^th meeting. EPA will then have six months to accept, modify or reject the plan. Green noted thatFrisco Unleaded is calling on residents to let their city council members they don't want Exide to get any extra time to further pollute their city. Tuesday's council meeting is the last one scheduled before the TCEQ vote on May 30^th. Schermbeck said the law states that Exide must comply with the new standard "as expeditiously as practicable," and no later than the end of 2015. "This extension is the opposite of that language. It delays the implementation of the standard, and does so by taking sides in a local zoning fight the TCEQ has no business in. For a state government that likes to exalt the virtues of local control, it just did a pretty good job of undermining Frisco's."   Read More

Frisco Unleaded's meet and greet turned into an impromptu town hall with Mayor Maso, at least two council members and City Manager George Purefoy showing up and fielding questions from a sometimes skeptical, sometimes supportive crowd of 50 or so residents who turned out to get an update on the fight over the Exide lead smelter. The official topic was the city's start and stop amortization efforts that began with a January vote by the Council to send the matter to the city's Board of Adjustment, then seemingly stalled, and then got jump-started by Frisco Unleaded's massive mailing to residents around Earth Day that prompted the city to announce a June 18th public hearing date. Local municipal attorney Jim Schnurr gave a presentation on the amortization process and how citizens should prepare for the June hearing. He also mapped out a strategy to plug any holes in the city's amortization case against Exide between now and June. But the discussion turned to other ways to get Exide out when Council Members Pat Fallon and Bob Allen spoke about the city's position. Although circumspect, from the language the councilmen were using, it seems the City is indeed exploring an aggressive "buy-out" of the lead smelter using a combination of bond money and economic development funding that would result in Exide ceasing operations within the next 12-24 months. That would probably be sooner than an amortization proceeding could close the smelter because of the length of time to hear appeals. But it would also cost more. With the rumor that the state and EPA have found a lot more hazardous wastes illegally buried at Exide, the expense of clean-up are still unknown but they're not going down. Purefoy did say that residents should see something happen within the next 60-90 days. The message residents sent the council on Monday night was that it was past due for a definitive resolution to get Exide out, and that they want all means of doing that aggressively pursued. If you're a Frisco resident, it's very important to keep the pressure on and show up on June 18th at the Board of Adjustment hearing and testify why you believe Exide's operations are a public nuisance to your health and/or property. This time last year the City of Frisco was negotiating with Exide over the conditions under which it would remain open. Now, it's haggling with citizens over which mechanisms to use to close it. That's progress and that's happened because of a determined group of people in Frisco Unleaded who haven't taken no for an answer. Stay tuned.   Read More

Downwinders' affiliate Frisco Unleaded is having a public meet and greet tonight beginning at 7 pm in a back room at Matitto's on the Square in Frisco. It's the group's first public meeting since it sent out thousands of mailers to Frisco households about the dangers of continuing to let the Exide lead smelter operate in the middle of town. That mailer, along with the media attention it received, prompted the city to set a June 18th hearing date to move forward with amortization of the smelter. Local attorney Jim Schnurr will come and give an encore and revised version of his "Amortization 101" presentation that initiated Frisco Unleaded's first public meeting back in September. They'll also be a preview of the EPA/TCEQ "open house on May 21st, and a citizen's slide show of Exide that's ready to be shown in from of any interested group. Meanwhile, municipal election are May 12 and there seems to be unanimity among all four Council candidates that Exide has to go, although some are more blunt than others. From an anonymous tip over the digital transom comes news that that the TCEQ has found lots of hazardous waste in the Exide "non-hazardous" waste landfills. We're tracking this down and expect to have an update shortly. If true, this news ought to shore up the City's case for amortization, since no zoning has ever authorized hazardous waste disposal at the facility. And besides all this, is the city still trying to work a deal with Exide that "buys-out" the smelter? If it is, what impact will finding a lot of hazardous waste onsite do to the cost of such a deal? Digging up and re-disposing of a hazardous waste landfill or two isn't cheap. If you live in Frisco or know someone who does, you really owe to yourself to come out and find out what can be done to accelerate removal of the smelter and meet the brave citizens who are pushing the issues toward progress.   Read More

Let's see, last time we checked in at Frisco City Hall, the city was finally scheduling a June 18th amortization hearing in response to an historic map of Exide lead smelter contamination showing up in the mailboxes of over 30,000 registered voters' mailboxes and reporters calling for a response about what the city would do next after not doing anything publicly since January. This is a good thing, right? Citizens won, right? We wish we could shout a definitive "yes," but the answer is instead a definite maybe. The city has been half-hearted in embracing the amortization option, with the city attorney's office misleading the public and Council members over the history of its use in Dallas, and making it out to be more difficult to use than other municipal attorneys consider it to be. Now, maybe this is to cover-up for the lack of any real documentation the city has to prove Exide was a "non-conforming use in decades past," like a valid Certificate of Occupancy, we don't know. Whatever the reason, there is the public face at City Hall, pointing out that the Council has done all the mechanical things to set amortization in motion, and a private face at City Hall that takes every opportunity to dismiss the strategy. Based on recent events, the two faces have not yet reconciled into a unified cogent position by the city on amortization, and residents are still skeptical. When the City released its statement last week that contained the long-delayed hearing date, it also went out of its way to take shots at the position the residents group Frisco Unleaded, and Downwinders has taken on amortization. It didn't just tell reporters that a hearing date for amortization had been scheduled. It posted a specific response to Frisco Unleaded's flier. After a couple of days of digesting this, the leadership at Frisco Unleaded released its reply to the City's posting. Here the whole thing, and here's a sample that shows why residents still don't trust the city to do this the right way:  CITY:  Some maintain amortization is a simple process. It is not. There are many safeguards in place to assure an existing business is treated in a lawful and fair manner.  Failure to follow the law and treat the existing business fairly could subject the City of Frisco to other liability that could cost taxpayers if a judgment is awarded by a court against the City.  As such, it should not be assumed that all one has to do to close a business is set an amortization hearing and the case is closed or that speeding through the process is an advantage to the citizens of Frisco. FRISCO UNLEADED RESPONSE: Amortization has been made out to be more difficult than it is by a Frisco city attorney’s office that is biased against this legal strategy. What is our proof? Exhibit A: “The Postell Report.” After our initial criticism that the City of Frisco wasn’t taking this option seriously, Frisco city attorneys went to interview the attorney who pursued amortization of Dallas’ lead smelters in the 1980’s – Don Postell. Dallas had three lead smelters at the time. One closed before the city could take action. The second closed before its amortization was settled in court. The third smelter, owned by Exide, closed in 1990 as a result of being amortized, and its amortization was upheld by the Texas Supreme Court. Guess which example the Frisco report left out of its report on Dallas amortization? Yep, the smelter that was owned by Exide, amortized successfully, and had its amortization upheld by the Texas Supreme Court. So when the City of Frisco city attorney’s office wrote a report that described its meeting with the Dallas attorney who participated in the amortization of that city’s smelters, it didn’t contain one word about the Exide smelter that was successfully amortized. Does that sound like an objective fact-finding report on Dallas amortization to you? Moreover, the city attorney’s office has made several references in public to new legislation from the Texas legislature that supposedly makes it harder to amortize a business. No other lawyer familiar with this legislation that we’ve spoken to outside of the city attorney’s office shares this interpretation of the law, suggesting to us this is yet another smokescreen. We remain skeptical that the Frisco city attorney’s office is sincere about its commitment to amortization or has the legal expertise to pursue it successfully against Exide, but we look forward to being proven wrong.   Read More

Sometimes officials can only see the light after they feel the heat. Less than 48 hours after a new map showing 50-years of lead fallout from the Exide lead smelter was sent to over 30,000 Frisco households, and less than 12 hours after a news release made it a story to follow, the City of Frisco posted an update on its official Exide website yesterday, the first since November. It announced a June 18th amortization hearing for the Exide smelter. All it took was hundreds of Frisco voters sending e-mails to the City Council and Mayor less than a month before the next municipal election, reporters quizzing them on when the city would follow-up on their January vote to begin amortization, and a national news story that reminded them of what was in store if they let Exide have its way with their city. Even though it's now set a hearing date, citizens remain skeptical of the city's sincerity, primarily because the Frisco city attorney's office has been openly biased against the amortization process. The FU flier with map that started it all can be downloaded here.  The city's puffy and defensive response that came out at the end of the business day on Thursday is here. By the way, when we asked Jess Mcangus, the engineer at Spirit Engineering in Houston in charge of putting together the map for us and Frisco Unleaded, to respond to Exide's claims that the lead emissions estimates used to draw the map were way too high, this is what he said: "The lead emission totals were derived from Exide's own reported annual lead emissions, and when annual emissions were not available, from the lead emissions from Exide's own permits (reduced by their historic operating capacity).  If anything, the 300,000 pounds of lead is lower that what was actually emitted by the company."  Read More

Frisco Unleaded is unveiling this latest graphic showing of Exide's legacy of lead via mailers going to 33,000 Frisco households this week. Read the archived release here.  Read More

For many years now there's been a entire theory of crime that blames a large part of the rise in anti-social behavior over the last 40 years on the exposure of millions of kids to lead paint and soil. Now comes a new study from Tulane lead expert Dr. Howard Mielke that concludes levels of airborne lead dust in cities have lead to spikes in the rates of aggravated assaults. So what does sunny suburban Frisco have in common with Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, San Diego, Atlanta? Thanks to the Exide lead smelter, they all have elevated levels of airborne lead. After controlling for other possible causes such as community and household income, education, policing effort, and incarceration rates, Mielke and his fellow researchers found that for every 1 per cent increase in tonnage of environmental lead released 22 years earlier, it raised the present rate of aggravated assault by almost half a percent. This latest information points "to a growing body of evidence that childhood exposure to lead dust causes permanent damage to regions of the brain that govern mood regulation, executive control and judgement."  Meanwhile, it's been three months since citizens THOUGHT the Frisco City Council was on track to amortize the almost 50-year old Exide smelter. But nothing has happened. No Board of Adjustment hearing per the usual course of action. On the other hand, Dallas has had no problem scheduling it's own Board of Adjustment hearing on April 18th concerning the slaughterhouse that dumped pig's blood in the Trinity River. Dallas is acting quickly to deal with its public nuisance. Frisco is not. with so much on the line, citizens should be asking questions.    Read More

That's the conclusion of a new report that was three years in the making. Dr. Laura Vandenburg of Tufts University led 12 other scientists in an effort that examined hundreds of recent studies on the effects to people and animals of hormone-changing chemicals that are widely used in industry, including cosmetics, pesticides and plastics. They found that even tiny doses of these chemicals, called "endocrine disruptors," can cause harmful health effects such as infertility, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and cancer. Writing in a separate editorial about the report, Vandenburg stated that "After reviewing hundreds of studies, my colleagues and I have concluded that there truly are no safe doses for these hormone-altering chemicals. We found overwhelming evidence that these hormone-altering chemicals have effects at low levels, and that these effects are often completely different than effects at high levels. For example, a large amount of dioxin would kill you, but a very small dose, similar to what people are exposed to from eating contaminated foods, increases women’s risk of reproductive abnormalities." In North Texas, we're not only surrounded by endocrine disruptors in products we buy, but also in the air we breath. Lead from Exide's Frisco smelter is an endocrine disruptor. Many of the pollutants released by the Midlothian cement plants - TXI, Holcim and Ash Grove - are endocrine disruptors, as are a good percentage of the chemicals emitted by the gas industry when its fracking a well. Like so many other kinds of human-made pollutants, endocrine disrupters were allowed in commerce without full understanding of their possible public health effects. That's why the report also recommends that the way the government tests for a chemical's toxicity be modernized. Currently, there's no evaluation of health effects from endocrine disruptors at the low level of exposure encountered by most people. These chemicals actually can harm you more in smaller doses over a long period of time than really high short term exposures. It's called a "non-linear" response because it doesn't follow the old "the dose is the poison" rule that makes the amount of poison the driver of any possible toxic effects. “Current testing paradigms are missing important, sensitive endpoints” for human health, Vandenburg and Co. said.“The effects of low doses cannot be predicted by the effects observed at high doses. Thus, fundamental changes in chemical testing and safety determination are needed to protect human health.” In other words, we need a system that catches these chemicals before they're widely marketed in consumer products, or released as pollution into the environment; before we become unwitting lab rats.  Read More

Word comes today via the Dallas Morning News that the City of Dallas has referred the notorious Columbia meat packing plant to the Dallas Board of Adjustment to begin amortization proceedings. The plant's crime was dumping pig's blood into the Trinity River .. and using an illegal discharge pipe to do it. While gross and potentially toxic to wildlife, Columbia posed no threat to human health, except maybe to its employees. On the other hand, the Exide lead smelter is spewing lead into the air every day that we know can lead to everything from learning disabilities to hearing loss to death. It's doing this in the middle of a densely populated area. It's doing this despite accumulating a longer record of serious environmental violations than 20 Columbia packing houses combined, including illegally disposing of hazardous waste and dumping lead into Stewart Creek, a tributary of Lewisville Lake, a drinking water source. After initially feigning a move toward amortization on January, the Frisco City Council hasn't been as worried about this toxic threat as Dallas seems to be about its pig blood problem. It's dragged its feet in referring Exide to its own Board of Adjustment for amortization and has so far refused to follow through. So here's our new office pool - which facility will be amortized by it municipality first - the meat packing plant or the lead smelter? Place your bets now and let's see if Frisco is as concerned about lead harming its residents as Dallas is about animal blood in its river. And by the way, there's an election in Frisco in May with choices to replace the current city  council members who seem to be dragging their feet.   Read More