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

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

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

Frisco Unleaded, the local citizens group sponsored by Downwinders, along with four other national and state environmental groups, have petitioned the EPA to reconsider the new National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for lead that's driving the nation's lead smelters to enclose their facilities and lower their emissions by this coming fall. And they're using our old friends at EarthJustice for their lawyers. In their petition filed today, the groups, including the national Sierra Club, California Communities Against Toxics, Missouri Coalition for the Environment, and the national Resource Defense Council, told EPA that it erred in relying on a standard that aims only for an "adequate margin," when the official regulatory goal is supposed to be an "ample margin of safety" to protect public health from lead. Now maybe that sounds like so much bureaucratic nit-picking to you at first, but what it turns out to mean is that the EPA didn't consider the health effects of breathing lead on those people already living around lead smelters that emit lots of lead into the air. Hard to believe, and as it turns out, the EPA usually does assess harms from all kinds of exposure pathways. It just didn't do it for lead. It settled for a number that seems very strict - ten times lower than the old standard, when in fact, there was lots of evidence that the number should have been much lower, and that the technology to achieve it was already in use. According to the petition, "EPA reduced emissions no more than needed to assure that a source in the Secondary Lead Smelting source category would not alone emit to the extent that the ambient air concentration of lead would exceed 0.15 μg/m3. EPA did not assess each type of risk caused by lead emissions – including chronic inhalation and multipathway risk and other potential risks – independently from its assessment on the NAAQS, and it thus has failed to show how it considered the full impact of secondary lead smelters’ emissions on public health." One of the most important points made on behalf of Frisco residents was that the new standard wasn't written to be protective of people who've lived where there's been decades of lead smelter fallout. "EPA’s reliance on the NAAQS has failed to appropriately take into account the ongoing impact of historic air emissions on the most-exposed people near secondary lead smelters, and has not assessed or explained how the NAAQS could provide ‚acceptable‛ protection in view of this history. The affected communities near sources in this source category have experienced persistent, bioaccumulative toxic air emissions for years, in the form of lead, cadmium, arsenic, and other hazardous air pollutants (HAPs)." Specifically, the petition cites Frisco has an exceptional community, "For affected communities like Frisco, TX that have experienced years of past exposure, which in turn have increased current health risk, smaller amounts of additional emissions are even more likely to cause greater harm."   If you look at the other groups that filed today's petition, they're all well-established. Frisco Unleaded isn't even a year old yet, and it's already taking on the EPA. As organizational parents, we couldn't be more proud.   Read More

Pursuant with its historic January 17th vote to reject the Exide lead smelter's "vested rights" petition and require the facility to get a Special Use Permit, the machinery at Frisco City Hall continues to grind out a path toward eventual amortization, or forced self-buy-out, of the smelter, located in the center of town. On Tuesday evening at 6:30, the Frisco Planning and Zoning board convenes to decide if the smelter's submitted site plans for the "improvements" it's touting meet city specs, including the required Special Use Permit. Of course, Exide has refused to apply for an SUP, arguing that it doesn't need one, and of course city staff is recommending rejection of the Exide proposal based on that refusal, along with specific deficiencies in the plans themselves. The P&Z is expected to concur with staff. Eventually this will come before an obscure local administrative body called the "Board of Adjustment" for an official hearing on amortization proceedings, but the city seems to be getting every possible duck in a row before taking it there. Stay tuned, and let's give another big round of applause to those Frisco Unleaded members who successfully changed the city 's mind about this strategy over the last seven months or so. Well done.   Read More

The Frisco Board of Adjustment is meeting tonight beginning at 6 pm. Usually that wouldn't warrant much notice except for the resident who might want to put a different kind of fence up around his or her house and needs the permission of this Board to do so. But tonight is different. It's the first time the Board gets enveloped by the process of amortization against the Exide lead smelter that the city seems to be pursuing as of last week's historic city council vote. At issue is the Council's request for the board to determine when the smelter became a "non-conforming use." That's important because it's the date a city needs to begin amortization - the forced recouping of investment in the property ending in a scheduled closure. It also affects how much depreciation a city can subtract from the value of the property and facility. From the looks of things, tonight's meeting is only the first round and the result will probably be the announcement of a future hearing date. The hearing allows the city to make its case for the date its chosen, and allows Exide to argue that it's either the wrong date, or that the whole exercise is unnecessary because it's in compliance with the city's zoning ordinances. Then the Board rules. That may take a more than a couple of weeks but kudos to the City of Frisco for following though so swiftly on the heels of last Tuesday's council meeting. It really does look like the City has found its backbone.   Read More