27-0 “Who Can Be Against Clean Air?’
As Flower Mound Council member Al Filidoro put it on Monday night: “Who can be against clean air?”
So far at least, no one but the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Bartonville’s Town Council became the fourth North Texas local government in eight days to pass a Fair Share resolution, and the fourth to pass it unanimously.
Located in the thick of the Cross Timbers in middle Denton County, Bartonville is home to some of the most notorious gas industrial facilities in DFW. One was featured in the Dallas Morning News series on gas that ran this week. It means a lot that we have the town’s support.
Thank you Mayor Ron Robertson and Council. And thanks to Sharon Wilson of the Texas Oil and Gas Accountability Project for representing us in Bartonville.
Meanwhile, down the Timbers in Northern Tarrant County, Southlake City Council member Al Zito (we’re the prefered clean air group of guys named Al) made sure Fair Share was up for discussion on that Council’s agenda. Like so many Shale cities, Southlake local politics is being wretched by the conflict between the promises of gas field financial gain for some residents, and the overriding concerns for public health and safety by others.
Mayor John Terrell said he’d watched the Flower Mound Council pass their Fair Share resolution on TV Monday night and believed it was something Southlake could pass too – unanimously. Nobody disagreed. There was discussion by the Mayor and other members about how the city had incorporated a lot of the same pollution control devices mentioned in the resolution into its recent overhauling of city drilling ordinances.
Southlake will hold their formal vote on June 7th, just in time to be counted for the scheduled June 8th TCEQ vote on the DFW plan. Thanks to Council member Zito for initiating things in Southlake, and for the support of Mayor Terrell and the rest of the other Council members. It felt good to emerge again with a consensus, especially in a city that hasn’t seen it on this issue.
It’s only been eight days, but please take a moment to consider a couple of things about what’s happening.
Like the breadth of support for the simple good idea of including Shale VOCs in this DFW clean air plan. Dallas County and Southlake. John Wiley Price and Calvin Tillman. Democrats and Republicans. Liberals and Conservatives. Rural and Urban and Suburban. That’s not just hyperbole, that’s a real regional consensus taking shape.
Citizens are building local political support for at least the air quality part of Responsible Drilling even while we suffer through the most regressive sate legislative session in recent memory. We’ll be lucky just to maintain the status quo in Austin this year, but locally, we’re gaining ground.
A regional clean air policy position is being built from the ground-up. It’s not FLOWING FROM Washington, or Austin, or even Council of Governments headquarters in Arlington. It originated with a citizens group. It’s being put together, plank by plank, by local governments, and DIRECTED AT Washington and Austin and Arlington. That’s so grassroots you can taste the dirt in your mouth.
Ever heard of the “better block” movement? When you want your neighbors and elected officials to see how your community could be improved, you take a weekend off and Do-It-Yourself. You bring in the trees in planters. You put a fresh coat of paint on. You invite the food vendors and entertainment. You set up kiosks of all kinds. You don’t talk about how things could be transformed. You transform them. And people see how it could be different. And they like it. And the perception becomes the new reality.
We still have a long way to go, and we won’t always win by unanimous margins, but the Fair Share campaign has already changed the political reality surrounding the June 8th vote in Austin by establishing a different political reality. The traditional regional voices for air quality aren’t being responsive to this problem and citizens are filling a vacuum of leadership. We’re doing it ourselves.