Early Voting Starts Today

Voting-booth-2Today is the first day of early voting in municipal elections throughout North Texas. Along with some high stakes city council races there are also lots of local propositions. Of course, of greatest interest to our Dallas supporters is the post-election make-up of of the city council that looks like it will decide the fate of the Trinity East gas permits. If you want to make a difference in June, please get out and support the candidates who are standing against irresponsible urban drilling, including longtime Downwinders supporter Claudia Meyer. This time, it counts.

Erin Got a Movie, But Lois Created a Movement

Lois GibbsEvery movement for social change has a birthplace that history assigns it. It's Rosa Parks refusing to give up her set on the bus, or the Stonewall patrons refusing to be bullied by the police.

For the grassroots environmental movement, it was Lois Gibbs and her neighbors refusing to let two EPA employees leave a Love Canal home for 6 tense hours in 1980 as they negotiated with the President of the United States for relocation off the top of a toxic landfill.

There was already an environmental movement in the mid-to-late nineteen-seventies, but it had grown out of the counterculture surrounding opposition to the Vietnam War and had a strong ideological streak. It also tended to focus on problems from a national or international perspective. Species extinction. Population control. Nuclear testing. Big Issues.

When Lois Gibbs made the connection between her children's illness and living on top of a toxic dump that no one had bothered to tell her or her neighbors about in Love Canal, New York, it was the beginning of a new kind of environmental activism. An activism rooted in home ownership and parenthood. An activism that stressed urgent action over political analysis. An activism that brought the unexamined consequences of 20th-Century industrialization not just into the living rooms of average Americans, but into their blood streams. It was the first time that we figured out that while we were thinking globally, we were getting poisoned locally.

It's hard to believe, but a short 35 years ago, there was no precedent for what Lois Gibbs did. There were no national groups advising citizens on how to effectively organize against toxic hazards. The EPA was only eight years old, as were the very first incarnations of the Clean Air and Clean Water Act. Yet her course of action is the template that is still repeated time and again, mostly still by women, as this nice retrospective piece makes clear:

…one day in 1978, the Niagara Falls Gazette published a story about toxic dump sites cluttering the region. Love Canal was one, and the news screamed from the page: 21,000 tons of toxic waste had been buried next to the school property, underneath the playground.

Pressing to move her son to another school, Gibbs won an audience with the school board superintendent. The school chief settled into an oversized leather chair behind a broad, shiny wood desk. He seated Gibbs in a school desk normally used by kids. Sunken in her seat, she slid two doctors’ notes across the desk saying her son’s sickness could be tied to the dump, she said.

The superintendent glanced at the notes, then slid them back. “‘We’re not going to do that because of one hysterical housewife with a sick kid,’ ” he said, as Gibbs recalled it. “ ‘Well, if your kid is so sick, why don’t you go home and take care of him? Why are you running around to City Hall and the school board?’ ”

Tears streamed down Gibbs’ face. “All of a sudden, I became the bad guy.”

At home, her Irish-Catholic temper began to burn. Raised on Love Road in Grand Island, one of six children of a stay-at-home mom and union dad, Gibbs was taught to vote at election time and fly the American flag. Now, as she raised two sick children in a town smothered in waste, the government had turned its back. “After I got sad, I got mad,” she says, recalling the conversation that helped propel her on a lifetime of activism. “Don’t ever tell me I’m a bad mother.”

Lois Gibbs wasn't calling herself an environmentalist when she started. She was just a desperate and pissed-off parent. But that's what made her effective. She was 26 years old.

“She was like a hurricane and we just kept going,” said Luella Kenny, a fellow Love Canal resident. “She was a housewife, and there’s nothing wrong with being a housewife, and she did not have all of this shall we say Wall Street and Washington know how the politicians had and the Wall Street investors had.”

Instead, Kenny said, Gibbs possessed a “hidden talent she wasn’t even aware of. But when push came to shove and your children are being threatened, I think you find that energy that you are going to protect them, for heaven’s sake.”

This is the same energy Downwinders at Risk was founded on. It's the same energy you find in all real grassroots fights. It's the kind if energy national groups based in Washington or New York did not have at the time and did not have the tools to support. Lois Gibbs wrote the creation story of the modern grassroots environmental movement.

Because of the fight over Love Canal, the nation's first Superfund Law was created to help finance the clean-up of abandoned waste sites. As so many women have since then, her experience in leading the fight transformed her deeply. She found her voice. And having found it, there was no chance in hell she was going to lose it.

She's created a national clearinghouse for helping citizens that she still runs, and its impact on groups throughout the country has been immeasurable. It provides a laboratory and staff and resources that often provide the only common link between thousands of new Lois Gibbs in their own fights. 

Some of us have been lucky enough to meet Erin Brockovich in person and find out for ourselves how underplayed Julia Roberts was in her on screen portrayal. She's the real deal. And there's no question that her celebrity status generates public and media interest in righteous local fights that would otherwise be begging for attention. But her toolbox is a law firm. Her job as a legal assistant in a law firm put her on the front lines of one of the largest and most serious water contamination cases in modern US history and it's the same law firm that she uses as an effective cudgel when the circumstances are just right. It's the prism she sees everything through because it's the way she helped clean up Hinkley, California, the way she got introduced to the fight.

Lois didn't get involved in the grassroots movement because of her job. She was involuntarily drafted because of her son's illness. Her toolbox is a movement she founded. It's got a lot more strategies and tactics in it than just lawsuits. Lois sees the problem through a bigger prism because it wasn't lawyers that got her out of Love Canal, it was collective action of her neighborhood, including the taking of two EPA employees as hostages. When you start out like that, you see the world differently.

Downwinders is the direct descendent of Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal fight. Not just in spirit. Not just because our founder Sue Pope has been called "the Lois Gibbs of cement plant opponents." Gibbs herself was a mentor to National Toxics Campaign Director John O'Conner who, in turn, was a mentor to our Director, Jim Schermbeck. Links on a chain. All of you are links on the same chain. 

While we haven't resorted to hostage taking, Downwinders does have the reputation of being the group that gets results, whether it means we have to get thrown out of an occasional meeting to highlight an undemocratic process, or repeatedly ask uncomfortable questions of industry reps who want to avoid answering. We do this because we are ever mindful of who we're representing – people who are getting shat on and don't have anyone else to turn to.

Despite all the progress of the last 35 years, Downwinders is the call of last resort for many modern day Lois Gibbs' in North Texas. After they find out that the EPA and state won't or can't help them, after they learn Greenpeace doesn't have an office here, and the Sierra Club is 100% volunteers, they end up calling us for help because we're the only anti-toxics group that provides full time staff support for residents. 

Like Lois Gibbs, having found our voice, we're out to add it the voices of others and make a very large choir indeed. If you like what we do and think it makes an important difference, won't you please consider helping us in our Spring fundraising drive and put some money in the tip jar? Thanks. 

We Hate to Say We Told You So, But….

empty_bagCalifornia Public Radio reports...

The California Department of Toxic Substances Control has shut down a battery recycling plant in Vernon whose own investigation revealed that it’s contaminating the soil around it. Exide Technologies recycles 22 million car batteries a year at its Vernon plant. The DTSC said Wednesday that it has suspended Exide’s operating permit.

Last month, regional air regulators said arsenic in Exide’s emissions has raised cancer risks for people in nearby Maywood, Huntington Park and Boyle Heights. DTSC Director Debbie Raphael says video provided by Exide shows that its wastewater pipes are leaking metals and other toxic substances into the ground.

The consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog said the DTSC “did the right thing” in suspending Exide’s operating permit, but the group also criticized the agency for never forcing the company to comply with laws that required it to prove it had enough cash to pay for any actions required by regulators, including the cost of closure.

“Exide has only put up $10 million dollars for closure—that is nowhere near enough” if the company needs to clean up a high level of toxic contamination, said Consumer Watchdog’s Liza Tucker. In that case, “Californians could be left holding the bag,” she said.

It'a all relative. Right now, Frisco residents wouldn't even have the bag. The town is putting its fate in the hands of a company that's finding new ways to circle the drain for the second time in a decade. While Exide and the regulatory agencies may want to pretend the California crisis has nothing to do with the company's ability to carry out a first-class demolition and closure at its Frisco smelter site, common sense says otherwise. Frisco needs an exit strategy.

No It Isn’t.

Dallas smog aerialIt's unfortunate the Dallas Morning News chose to drink the Kool-Aid and say, that despite DFW once again getting an "F" from the American Lung Association for its smog levels, it "isn't as bad as it looks" because the air is "getting cleaner" than it was in…1999.

And 20 years ago too probably, but what about compared to, say, 2010? In that more relevant comparison, the answer would be no, the air is not cleaner, it's in fact dirtier. The average concentration of smog has inched up over the past two years and the number of monitors in violation of the old 85 parts per billion ozone standard has increased from 2 to 7 in 2011 and 6 last year. That's not progress.

The DMN story also doesn't mention that the state has tried and failed twice with its "clean air plans" to reach the obsolete 1997 standard, and it forget to say we face a 2018 deadline to meet the new 75 ppb standard. But don't worry because the air is cleaner than it was in…1999! Even if it's still not safe or legal.

 

More Gas Drilling Smog in Rural Wyoming Leads To More Doctor Visits

GirlwithMaskThe higher the smog levels in Sublette County Wyoming, the more people go to see doctors. Sounds about right. Unless you know we're talking about a very rural area in the middle of the wintertime. Thanks to waves of new gas drilling, lots of ozone is now created by the winter sunlight reflecting off snow and photochemically changing the voluminous Nitrogen Oxide and Volatile Organic Compounds into ozone, or smog.

According to a new study from 2008 to 2011, for every 10 parts per billion ozone rose in Sublette County, respiratory-based visits by residents to doctors rose 3 percent.

Kerry Pride, a Centers for Disease Control epidemiologist assigned to the Wyoming Department of Health, said the study’s results are in line with what the department expected. Similar studies around the country and internationally have indicated similar trends.

Wyoming's Department of Environmental Quality has rolled out a plan to reduce the pollution with a deadline of 2015.

West to Dallas: Zoning is Important.

WEST TX MAPFor many of us dealing with the Texas "environmental regulatory system" the shock isn't that something like the West disaster happened, it's the fact that similar accidents don't happen more frequently. Still, it seems like it combined a perfect storm of all-too familiar circumstances

1984 – the company moves two large pressurized tanks of liquid anyhydrous ammonia, a potentially lethal poison, from a site in nearby Hill County to its current location in West without notifying state authorities. It was 1992 before the state caught the mistake and made the company do the paperwork. It moved into an area whre there was already residential development.

1987 – the company was venting ammonia that built up in transfer pipes into the air despite explicit orders in its permit not to do so.

Mid-1990's –  the plant’s neighbors complained often about ammonia odors from the company. A neighbor reported “strong anhydrous ammonia odor at her house on Jane Lane.” Another “alleged that strong ammonia odors had intermittently been coming from the West Chemical and Fertilizer facility. That happened repeatedly, but each time a state inspector arrived, usually days later, he couldn’t smell any ammonia or find any leaks.

2004 – The company’s “grandfathered” status for the two large pressurized tanks of liquid anyhydrous ammonia expires. It was 2006 before an ammonia odor complaint sent an inspector to the company in 2006, a records check revealed the overdue permits.

2006 – a West police officer called a company employee to tell him an ammonia tank valve was leaking. The employee confirmed the leak and “took the NH3 [ammonia] tank out to the country at his farm,” according to a handwritten note. “West Police followed him.”

2006 – EPA fined cited West Fertilizer $2,300 for not implementing a risk-management plan, according to an EPA database.

2011 – In the required risk-management plan, West Fertilizer said the “worst-case scenario” would be an ammonia leak from a storage tank or hose. It didn’t specify the likely consequences. The company said the plant had no alarms, automatic shutoff system, firewall or sprinkler system.

2012 – the Office of the Texas State Chemist, which regulates fertilizer, visited the company 12 times and found "no problems" with the management of its material.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration had not inspected the plant since 1985, when it gave out a $30 fine. Because of budget cuts, OSHA can inspect plants like the one in West about once every 129 years.

All the elements found in West –  disregard for common sense, "grand-fathering" of incompatible zoning, no enforcement of current regulations – can be found just about anywhere you could throw a dart on a map of Texas. All it takes is a lightning strike, a mistake at a control board, or a wind-whipped ember. For evidence, look only to the stories being told by an ex-Exide employee about working conditions at the recently-closed lead smelter in Frisco.

But much more common still are the daily insults to workers and neighbors inflicted by "upsets," accidental releases, and routine pollution that no one has assessed for its full toxicological impacts. These are the non-spectacular injuries of under and no-regulation, and they overwhelm the headline-making ones. Together with the potential for catastrophe, this is why zoning is important. This is why paying taxes for inspectors is important. This is why industry cannot be trusted with its own regulation. This is why environmental protection is a DIY proposition.

There's been a lot of tsk-tsking over the wayward rural ways of West that allowed the accident to inflict so much damage, but countless North Texas officials have shown they're no more sophisticated. Many Barnett Shale communities allow drilling sites within just 100-500 feet of homes and schools, much less as processing plants and compressor stations. Currently, the majority of the Dallas City Council is in favor of putting drill sites in city parks and a gas refinery dealing with dangerous Hydrogen Sulfide only 600 feet from a giant children's athletic complex. Imagine the indignant questions should they get their wish and something terrible happens. "Who allowed a facility like that so close to those kids?"

We think we live in places where a West could not happen. We're wrong. 

Why Frisco’s Lead Clean-up is Now Tied to California Courts

Stock topteboard declineSmelling green, lawyers suing on behalf of Exide shareholders have begun to flock to the Golden Gate state's courts to file lawsuits alleging the company lied to purchasers of stock about the substantial environmental liability of the company's Vernon smelter, recently cited as presenting the highest cancer risk of any industrial facility in Southern California.

At last count there were at least five separate law firms preparing to sue, alleging Exide has…

"…violated certain provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Specifically, the complaint alleges that defendants misrepresented and/or failed to disclose that, among other things: (a) the Company was polluting the environment and exposing almost 110,000 residents near its Vernon, California battery recycling facility with potentially fatal levels of arsenic and other pollutants; (b) the Company knew that it would not be able to meet its debt repayment obligations and other pledges and promises based on actual and projected revenues and expenses; and (c) the Company knew that its environmental liabilities, debt obligations and potential insolvency did not support Exide’s statements to investors. According to this complaint, when these facts were finally revealed to the market, Exide’s shares plummeted by approximately 46%.

This isn't the first, or even the second or third time the company has had these kinds of problems. As it turns out, Exide has a history of financial shakiness and corporate irresponsibility:

Despite market dominance, Exide lost about 75% of its share value from 1996 to 1998. Some shareholders sued management, alleging misrepresentation, and the Florida attorney general and the SEC launched probes into whether the company sold used batteries as new. (In 1999 Exide settled with Florida without admitting wrongdoing, and it also settled with shareholders.) In 1998 management clumsily announced a recapitalization attempt and then changed its mind. Amid these problems, Hawkins resigned as chairman and CEO and former Chrysler exec Robert Lutz replaced him.

In 1999 Exide canceled a contract with Sears (4 million batteries a year) to focus on profits rather than volume. Later that year Exide sold its Speedclip division to Prestolite Wire. In 2000 it acquired the global battery business of Pacific Dunlop (now Ansell Limited), GNB Technologies. Exide also sold its remanufactured starter and alternator business (Sure Start).

In 2001 Exide agreed to a plea deal with federal prosecutors whereby the company would pay out $27.5 million in fines over five years. The company admitted to making defective batteries, covering up the defects, and bribing a Sears, Roebuck buyer. Burdened with heavy debt, Exide also announced in 2001 that it planned to issue 20 million new shares in a debt-for-equity deal. That year the company changed its name from Exide Corporation to Exide Technologies.

In 2002 Exide filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization as a result of its acquisitions bender and poor conditions in the automotive sector. Later in the year Exide inked a deal to become the exclusive battery supplier to Volvo Truck Australia, giving the battery maker a 74% market share for heavy truck batteries in Australia.

Arthur Hawkins, the former CEO of Exide, was convicted in 2002 of fraudulently selling defective batteries to Sears Automotive Marketing Services. He was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison; the sentence was upheld in 2005. Three other Exide executives were convicted of various federal charges.

When Exide emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2004, the company had cut its debt by a reported 70%. That year the company combined its motive power and network power operations into one segment, industrial energy.

While Exide exited Chapter 11, it still experienced corporate pain — the company continued to lose money, and it shut down its lead-acid battery manufacturing plant in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2006. The plant served Ford Motor and other aftermarket customers. The Shreveport factory was operating since 1968. Production was shifted to other Exide facilities.

Guess what lucky North Texas community helped pick up Exide's slack?

So this is the corporate entity the City of Frisco reached an agreement with concerning the "outer ring" of the Exide lead smelter in that town, also other wise known as the "J" parcel. As it turns out, that agreement gives the company a big financial incentive to clean up that part of their property and hand it over to the City for development. Exide is counting on getting $45 million from the City when the clean-up of the "J Parcel is given the Good Housekeeping Seal.  To put that amount in perspective, 2013 second quarter operating income for Exide was only $6.8 million.

So if Exide is as greedy and needy as their record indicates, that J Parcel will be spic and span. But that's not the land the smelter and all of Exide's tons of lead smelter waste is on. That's on the approximately 100 acres smack dab in the middle of the J Parcel and central Frisco that Exide will still own. And there's no City deal to make sure that contaminated property is ever cleaned up.

Now add the current round of financial troubles Exide is in and there's absolutely no incentive for the company to spend money on the kind of state-of-the-art clean-up Frisco residents say they want. In fact there's a huge disincentive. Frisco is a former Exide smelter site with no discernable assets and all sorts of long-term expensive liabilities. And if Exide goes belly-up, the City will find itself at the end of a long line of creditors, beginning with the shareholders who have the best lawyers, with little luck in recovering the money necessary to do a proper cleaning and closure.

The solution? Perhaps a little pro-active planning on Frisco's part could make sure the money is there to clean-up the worst of the worst contamination in a timely way. Requiring Exide to put up a bond pre-bankruptcy, or maybe taxing hazardous waste disposal by the pound are two possible paths that come to mind. Unless the City does something like this, and soon, it's central downtown development, and ambitious Grand Park plans will be forever held hostage to the fate of a company that's looking less and less viable with each passing day.

UPDATE: It was announced Wednesday that the State of California has ordered the Vernon smelter closed because the facility has "been continuously releasing hazardous waste into the soil beneath its plant because of a degraded pipeline" along with poisoning an unacceptable cancer risks.

Downwinders and Others File Stay Against EPA Over Weakened Cement Plant Rules

buttonSeventeen years and counting – that's how long Downwinders at Risk has been fighting to get the EPA to modernize their rules for waste-burning cement plants. And we're not giving up.

On Wednesday, a national coalition of environmental and community groups that included Downwinders at Risk asked a federal court to stay a decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to weaken and delay Clean Air Act protection against toxic pollution from cement plants.

By the agency’s own calculations, the delay will cause between 1,920 and 5,000 avoidable deaths and will allow cement plants to release an additional 32,000 pounds of mercury into the environment.

The complete list of groups seeking relief include Cape Fear River Watch, Citizens’ Environmental Coalition, Desert Citizens Against Pollution, Downwinders at Risk,  Friends of Hudson, Huron Environmental Activist League, Montanans Against Toxic Burning, PenderWatch & Conservancy, and the Sierra Club, all of which have members who live and work in close proximity to cement plants and have suffered from cement plants’ excessive pollution for many years. Earthjustice filed the stay motion on their behalf in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. A copy of the groups’ motion can be found here: Cement Motion to Stay Rule

Cement plants are among the nation’s worst polluters, emitting vast quantities of particulate matter, mercury, lead, and other hazardous air pollutants.

“As if gutting and delaying the rule were not bad enough, EPA has essentially created a compliance shield for the industry, making it impossible for citizens to hold facilities accountable for their toxic emissions. These changes in the cement rule are irresponsible and reckless,” said Jennifer Swearingen, of Montanans Against Toxic Burning.

“Los Angeles is ringed by cement plants, and three of them operate near my home in Rosamond,” said Jane Williams, of Sierra Club and Desert Citizens Against Pollution. “The pollution from these plants hurts the people in this community and robs us of the outdoor lifestyle we came here to enjoy. We can’t wait two more years to get relief from these plants’ pollution. I don’t want anyone in these communities to be among the people this pollution is going to sicken and kill.”

Our own Midlothian is the cement capital of the United States and so Downwinders at Risk' Director Jim Schermbeck had something to say about the move. “The EPA seems to have learned nothing from having cement plants exploited as inadequate hazardous waste incinerators. As cement plants are once again becoming the nation’s Dispos-All, and new wastes are generating new emissions, the Agency is weakening air pollution controls and making it easier for cement kilns to poison their neighbors. It was wrong to turn kiln into incinerators in the 1980s and it’s wrong to try and do so again in the 21st century – especially accompanied by a roll back in regulations."

In North Carolina groups are fighting a massive proposed cement plant. “A gigantic foreign cement company wants to build one of the world’s biggest plants here,” said Allie Sheffield, of PenderWatch and Conservancy, a group that works to protect the coastal ecosystem in Pender County, North Carolina. “If this plant is built, EPA’s new rule will let it emit twice as much lead, arsenic, and particulate matter into our air and waters. At this point, I have to ask – why do they call it the Environmental Protection Agency?”

William Freese, of Huron Environmental Activist League, lives near what the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory lists as the dirtiest cement plant in North America for point source pollution. “This makes one wonder how the EPA, in violation of U.S. Court of Appeals’ order, can allow this company to do keep polluting for two more years. By the time they get around to finally doing what’s right, they won’t have any environment to protect,” Freese said.

“Federal law required EPA to put limits on this pollution more than a decade ago,” Earthjustice attorney James Pew said. “But under one administration after another, the agency has refused to put limits in place. Real people suffer as a result of EPA’s scofflaw behavior, and now they are going to court to say ‘enough is enough.’”

The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act required EPA to limit cement plant’s emissions of hazardous air pollutants such as mercury. In 2000, a federal court had to order EPA to set these standards after the agency refused to do so.

In 2010, in response to a lawsuit filed by Earthjustice on behalf of community groups living in the shadow of cement plants, EPA finally set the standards that the Clean Air Act had required it to set more than a decade before. These standards would have significantly reduced cement plants’ emissions of soot, mercury, lead, benzene and other toxic pollutants by September of this year.

Rather than acting to clean up their pollution, cement companies attacked EPA’s new rule in court and in Congress. The attacks failed. The court denied their request to vacate or delay the standards, and legislative efforts to do the same failed to gain support on the Hill.

In 2013, however, the EPA voluntarily gave the cement industry the very relief it had failed to get in court or in Congress. It delayed emission reductions that were already more than a decade overdue for another two years, until 2015. Additionally, EPA weakened particulate matter standards and eliminated requirements that would have required cement plants to monitor and report their emissions to the public.

Citizens are down but not out. And we will never rest until we see cement plants regulated the way they should be when they burn so many different types of waste. We can fight this fight because of your support over the years. Please help us keep fighting by putting a bill in the tip jar. We need your help to raise our 2013 budget to keep our staff in the field working for your lungs. Thanks.

Irving City Council Passes Resolutions Opposing Dallas Drilling; Dallas Council Member Reverses Position

bigMoOpening up another official front of opposition, the Irving City Council unanimously passed two resolutions at their regular monthly meeting Thursday night that puts the city on the record against Dallas' plans for park and floodplain drilling.

Besides rhetorically taking a side, Irving opposition could be important because Trinity East Big Cheese Tom Blanton told the city's officials last month that, although the controversial wells and refinery the company wants to build on the banks of the Trinity will be within the City of Dallas, the lateral drilling from those wells are actually planned to go under the City of Irving. They'll put the straw down in Dallas but Trinity East wants to really drink Irving's milkshake

One resolution was aimed at opposing the three Trinity East permits themselves and a second one was aimed at opposing drilling in, on or near Irving city parks. Since both were on the Council's "consent agenda," there was no discussion so we don't know if there's a second shoe that's going to drop in terms of denying mineral rights to Trinity East outright. That might be complicated by the fact that there are already at least two wells near the University of Dallas (in Irving) that the company drilled on behalf of itself and others, including the City of Irving.

Irving's opposition comes a week after the revelation that Dallas City Council member Monica Alonzo, in whose district all three Trinity East wells are located, now "opposes drilling anywhere in the city," a U-Turn on the subject, since just last year she was reported as salivating at the prospect of royalty money from the wells. That could also be critical, because council members often defer to their colleagues when it comes to zoning matters within each other's districts. Of course, there's one way to prove her new-found conversion – sign-on to the internal memo that Council members Scott Griggs and Angela Hunt have circulated asking for five signatures to bring the matter up for an immediate vote by the full council.