Click on image to buy your tickets
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Downwinders at Risk is excited to announce that we won a $20,000 Ben & Jerry’s Foundation grant to help add high-tech, low-cost air quality sensors to our growing community air network powered by the expertise and hardware of the University of Texas at Dallas.
While we applied in the past for these prestigious national grants, this is the first time we’ve received one. It’s kind of a big deal for us.
Our winning grant proposed combined old-fashioned community organizing with the installation and maintenance of new solar-powered, wifi-connected Particulate Matter monitors. Real time information from those monitors will be accessible through a free app you can download on your phone. This information can be used to propel a variety of public health and public policy initiatives.
Depending on how much of a bulk discount we can get, the grant should be able to buy at least 20-30 additional more monitors to add to the 11 we’ve already ordered. Our plan is have all of these up and operating by this time next year.
Dallas’ Joppa neighborhood will get the first wave of these. We’re already finding locations for them in the community. We’re beginning discussion with West Dallas community leaders to bring at least as many or more monitors to that abused part of town as well.
Residential communities adjacent to or directly downwind of major PM pollution sources are the first priority, but we hope to keep expanding to make the network as comprehensive as possible. There are plans to begin assembling a community air network board or committee of some type to oversee the Network. Stay tuned.
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Better Bus Stop Design
Competition Finals
This Saturday May 4th
6 – 9 pm
Better Block Foundation HQ
700 West Davis
Look, Judge, Vote.
Every year the Dallas-based non-profit Better Block Foundation sponsors a design competition that challenges teams of engineers, architects, and creators to come up with more people-friendly ways for city residents to interact in an urban environment.
Downwinders at Risk is one of this year’s contest sponsors because it’s all about building a more people-friendly bus stop that’s also trying to minimize riders’ exposure to street level Particulate Matter pollution (PM.) Better Block was inspired to tackle this problem via its collaboration with Downwinders at Risk back in December on our Electric Glide Pub Crawl. This is a great example of how simply talking more about PM pollution can trigger a cascade of unintended beneficial effects.
Better Block gave 11 teams $250, four hours on their CNC router (basically, a giant printer for wood), and freedom to create whatever they want, as long as it’s a bus stop. Nine teams made 90 second videos on their designs you can see at the bottom of Better Block’s home page. They include a local couple, a Boston collective, Dallas’ own City Lab High School and UTA grads.
On Saturday those teams will actually build their prototypes at Better Block headquarters on West Davis. They’ll have judges determine a winner, but the public can also pick its favorite stop. Live Music and food trucks on site. Come and see the future while you wait for election returns.
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For the first time in its history, Downwinders at Risk is endorsing a candidate for Dallas Mayor. Scott Griggs has been a reliable ally to clean air advocates since he was first elected to the Dallas City Council in 2011. He led the successful fights opposing both the Trinity Toll Road and illegal gas drilling in Dallas parks. He’s the only candidate in the Mayor’s race with a proven track record of working on behalf of the Dallas environment and public health.
We’re listing the Dallas Green Alliance city council endorsements here as a kind of Green voter’s guide for those interested in other Big D races.
Finally, we sent what we think is the first questionnaire to DISD board candidates that focuses on electric buses and public health. Response was underwhelming with only two of nine candidates bothering to answer and we present their answers here. This lack of replies is probably an accurate reflection of the awareness level of the issues within the School District itself. But we’re determined to change that.
In many ways, this May 4th election is as important at themid-terms were last November in changing the balance of power.
Don’t sit it out.
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They had the PowerPoints. They had the hardcopies of the PowerPoints in Spanish. They had the Subject Boards. They had the Post It notes and purple dots. Lots of purple dots. They had staff. They had consultants. They had consultants hired by consultants.
All in all, Dallas City Hall had everything it thought it needed for its very first of six climate plan public engagement meetings…save the public itself.
Of the 23 people in attendance on April 29th at the Beckley Saner Rec Center, only three were members of “the public.” Staff and consultants outnumbered them a good five to six to one with the rest being members of the City Climate Plan’s handpicked “Stakeholders Group.”
And even that group was not a safe bet. One Stakeholder came armed with a flier complaining that the City had made “no promise your voice or ideas will actually be heard” while another wondered why there were being asked to attend. That was a easy question. To help fill seats.
Looks can be deceiving. There were only two members of the public at the first climate plan public meeting. Everyone else in this picture is staff or Stakeholders.
It wasn’t a very auspicious beginning to the public interface phase of the city’s climate plan process. It’ll be interesting to see how much the city gets billed by the professional PR experts to generate less than a Poker game’s worth of participants.
That result prompted a memo which produced wave upon wave of new social media reminders about the great opportunity to attend the next five meetings from everyone at City Hall including, council members, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings to DART board members. That push was successful in tripling the size of the April 30th and May 2nd meetings to nine members of the public. But there hasn’t been a meeting yet where the public made-up a majority of those in attendance.
Maybe word got out about the, er, circumscribed nature of the “engagement” meetings. You arrive to find the categories for responses have already been defined by staff on big white boards surrounding the room. There’s “Buildings and Energy,” “Food and Urban Agriculture,” “Parks and Open Spaces,” “Solid Waste,” “The Water We Use,” and “Transportation.”
These follow the format of the online survey the City is pimping.
Missing are topics like “Air Quality,” “Flood Control,” “Zoning” and “Industry.”
Under each of these broad subject titles are exactly six prompted policy options already proposed by staff. Not five, or seven, always six. And they’re far from comprehensive. For example, despite the worldwide wave of electric bus fleet electrification (Paris just ordered 800 e-buses), that policy option is nowhere to be found on the Transportation Board. If you’re aware of that trend you can record a write-in vote for it but it’s not presented to the general public as an obvious climate change policy, which it most certainly is.
Otherwise, your job is to place purple dots by the policy options already outlined for you by City Hall staff.
This is after you get a 30-minute Dallas staff PowerPoint primer on climate change that tells most people showing up for this meeting what they already know. There’s never any opportunity for a back and forth discussion among participants or true brainstorming as a group about local remedies. You watch the PowerPoint, pick among the already chosen policy options on the big boards, or write your own suggestions in, and then….go home. This is the staff’s definition of “public engagement.”
Setting the tone-deaf basis for these public engagement meetings was the much ballyhooed “Town Hall” at this year’s Fair Park’s EarthX event, which was really just one looooong lecture. There you could immerse yourself in 45 minutes of staff talking at you about how great staff and Dallas had been doing so far. Want to ask questions about the process? No time. It was less a “town hall” than a “city closet.”
A good fifth or fourth of the Town Hall audience were Stakeholders already chosen by the city staff to participate in a sort of overview of what’s going on. These are the same Chosen Few who were asked to please show up at the public engagement meetings. There is no public listing of who’s in the group – it’s not there on the City’s website or anywhere else, but it looks to include all the usual suspects we predicted it would plus a few others. There’s also not a meeting schedule for the group or an indication whether the public is allowed to attend.
In fact, the City’s climate plan website is kind of a hot mess, full of 404 error messages and empty white space where details of the process should be housed. A question on the site’s “forum” asking about Stakeholder membership has gone unanswered for 6 days now. It’s “blog” is empty of posts. Like the process itself, it seems mostly for show and to serve as a funnel to take the city’s survey.
Official Stakeholders are sometimes asked to identify themselves in the meetings, but never actually introduce themselves to the public. They’re supposed to be a combination of business, government, and environmental group representatives but since there’s no listing of them, it’s hard to tell how representative they really are. During their first group meeting, the guy from the Trump EPA reportedly looked around the room and commented how “white the group was.” Not a good sign.
Nor do they seem to have much opportunity for real input. Stakeholders complained at the April 29th meeting that either that they hadn’t been asked to provide suggestions for the City’s survey and meeting format or the ones they’d offered were ignored.
So far, they’ve mostly served the purpose of filling out the very thin public presence at each of the City’s official climate plan events and being a PR backstop for staff to proclaim how inclusive they’re being.
We hate to say we told you so, but we really did.
There are three more city “public engagement” meetings scheduled if you want to assess the process for yourself:
MONDAY, MAY 6
Churchill Rec Center
6906 Churchill Way
6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
TUESDAY, MAY 7
Audelia Rd Library
10045 Audelia Rd
6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
THURSDAY, MAY 9
Eastfield College- Pleasant Grove
802 S. Buckner Rd,
6:00 – 8:00 p.m
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After being rebuffed by its own city council on the idea, Dallas Staff Goes to NCTCOG to promote autocratic regional air monitoring network
You may remember that way back last September members of the Dallas City Council Quality of Life Committee approved a independent regional air network as laid out in a 20 minute presentation by the University of Texas at Dallas’s Dr. David Lary and Downwinders’s Director Jim Schermbeck. They approved it 7-0 with even Rickey Callahan voting for it.
Usually when things get voted that favorably out of a Committee, they head straight to the full Council and get approved. But moments after the Committee vote City Staff demanded it not be sent to the full Council until December.
Everyone who knew the backstory of how much the Dallas Office of Environmental Quality and (Rockefeller) Sustainability hated the idea of such a network knew what was really going on. And sure enough, here it is April and there’s still no movement on the one regional network idea officially endorsed by a City Council Committee.
But guess what? Staff isn’t just standing still. No, they’re on the move. They’re not only going out of their way to shoot down the air monitoring network approved by members of their own the city council; they’re going out of their way to ignore the Dallas City Council all together and take their case for a more autocratic, less public network to the North Central Texas Council of Governments, or “COG.”
Not satisfied with allowing the worst environmental justice crisis since West Dallas to explode into Shingle Mountain during his watch, OEQ&(R)S’s James McQuire is now out to make sure Dallas residents never get a chance to make decisions about monitoring air quality in their own backyard.
Why? Because as one Dallas staffer put it, “too much participation by the public can be a bad thing.” McQuire and Company want a monitoring network staff can control without citizen participation or accountability, in other words the Status Quo. But of course the status quo has failed spectacularly to address both the region’s old, and new air pollution problems. UTD and Downwinders are proposing a model with heavy doses of public participation and representation.
So last month, McQuire submitted a request to COG to ignore what his own Dallas city council committee had endorsed, and instead start from scratch to build a less-democratic, more staff-driven network that would be run by the same agency that for years denied the Midlothian cement plants had any impact on DFW air quality. He did this OVER THE OBJECTIONS of Quality of Life Chair Sandy Greyson, who has a healthy skepticism of CO’s abilities to look out for Dallas’ interests.
Like members of the Dallas Citizens Council who to make an end run around the City Council to get their own pet projects funded – see the VisitDallas headquarters slated for the new extension of Kyle Warren Park that is now being pimped by COG’s Director Michael Morris – McQuire is now circumventing his own Council and seeking relief from a “regional” agency that has historically only looked at air quality as an obstacle to highway funding.
So let that soak in – Dallas city staff is intentionally ignoring its elected city council and the only air monitoring approach that council is on record as supporting, and instead now backing its own more autocratic version which has never been voted on by council and in fact was rejected out of hand by council members when asked.
It would take a novel’s worth of history to make the full case of why the COG is a poor choice for any new serious clean air effort in DFW but let’s start with just fundamentals.
COG has never cared about air quality from a public health perspective. Ever. Any work it’s done or is doing now – including promotion of electric vehicles and other anti-smog measures – are aimed at keeping DFW out of “non-attainment status” with the Clean Air Act in order to keep getting precious federal highway money. As long as the dollars keep flowing, COG isn’t interested in taking on other kinds of air pollution besides smog, or doing research into how even routine levels of combustion pollution are harmful, or until this moment, shown any interest in doing the air monitoring other metro areas are now routinely engaged in.
This skewed perspective is reflected in the language of McQuire’s proposal to COG. It’s all about how this air monitoring network could be a boon to transportation planning and oh by the way, maybe be of some public health interest too.
Because it lacks a public health perspective and is run by a cabal of local governments and staff by way of committees 
within committees, COG has been every bit as pro-active about bad air as the Dallas OEQ(R)S under McQuire, which is to say not a bit.
Downwinders spent years trying to convince COG leadership that three giant cement plants located in close proximity to each other in Midlothian, upwind of Dallas, and in eyesight of I-20 did in fact contribute to DFW smog. Despite spewing the equivalent of half a million cars worth of air pollution every year and being sited just across the Dallas and Tarrant county lines, the COG folks just didn’t get it – until Downwinders had to petition the EPA to bring those cement plants into DFW’s official smog plan itself. Those cement plants now have to be included in regional anti-smog plants but COG didn’t do that, citizens did.
When COG was writing its anti-smog plans, there were only two sides represented in it regional Clean Air Steering Committee: city staff and business. It took Downwinders to organize a collective boycott of this process until environmental groups were given seats at the table. COG didn’t do that, citizens did.
When fracking came to DFW, COG was as reluctant to point the finger at this huge source of new air pollution as it had been with the Midlothian cement plants. Why? Because local governments were benefactors of the Barnett Shale “boom” in tax revenues and drilling leases. COG steered clear from even acknowledging gas drilling as a significant air pollution problem and aligned with industry to dismiss concerns. It was up to local residents living next to drilling pads and compressor stations to write new rules for everything the drilling boom brought with it. Dallas residents wrote the most protective gas drilling rules in the state. COG didn’t do that, citizens did.
And if it had really been interested in air quality and air quality monitoring, the COG has had years to develop the idea and pursue it. It did not. Instead it was left up to non-profits like Downwinders and UTD to design and build a new approach to air monitoring. For over three years now this effort as been in the works and in fact James McQuire and his staff sat in on the meetings where the UTD model that was endorsed by his own council was drafted. He raised no objections at the time. Instead he waited until after the effort was finished and begin to sabotage it immediately from behind closed doors. Despite his best efforts at scuttling the proposal, the UTD model made it to Greyson’s committee and won a 7-0 vote. COG and Dallas OEQ(R)S didn’t do that. Citizens did.
And so now two of the region’s two most citizen-hostile entities are trying to team up and let COG do for Dallas air quality monitoring what it’s done to Dallas transportation policy – make it top heavy, unresponsive, undemocratic and staff controlled.
Like Greyson, Dallas County Commissioner Theresa Daniel is four-square against the COG idea and in favor of more public participation. Representing the largest local government entity involved, her opposition may keep McQuire’s effort from taking off despite his best bureaucratic efforts. And there’s also the May elections in Dallas to consider. A new council could have a lot more confidence in overriding staff proposals than the current one. And maybe that accounts for McQuire’s proposal arriving at COG now as well.
What really frustrating is that if McQuire and staff hadn’t begun his campaign to undermine the one approach that was favored by most of the entities involved, the Dallas city council would have already approved the UTD plan and we’d be on our way to building a truly independent monitoring network. Until Dallas staff objected last fall, there was a consensus about how to proceed. He’s single-handedly gutted that consensus, stifled all progress, and kept DFW way behind the air monitoring curve.
We’ll keep you up to date on how far this COG proposal gets, but Downwinders in Denton, Plano and Fort Worth should be on alert that McQuire is trying to get those cities on board with the COG approach as well. Please contact your most citizen-friendly council members and ask them not to support, what is in essence a staff coup in Dallas.
In the meantime, here’s one more question you can pose to Dallas council candidates this election season: “Do you support staff’s attempt to override the will of the council and impose a less public -friendly COG-run air monitoring network on Dallas, or the homegrown version proposed by UTD that’s already received a 7-0 vote?”
If this is going to get done right, citizens will have to do it.
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After a year of excuses, a determined group of women and their supporters shamed the City into finally taking action to close down the worst environmental health and justice crisis in Dallas.
When the collapse came, it came quickly.
Halfway through their Wednesday March 20th news conference giving authorities an ultimatum to shut down “Shingle Mountain” or face protests and possible civil disobedience, members of the freshly minted Southern Sector Rising Campaign for Environmental Justice learned the City of Dallas was reversing course and moving to close Blue Star’s year-old asphalt hell.
Only a week before, the official party line from City Hall was that the self-described “recycler” had all the permits it needed. Staff said critics’ description of Blue Star’s operation as an illegal dumping ground was wrong. It had “a right to be there.”
Now, on Wednesday….well, now circumstances had changed. The political circumstances that is.
Now there was a new coalition of frustrated Southern Dallas residents and Old School Icons like Peter Johnson, Luis Sepulveda and John Fullenwider staging an emotionally-charged news conference with chants of “Shame on Dallas” ringing loudly up and down the corridors of City Hall. Now there was a publicly-leaked report with incriminating evidence of official wrongdoing. Now there were swarms of cameras and reporters hanging on the every word of a middle-aged, middle-class, horse-loving DART employee who had been ignored for such a long time.
Three Generations of Dallas Environmental Justice Advocates: John Fullenwider, Luis Sepulveda and Marsha Jackson
Led by Marsha Jackson and her Choate Steet neighbors, Temeckia Durrough and Miriam Fields of the Joppa Freedman Town Association and Olinka Green from the Highland Hills Community Action Committee, with Stephanie Timko as media czarina, the Southern Sector Rising Campaign for Environmental Justice did more than just win a huge victory for an much-abused part of Dallas. It gave Southern Dallas residents a new model for effectively changing their circumstances.
An ad-hoc group that hadn’t even existed in February had the temerity to put City Hall on trial in its own lobby for Big D’s most spectacular municipal act of environmental racism in years. And it wasn’t even a fair fight.
An eye-opening state inspector’s report Downwinders sent to reporters a few days before the news conference officially documented permit violations and red flags too large to defend. Although Blue Star had promised the state in April 2018 it wouldn’t store more than 260 tons of waste at its site, it was already storing 60,000 tons in December. Blue Star was supposed to have a Fire Protection Plan. It didn’t. Blue Star was supposed to have adequate funds to close and clean up its site. It didn’t. Blue Star was supposed to randomly test incoming loads of shingles for asbestos. It didn’t.
This is how bad it was: Blue Star’s mocking of the law was too much even for Gregg Abbott’s Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Or the City of Dallas.
So long before the last speaker spoke in the Flag Room, news came that the City had pulled the Certificate of Occupancy for the largest of the two Blue Star tracts, something it had previously said wasn’t possible. Then it announced it was taking the company to court the next day to get an emergency Temporary Restraining Order to close Blue Star down.
That City staff could so shamelessly pull off such a dramatic flip flop over a matter of a few hours is testimony to both the fury fueling the Campaign, and the overwhelming evidence that Blue Star and its government enablers had allowed a full-blown illegal dump to grow… and grow…and grow. The only thing missing from the turnaround was an apology and acknowledgement to the women that had forced City Hall’s hand.
In Thursday’s hearing on the Restraining Order, the City of Dallas cited a number of missing municipal and state permits it now said Blue Star needed, including a Special Use Permit, an air quality permit, and a permit for storage in the flood plain – none of which the City had demanded when Blue Star had opened for business a year earlier. Despite the lack of these permits the City was now saying were essential, it had kept telling reporters, Council Members, and residents alike that Blue Star was a legal business right up until the time of the news conference.
It wasn’t. Ever. But it took a group of frustrated Southern Dallas residents to expose that lie.
Of course in the hearing itself the heretofore lack of official city concern about these lacking permits was perturbing in the extreme for the attorney representing Blue Star, who said City Hall had already signed-off on its operations.
“The City told my client there were NO air quality problems,“ he protested to the judge. That was undoubtedly a true statement. But that conclusion was rendered before a brigade of angry residents showed up at City Hall demanding Dallas enforce the law.
Now, presto-chango, the City was emerging out of its dilapidated telephone booth with its moldy Toxic Avenger costume on and finding plenty of air quality problems, albeit in a anecdotal, non-quantifiable, way.
Because despite being “very concerned” about air pollution from Blue Star, the City of Dallas never monitored air quality from the facility before it got to court. Neither did the state. Only Downwinders at Risk, plugging-in one of our own portable PM monitors on the top of Marsha Jackson’s window unit for days at a time, captured any credible scientific evidence of air pollution harms.
Those results were released at the March 20th news conference and showed levels of Particulate Matter pollution that UNT’s Dr. Tate Barrett concluded “poses a significant health risk to the residents.”
But in court, the City didn’t even mention those EPA-calibrated results.
For the first time in memory it was the regulators using only their senses to call for a crackdown – what they saw and heard and smelled at Blue Star’s site – and citizens showing up with Real Science.
Lacking any monitoring data of their own, Dallas city attorneys sounded like countless over-matched and overwhelmed residents from past TCEQ hearings, pleading with the judge to accept their word that the air pollution was so darn obvious…if not directly quantifiable because, well, no, we didn’t actually do any monitoring. We don’t know how to do that.
A layer of asphalt dust coated a Downwinders air quality monitor while it was recording levels of PM pollution at Marsha Jackson’s house in early March
This lack of any data to back up its air pollution claims was one of the most embarrassing parts of the hearing for the City. One wonders when James McQuire and his Office Of Environmental Quality & (Rockefeller) Sustainability’s stubborn refusal to buy its own air monitors will eventually cost the City (and its residents) in court.
But every time the City’s case looked in trouble, Blue Star’s attorney dug a deeper hole. He wanted the judge to know “shingles make really good fill” and that the spring-fed creek that ran through the company’s site was merely “a drainage ditch” and asking, after all judge, what is the true and right definition of “combustible” under Texas law?
Judge: “It means catch fire.”
Everyone but the Blue Star attorney chuckled.
After 45 minutes, Judge Gina Slaughter had heard enough and ruled in favor of the Restraining order. It took effect March 22nd and runs until Midnight on April 3rd.
Before that happens, an 11 am Wednesday morning hearing will be held in the same courtroom to decide whether to extend the Temporary Order into a more permanent one. Word is that Blue Star was caught doing business during the last week when it wasn’t supposed to be on site at all. If true, it seems unlikely Blue Star will be granted a reprieve, despite the optimism displayed on the company’s website. “We fully expect to be open on Thursday April 4th, 2019″ it proclaims.
Not if Marsha Jackson, her friends in the Southern Sector Rising Campaign, and now their reluctant ally, The City of Dallas, get their way.
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Dallas Goes After Shingle M… by on Scribd
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12 Noon, Wednesday March 20th
Dallas City Hall Flag Room 6th Floor
JOIN US FOR THE PUBLIC LAUNCH OF THE
SOUTHERN SECTOR RISING
CAMPAIGN FOR
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Downwinders at Risk has joined with the the Joppa Freedman’s Association, Neighbors United/Vecino Unidos, the Highland Hills Community Action Committee, Sierra Club/BeyondCoal, Pax Christi Dallas, and other Dallas groups in initiating a campaign aimed at uniting residents who live along and south of the Trinity River, and their allies to say “enough is enough.”
The Southern Sector Rising Campaign for Environmental Justice seeks to end decades of racist zoning forcing industrial polluters into predominantly Black and Brown residential neighborhoods and more equitably distribute Dallas’ pollution burdens.
The Campaign’s First Target
SHINGLE MOUNTAIN
The most serious on-going environmental justice crisis in Dallas –
The Blue Star asphalt shingle sham recycling operation,
aka, “Shingle Mountain” aka “the Asphalt Alps.”
What makes this situation such a crisis?
Volume – thousands of tons of waste are accumulating with new loads arriving daily. The mountain is now4-5 stories tall.
Proximity – fine dust spewed and stored across the backyard fences of families with kids
Toxicity – Asphalt shingle waste is chock full of carcinogens
Help us apply more public pressure.
The Campaign’s First Action:
Public Launch @ DALLAS CITY HALL
WEDNESDAY MARCH 20th
12 NOON
FLAG ROOM 6th FLOOR
JOIN US AS WE PROPOSE A PRO-ACTIVE
DALLAS ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AGENDA
On March 20th, campaign representatives will be announcing a variety of tactics the campaign will be using to win the closure of Blue Star. But they’ll also be announcing four other goals that can help all Southern Sector:
1. The City of Dallas must immediately close the Blue Star Asphalt operation and begin to clean up the mess the company has created along the South Central corridor.
2. The City must include an equity provision in the City’s new Economic Development Policy prohibiting concentrations of polluters/pollution in the same neighborhoods.
3. The City must pass a moratorium on any new Industrial permits south of the Trinity River until that new industrial equity policy is in place.
4. The City must restore the City’s Environmental Health Commission to allow for a more resident-friendly process for hearing environmental nuisance and health problems.
5. The City must create a Joppa Environmental Preservation District prohibiting any new industrial permits in that historic Dallas Freedman’s community, phasing-out of existing industrial zoning there, and better protecting residents from pollution exposure.
March 20th’s launch at City Hall will begin with a video by local filmmaker Rick Baraff examining the personal toll Blue Star’s operations have had on the families who live around it. We’ll hear from Marsha Jackson, Biance Morales and members of her family as well as some very special guests.
It’s expected that at least one lawsuit, and maybe others, will be announced on March 20th on behalf of Ms. Jackson and the Morales’.
Campaign representatives will also be submitting language for specific ordinances the Dallas City Council to pass to implement the five campaign goals, announcing weekly pickets and a warning to the City that if Blue Star isn’t shut down by Earth Day, Monday April 22nd, we’ll be attempting to blockade new trucks of shingles from being dumped.
The Campaign’s First Protest
Picket Line at the front gate of Blue Star
12 noon to 2 pm, Saturday March 23rd
9527 S. CENTRAL EXPRESSWAY
VOTE WITH YOUR FEET TO HELP THIS NEIGHBORHOOD
IN ITS TIME OF CRISIS
This first protest at Blue Star will reflect Ms. Marsha Jackson’s deep ties to the Southern Dallas trail riding community. We’ll have a check-in tent with water, Rules of the Road and the latest information. We can supply some signs and help you create your own. The important thing is to show-up and support the effort to clean-up this horrible mess and the messes that decades of racist zoning have produced all over the Southern Sector.
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Marsha Jackson thought she’d found relief when Dallas Morning News columnist Robert Wilonsky wrote about the grotesque environmental disaster being caused by the Blue Star asphalt operation in mid-December..the first time.
After complaining almost a year to the City of Dallas, the State of Texas, and the EPA without any action taken, Ms Jackson saw Wilsonky’s column set-off a flurry of official concern about this inept and dangerous operation destroying acres of tree-covered Southern Dallas and Ms. Jackson’s home of 25 years.
That’ll happen when the city’s most read reporter informs you for the first time in passing about a situation it’s your job to already know about.
But that initial knee-jerk response left Blue Star still open for business, and without a clean-up. So Wilonsky wrote another column. Some more official action ensued. The City got a Temporary Restraining Order….that expired after a week. The authorities made Blue Star push their 4-5 story high mountains of used shingles back away from a small creek running through it’s property so the waterway would be better protected. Ms. Jackson? Not so much.
In fact, Blue Star has not been cited with even one nuisance, air pollution, or public health violation by the City of Dallas since it began building its special version of Hell a little more than a year ago. Officially, the city has shown zero concern for the human toll being taken by Blue Star’s pollution.
Last month Wilsosky wrote his third column stating what many of us feel when we see the operation in person: “This is insane.” He got Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax on the record saying Ms. Jackson’s plight was the result of bad zoning, the kind that allows polluters to only set-up shop south of Dallas’ historic dividing line Trinity River. But no action was taken to change that zoning and Blue Star keeps right on accepting truckloads of old shingles and keeps grinding them up in the open-air using the industrial equivalent of giant wood chippers, spewing fiberglass, plastic and maybe asbestos into Ms. Jackson’s property and neighborhood.
Blue Star keeps operating even though the City of Dallas says the business didn’t have a Certificate of Occupancy when they opened, despite evidence current city zoning doesn’t allow what they’re doing on the property they’re doing it on, and despite evidence they don’t have all the environmental paperwork they need for the despoiling taking place.
Despite his best efforts to do the job the City and State are supposed to be doing, Wilonsky’s words just haven’t been enough to stop the obscene environmental and public health problems being caused daily by Blue Star.
So maybe it’s time to do this ourselves.
Maybe it’s time to file some lawsuits of our own, as citizens. There’s now plenty of documentation to prove the case of destruction, property rights takings, and personal and public health problems. Are there lawyers working in the public interest who could pursue these on behalf of Ms. Jackson and her neighbors? Yes there are. There are ones who can sue for regulatory relief and others who sue for “personal damages” caused by this kind of reckless disregard. These “toxic tort” attorneys would do well to target the deep pockets of the City of Dallas and the State of Texas as well as the modest holdings of Blue Star. Often the way to permanently put a stop to this kind of thing is to make the responsible parities pay such a high price that they’re never even tempted to try it again.
Maybe it’s time for us to begin amortization proceedings against Blue Star. This is the process that closed the RSR lead smelter in West Dallas in the 1980’s. A city can change the zoning for a piece of property to something that clearly does not allow the current activity to take place on that property. In order to be fair, the law allows the current users to operate until they get their investment in the property back and then they have to close-shop and move. Once you see the Blue Star property, you’ll understand that it’ll take about a day and a half for the company to get back its “investment.” In fact, because of all the violations of law and probable lawsuits, Blue Star is probably already close to being in the red.
Amortization proceedings can be initiated by the City Council OR citizens themselves. Here’s a description from the Dallas City Code using the City’s 15-member, council-appointed Board of Adjustments:
§ 51A-4.704. Nonconforming Uses And Structures.
The city council may request that the board of adjustment consider establishing a compliance date for a nonconforming use. In addition, any person who resides or owns real property in the city may request that the board consider establishing a compliance date for a nonconforming use. Upon receiving such a request, the board shall hold a public hearing to determine whether continued operation of the nonconforming use will have an adverse effect on nearby properties. If, based on the evidence presented at the public hearing, the board determines that continued operation of the use will have an adverse effect on nearby properties, it shall proceed to establish a compliance date for the nonconforming use; otherwise, it shall not.
Ms. Jackson owns her house. So maybe it’s time we help her petition the Board of Adjustments to begin kicking Blue Star out of Southern Dallas ourselves. If the Council wants to do its job and join in, that w
ould be great. But we don’t need them to start the ball rolling.
Maybe it’s time we protested. Not just on behalf of Ms. Jackson, but the ancient, racist underlying cause of this awful situation and so many more south of the Trinity River. Everyone who lives in the “Southern Sector” is a current or potential Marsha Jackson. We’ve got to begin to change the entire zoning map of the city to get rid of the kind of outrages even the City Manager acknowledges are a problem. We need to demonstrate not just against Blue Star, but for improvement across the board, for real progress on the City’s own Master Plan for South Central that aims to “de-industrialize” the area – not make it into a wasteland. We need a platform for progress that address the Southern Sector as a whole instead of continuing to play whack-a-polluter every few months at a different location.
Since August, T
he Let Joppa Breathe Alliance has been meeting to try and draft such a platform as part of its mission. It’s been recruiting allies south and north of the river. It’s very near to making an announcement about that platform and the means it will begin to pursue it. This platform will be the first attempt to articulate specific City of Dallas environmental justice policy changes in the City’s history. It represents a tectonic shift in responding to age-old discrimination that’s still leaving a huge dusty coal-like legacy in Southern Dallas. We’re tired of playing defense. Its time we set the agenda.
Dallas City Hall has failed Ms. Jackson and her neighbors. It’s failed Joppa. It’s failed Cadillac Heights, and Highland Hills and Fruitdale, and West Dallas. Over and over again. To win progress, something more must be done. When the call comes for that something more, how will you respond?
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Also expected to quiz School Board candidates on electric buses
Citing his role in stopping illegal gas drilling in Dallas, opposition to the Trinity River toll road road, and healthy skepticism of City Hall bureaucracy, the “c4” board of Downwinders at Risk voted to endorse Scott Griggs for Dallas Mayor at its February meeting.
“No one else running for Mayor has done as much to protect Dallas residents from very bad ideas, often against very big odds, than Scott Griggs” said Downwinders at Risk Director Jim Schermbeck. “No other candidate even has a track record of environmental accomplishments, much less one that includes slaying Goliaths like “done deal” gas drilling or the zombie toll road. If you want to be sure Dallas will be Greener in deed as well as rhetoric, there’s really only one choice this time.”
Griggs was first elected to the Dallas City Council in May 2011 representing then-District 3 including West Dallas, Oak Cliff, and Mountain Creek neighborhoods. After redistricting in 2013, Griggs was reelected to represent residents of North Oak Cliff in the redrawn District 1. He was reelected again in 2015 and 2017. In his first term Scott was voted as the 2012 Best Politician by D Magazine and the Dallas Observer. He’s known as a studious council member who’s often more prepared to talk about city policy than city staff.
Griggs was a well-received special guest speaker at Downwinders’ 1-Day University this last December, where he brought his daughter Catalina along on their way to a dance recital.
Along with the mayoral endorsement, the c4 board also voted to send a questionnaire to Dallas Independent School District board candidates asking about their support for school bus fleet electrification. It’s believed to be the first time bus electrification has shown up as an issue in a DISD election.
While non-profit c3 boards must devote the majority of their time and money to educational efforts, c4 boards are allowed wide latitude in advocating, lobbying and contributing to campaigns. Like many non-profits Downwinders at Risk has both.
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Despite supporters’ claims that the new $500,000 Dallas Climate “Action” Plan would have lots of opportunities for public participation, the decision-making apparatus drafting the plan puts all the decision-making power in the hands of City staff and its hired consultants.
Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss.
Oh, they’ll be countless PowerPoint presentations and “brain storming” sessions around the city over the next year in meetings sponsored by City Hall and neighborhood associations, but those will have exactly zero official standing in the final plan. Suggestions and comments will be harvested but they don’t have to be included – not even if they’re extremely popular in all those meetings.
Those community meetings are the foundation for the process AECOM consultants outlined at the City’s Climate Symposium on February 4th. They’re at the very bottom of the plan’s purported decision-making pyramid. This MO is familiar to anyone dealing with Dallas City Hall in the recent past: “We’re happy to give you all the well-publicized public meetings you want. Just don’t ask us to let the public in the room when the actual decisions are being made.”
To maintain the illusion of someone other than city staff and consultants being involved, there’s a 20 member “Business and Advocacy Working Group, or “BAWG” (pronounced like the noun describing the soft ground formed by decaying plants, but also like the British slang term for a toilet, as in “Do you have any Bog/BAWG paper? We ran out.” Either metaphor is probably apt here.)
This august body will be, let’s see, what was the very civilized term used by the AECOM consultant at the Symposium? “Curated,” that’s it. The BAWG members will be “curated” by city staff and AECOM. We thought that was such a precious term for “hand-picked by the Powers-That-Be.”
So City Hall and AECOM will hand pick the 20 members of this working group, at least half of whom will be Dallas “Bidness” folk. That leaves 10 or less slots for “advocates” like the Texas Tree Foundation, the Texas Nature Conservancy, and other City Hall friendly-groups who are allies or have the blessing of Dallas (Rockefeller) “Resilency” Czarina Theresa O’Donnell. Of course O’Donnell proved her green bone fides earlier this decade when she passionately defended the idea of drilling for gas in Dallas public parks.
Despite other cities singling-out “equity” concerns for their own tracks, there’s absolutely official zero intent in the Dallas Office of Environmental Quality and (Rockefeller) Sustainability to do so here. Not even after going around the last six months proclaiming how concerned City Hall was about black kids with asthma. Local environmental justice advocates approached the OEQ(R)S last month with the idea of establishing an “equity working group” as part of the public participation process. They were told the City wasn’t interested.
Remaining remarkably consistent with their current management philosophy city staff dismissed the idea that more Dallas residents being involved in the planning process was a good thing. When the EJ groups brought up the recently-completed San Antonio plan which established not only a business-environmentalist steering committee but working groups on “Energy and Buildings,” “Transportation and Land Use,” “Solid Waste Resources, ” Water and Natural Resources,” and “Equity,” staff responded that San Antonio City Hall had warned them to avoid all that democracy. “There were too many people involved down there” was the reply, which will surely come as a surprise to the 86 San Antonio activists who participated.
Despite all this official gate-keeping surrounding the Climate Plan’s BAWG/BOG membership in Dallas, the actual on-the-paper influence of this curated working group is questionable since it only meets 3 times over the course of the year long drafting process. For most of those 12 months this “working group” is unemployed.
Which brings us to the real decision-makers at the top of the pyramid, the “Environmental Planning Task Force, or “EPTF.” Gesundheit!
Comprised exclusively of city staffers and consultants, this Task Force will oversee the day-to-day machinations of the climate plan, and most importantly what recommendations to include, or not, and what timelines are “realistic” vs “not practical.” While there’s a patina of public participation in its “listening tours” the final arbiters of Dallas’ climate plan remain completely removed from public transparency, accountability and meaningful participation.
It didn’t have to be this way, at least not without a fight.
The same mainstream green groups that signed-off on City Hall using Dallas’ moribund plastic bag fund to pay for this plan could have demanded authentic public participation in return for their support. They could have asked for Southern Sector groups to have their fair share of representation at the table. They could have requested multiple resident-staffed working groups like San Antonio. They could have asked for real oversight and decision-making. Dallas City Hall needed them and their lobbying last August during the budget town hall meetings, but they gave up their leverage without asking for anything in return (that we know about anyway). This current public participation plan that really isn’t, is the result.
As we noted in our last post about this subject, perhaps the only good thing about this process is that’s it gives Dallas residents a chance to upset the cart with their own ideas about how a climate plan for the city should be assembled. There’s already rumblings about a citizens’ planning process to shadow the staff’s version and provide an honest measuring stick for it. That would be a good idea. Unlike city staff, Downwinders believes the more people in the room, the better the decisions being made.
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The most worthwhile thing that might emerge from the City’s plan is a new challenge from citizens to Business-as-Usual
Take a Deep Dive into How Dallas City Environmental Policy is Being Directed from… New York City?
Over at the Belo Mansion this morning, the City of Dallas’ Office of Environmental Quality and (Rockefeller) Sustainability is hosting a splashy PR roll-out of its council-approved “Climate Action Plan.” There’s a well-known climate scientist as luncheon headliner, and break-out sessions, and lots of food. It’s been sold out for weeks.
What there probably won’t be is an accurate recounting of how the plan came to be and an honest assessment of its severe limitations.
When the Council was voting on the plan last month City Staff were quick to point to rising public clamor over the need for this report. OEQ(R)S Director James McQuire told a reporter that what really made the Plan happen was “A change in viewpoint by Council, alignment of a department that brings together all the environmental functions of the City…and then there’s the voices of the citizens that caused this thing to get funded and started right away. I got lots of phone calls from people [City officials] saying, We had more folks come and talk about climate change planning at our budget town hall.”
And of course that scenario fits right in with the responsive, citizen-friendly customer service Dallas residents have come to expect from City Hall staff, right?
Take firm hold of those pearls and get the smelling salts ready because as it turns out, the truth is much more cynical. 
In fact, the plan was a foregone conclusion from the moment the City received a Rockefeller Foundation “Resilient Cities” grant in 2014. Municipal recipients of these grants are expected to produce such a plan. A plan exactly like the one passed by the Council in January had already been rubber stamped by an under-the-radar, Staff-selected “Community Advisory Committee” headed-up by none other than current Dallas Mayoral candidate Regina Montoya and including other Mayoral candidate Michael Solis organized three years earlier. That committee – with no one from local environmental groups as members, much less leaders – released their report last June.
As it turns out, there was a years-in-the-making, Staff-scripted path to a climate plan long before before the public clamor supposedly was just too much for the City Staff to ignore.
One obstacle remained to reaching the end of that path: how to pay the high costs of this consultant-driven plan. OEQ(R)S’s budget wasn’t large enough to absorb the $500,000 it had cost other cities like San Antonio to do the same kind of plan. Staff couldn’t bring itself to ask the Council to wring money for such an item out of the general budget. Not with Fire and Police pay so low, and pot-holed streets and such. So where could it get a cool half million for its needed pet project?
The city’s dormant plastic bag fund of over a million bucks, that’s where. Money collected from the brief period Dallas was able to charge for plastic bag use before the Council repealed the fee under pressure from Austin was still sitting around, dedicated for use for “environmental projects.” But that money had been there since 2015, and despite calls from groups and citizens for new environmental initiatives of all kinds at the city level, it had not been touched, or even mentioned by City Hall staff as a resource that could be tapped to fund those initiatives.
Until now.
With those other projects asking for money City Staff knew they wouldn’t be able to use the bag fund for their own grant-fulfilling use without a public fight. They needed a public groundswell of support to say, “By-God use that plastic bag money to fulfill the requirements of your Rockefeller grant!” It doesn’t quite have the ring of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” but whatever.
They got a mostly white middle-class version of that by calling on Dallas’ mainline green groups that all have national climate change agendas to lobby for the bag money at the August 2018 budget town hall meetings. These groups bombarded their members with messages to get out and tell their city council representatives the city had to finally take action on climate change. A significant number of them complied. This is the staff-engineered public clamor OEQ(R)S’s McQuire is alluding to in his quote above.
How many of those who showed-up and did the staff’s lobbying for them actually knew how inconsequential the report would be is unknown. Lost in the call for action was any real discussion of what the report would do – and more importantly for residents who want tangible local climate action measures now – what it won’t do.
There was no grassroots consensus, or even discussion, on what priorities that “found” dedicated environmental money could or should be addressing in Dallas, and whether this climate plan was its best use. There was no discussion about what concessions the broader Dallas environmental community could win from the city in return for its support.
City Staff had a self-interest in checking this box for the Rockefellers, and the national mainline groups had a self-interest in justifying their own grants. That’s how Dallas’ environmental policies ended up being decided from the East Coast, instead of you know, Dallas.
THE PLANNING PROCESS: RIGGED FROM THE BEGINNING
Our story begins way back in 2014 when Dallas City Hall’s newly-named chief “Resilience” officer, Theresa O’Donnell began recruiting members to join a special Resilience Report project. Dallas had just won a Rockefeller Foundation “Resilient City” grant that paid for her new job title. It’s the same eager-to-please reason OEQ became an awkwardly-named OEQ(R)S.
Old-timers will recognize the O’Donnell name from her role in the secret deal giving Trinity East gas drilling rights to Dallas parks and floodplains without the public, or council’s knowledge. Public disclosure of that deal sent City Manager Mary Suhm packing but Suhm minions remained in charge. O’Donnell is a Major Minion. Yes, that’s right. Dallas’ very first “Chief Resiliency Officer” advocated gas drilling in parks and floodplains against overwhelming citizen opposition.
Apparently no lessons were learned by O’Donnell from that episode except maybe to keep things more hidden from public scrutiny.
Dallas’ Resiliency Report 2014-2018
Within a year of the gas drilling debacle, she was hand-picking a committee that would ratify the “Resiliency” goals staff had already identified. O’Donnell applied a light coating of the world famous Dallas-brand Patina of Public Participation – giving the appearance without providing the real thing.
Heading up this Dallas Resilience Report effort was….Theresa O’Donnell, followed by two of O’Donnell’s employees, followed by four Muckity-Mucks from the Rockefeller Foundation, followed by “strategy partner”AECOMM, followed by 15 Dallas City Hall departments, followed by a “Steering Committee” composed of four other O’Donnell/City Hall employees, including OEQ(R)S Director James McQuire and finally someone seemingly from outside of City government – Dr. S. Marshal Isaacs, UT Southwestern Medical Center – except he’s also a city employee because among other duties he’s medical director for Dallas Fire-Rescue.
You have to make your way through 28 names before you get to any mention of Dallas citizens that have no connection to city government or the Rockefellers. That pretty much tells you who’s running the show. But just to make it crystal clear the title of the next grouping of names in the Dallas Resiliency Report is: “Community Advisory Council.” Got that? Here they are, all selected by Theresa O Donnell:
Regina Montoya, Mayor’s Task Force on Poverty (Chair)
Timothy M. Bray, Ph.D., UTD, Institute for Urban Policy Research
Richie Butler, St. Paul United Methodist Church
Teresa Jackson, Sharing Life
Mirjam Kirk, Family Gateway
Cyndy Lutz, Dallas Area Habitat for Humanity
Leonor Marquez, Los Barrios Unidos Community Clinic
Miguel Solis, Dallas Independent School District
Susan Hoff, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas
Elizabeth Sobel Blum, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Dr. Baranda Fermin, Faith in Texas
Michelle Kinder, Momentous Institute
Duane Dankesreiter, Dallas Regional Chamber
Eva Szalkai Csaky, Ph.D., MSF, SMU Hunt Institute
Michael Gagne, appointed by DISD Board President
Cortney Nicolato, The Senior Source
Javier E. Olguin, Ph.D., Dallas County Community College District
Can you spot any Dallas environmentalists or grassroots groups of any kind? Neither can we. All the non-profit organizations are the traditional faith-based ones Dallas City Hall uses as their go-to pool of “community representatives.” Safe, non-confrontational, and unlikely to buck staff. Also unlikely to know a lot about the local case fo
r climate change action.
Whether Ms. Montoya, Mr. Solis and the other members of this Committee knew they were being used by Staff to pass their already-agreed upon agenda or just went along for the ride is unknown. Neither choice inspires confidence in her or Mr. Solis’ leadership abilities.
Next comes a gaggle of participants with the generic title of “Community Engagement,” which if you’ve seen Dallas City Hall in action probably means there were one or two well-catered lunch meetings of O”Donnell invitees who gathered to “Brainstorm” possible strategies over some excellent chicken and Brussel Sprouts..and then never saw staff again. Nevertheless, these cattle calls do result in excellent fodder for the Appendix in the report. Look, there are so many Engagers!
American Heart Association
American Institute of Architects
American Planning Association
AT&T
Atmos Energy
Brunk Government Relations Services
Building Community Resilience
Childcare Group
Children’s Health
Cities for Action
Cities for Citizenship
City University of New York Institute for State and Local Governance
Citymart
City Square
Commit Dallas
Communities Foundation of Texas
Community Council of Greater Dallas
Dallas Area Rapid Transit
Dallas Citizens Council
Dallas County
Dallas County Community College District
Dallas County Health and Human Services
Dallas County Medical Society
Dallas Faces Race
Dallas Housing Authority
Dallas Independent School District
Dallas Innovation Alliance
Dallas Regional Chamber
Dallas Women’s Foundation
Dallas Youth Commission
Dallas Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation
Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council
Downtown Dallas, Inc.
Earth Day Texas
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Friendship-West Baptist Church
Greater Dallas Planning Council
Habitat for Humanity
Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab
Health and Wellness Alliance for Children
Heritage Oak Cliff
Lyda Hill Foundation
Mayor’s LGBT Task Force
Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness
Mayor’s Task Force on Poverty
Milken Institute School of Public Health
National Association of City and County Health Officials
Neighbor Up
New Americans Campaign
New American Economy
North Central Texas Council of Governments
North Central Texas Regional Emergency Managers Group
North Central Texas Trauma Regional Advisory Council
North Texas Commission
North Texas Fair Housing Center
North Texas Food Bank
North Texas Tollway Authority
Oak Cliff Chamber of Commerce
Oncor Electric
Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation
Parkland Health and Hospital System
Paul Quinn College
Regional Transportation Council
Revitalize South Dallas Coalition
Richardson Independent School District
San Diego State University National Center for Urban School Transformation
SMU Embrey Human Rights Program
SMU Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity
Society of American Military Engineers
Southern Methodist University
Southfair Community Development Corporation
Texas A&M AgriLife Research
Texas Department of Transportation
Texas Trees Foundation
Texas Workforce Solutions of Greater Dallas
The Institute for Urban Policy Research at University of Texas at Dallas
The Nature Conservancy
The Senior Source
Toyota Mobility Foundation
Trinity Park Conservancy
Trust for Public Land
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
U.S. Green Building Council Texas Chapter
United Way of Metropolitan Dallas
University of North Texas
University of Texas at Arlington
University of Texas at Austin
UTA Center for Transportation Equity, Decisions & Dollars
Welcoming America
Welcoming Plan Task Force
Remember, these are just folks invited to brainstorming sessions, not the precious “Advisory Committee.” But not even one local professional or community environmentalist or group is included. Not even the mainline ones Staff would later use to sell the recommendation for a climate action plan to the Council. And certainly not the ones that had just helped defeat the gas drilling deals O”Donnell had advocated.
And no, EDX, the Green Buildings Council, Texas Trees Foundation, and The Nature Conservancy don’t count. EDX is a network not an advocacy group. Green Building Councils are great but those architects aren’t representing any Dallas neighborhoods, and again, not an advocacy group. The national and Austin conservation-focused groups aren’t based in Dallas or do much, if any work in neighborhoods here. One thing they do have in common is that they’re all among Theresa O’Donnell’s circle of friends in other city projects, providing her with a light green patina without having to have the real thing.
It’s really not that hard to put together a list of environmental and citizens group doing climate change work on the ground in Dallas. They’re aren’t that many, and unlike a lot of the names on that long Resiliency Report list, people have actually heard of them.
BTW, at the same time O’Donnell was tapping her nature-loving friends at the Nature Conservancy for this “engagement’ she was also lining them up for the dubious “Breathe Easy” nine school air monitoring project the city is pushing as its one and only “air monitoring project.” No public debate on whether that was the best project, no call for RFPs among the Dallas environmental scene. Just a decision made on behalf of her friends in her office.
Under the mirage of manufactured consent, O’Donnell’s Resiliency Report was spit out in June of last year. It has a myriad of lofty goals including # 7: “Promote environmental sustainability to improve public health and alleviate adverse environmental conditions.”
But if like us, your mind is racing to all the things Dallas City Hall could be doing to meet that goal when you first hear it, you’ll be disappointed at the very low bar the report sets. Maybe if they’d had someone who knew abut the current “adverse environmental conditions” in the city it would have helped.
Recommendation #1. “Work with The Nature Conservancy, Dallas ISD, and a health partner to conduct an air quality study that assesses the impact of poor air quality on childhood asthma and asthma-related absenteeism. Office of Environmental Quality, The Nature Conservancy, and Dallas ISD, Fall 2018.”
Nobody from outside the O’Donnell bubble is involved. The projects, down to the specific organizations, have already been decided by staff. Like clockwork this project hit the Council in the fall of 2018 and is underway.
We’re sure this project sounded like a splendid idea to everyone on the Advisory Committee and among the (barely) Engaged. Unbeknownst to them there were other options available to Dallas for more widespread and useful air monitoring research but nobody got to hear those because they were being sponsored by what staff described as “biased groups,” i.e. grassroots groups like Downwnders at Risk who’ve been hostile to the staff over its advocacy of pollution permits in West and South Dallas. Only those groups who are in agreement with City Hall staff are allowed for consideration in formulating city policies. Much tidier that way.
Recommendation #2. “Work with The Nature Conservancy, Trust for Public Land, and Texas A&M AgriLife Research to compile existing flooding and drainage analyses across the City into a comprehensive map to identify gaps and nature-based solutions to reduce flooding.”
See a pattern? But you’re really here for this:
Recommendation 3. “Conduct a greenhouse gas emissions inventory to identify largest emissions sources, set reduction goals, and develop innovative, market-driven approaches to improve air quality and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Spring 2018.”
A Dallas climate plan was so far along inside City Hall by last spring that O’Donnell’s Resiliency Report in June of 2018 could confidently report it as a done deal. (And BTW, that was it. They could only think of three ways to “Promote environmental sustainability to improve public health and alleviate adverse environmental conditions in Dallas.”)
But please note the climate plan didn’t go before the Council in the spring of 2018, or the summer, or the fall. It was January 2019 until this “done deal” made it for a final Council vote. Why? Because it wasn’t done. Staff needed to figure out a way to pay for it.
And suddenly that’s when the mainline green groups they’d previously ignored became important to them. However much they talked up the Nature Conservancy, they knew it didn’t represent Dallas environmentalists and could not pull off the kind of sales job they needed. As a result, the Staff helped engineered the “public outcry” they later cited as a reason for passing the plan.
Oh, and the company that got the contract for drafting Dallas’ climate action plan? It was Theresa O’Donnell’s old “strategy partner” AECOM, a consulting firm spun off from…wait for it…oil giant Atlantic Richfield. Yes, that’s right. Dallas’ climate plan is being written by a firm founded as a subsidiary of one of the world’s fossil fuel giants.
Now that it really is a done deal, there are at least two important questions to ask of this Dallas climate planning process:
1) What will it actually deliver to the public and Council?
and,
2) What’s the process for “community engagement” from now to release of the plan next year?
INVENTORYING THE DELIVERABLES
What will Dallas get for $500,000?
One thing it will not get is any immediate action on any item that could reduce climate change pollution.
As the plan was being sold to the public and Council, some extreme claims were made about its impact. One advocate stated that “This plan will have huge positive health impacts, saving lives and improving our quality of life. It will make Dallas a better place to live and work, and more attractive to new and clean businesses and jobs, all while reducing Dallas’s greenhouse gas emissions and putting Dallas in the ranks of other world-class cities doing so.”
No it won’t. It can’t do any of that. It can recommend measures that might produce those results, but the report is specifically designed NOT to set in motion any specific policy change on any specific timeline.
It only does two things:
1. Estimate the amount of very specific climate change gases (not even all air pollution) coming from City of Dallas operations, and then tries to do the same thing for the entire City of Dallas.
2. Make recommendations for measures to reduce climate change emissions from municipal and community sources and/or mitigate their impact.
If they’re any good, those recommendations will then need to find a sponsor on the City Council and have at least seven other Council allies willing to pull the trigger. None of that is guaranteed to happen. You could have a report whose worthy goals are disowned by a majority of the Council for years.
In its own anti-climatic words, here what staff says itself about the end results of the plan:
• Use GHG emissions inventory data in development of Comprehensive Environmental Climate Action Plan (CECAP)…. building on the Resilient Dallas plan…
• Continue to encourage City emissions reduction initiatives and conduct emissions monitoring.
Town Hall passions of the advocates outstripped the reality of what this plan can do on its current course.
Any of the environmental groups Theresa O’Donnell hasn’t invited to participate to date could give you a good list of climate change action items right now – free of charge. Again, not that hard since there’s a known universe of options already from the half-dozen or so previous climate plans other cities have produced – courtesy of AECOM and their consulting brethren, who’ve been only too happy to charge officials for some of the most expensive photocopy jobs in history.
SAN ANTONIO EXAMPLE
And now there’s some proof those groups’ lists for Dallas City Council climate change action items really would likely be more aggressive and transformative than any list AECOM is likely to produce next year: San Antonio.
San Antonio is to Dallas on climate change as Dallas is to San Antonio on shopping. They’re in whole other leagues.
San Antonio has a progressive mayor who’s made climate change a big local issue. They were out in front before any other major Texas city. The city’s public utility company committed $500,000 two years ago to pay for a climate plan that does the same thing Dallas’ will do. The process there included dozens of community activists who did actually know something about the local “adverse environmental conditions.” Its climate plan was written by a consultant not named AECOM. San Antonio has won all kinds of awards for being pro-active on climate change, including a huge Bloomberg Foundation grant, one of only 25 given to American cities.
Time and again during the push in Dallas to get a local climate plan going, San Antonio was the example being used. They did it right in the Alamo City, we were told. We need to follow their lead.
And yet the final San Antonio plan, recently released, is being criticized by those same mainline groups that advocated Dallas going down exactly the same path only last month.
“The draft SA Climate Ready plan is out and its not what we hoped for. It’s time for San Antonio residents to speak up and demand real action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a pace that will preserve a livable climate.”
Examples of disappointment in the report abound. While Chinese cities enjoy full electric transit fleet service in 2019, and Los Angles, Vancouver and other cities have pledged to do the same by 2035, the San Antonio consultant wants to give the city until 2050. Other equally uninspiring options follow. Any climate change organizer could have done better.
So yes, by all means, let’s follow San Antonio’s lead and produce a report that doesn’t deliver desperately needed urgent recommendations or timelines.
But of course these are exactly the kind of feel-good, not-too-challenging goals Dallas City Hall loves to publicize…and then forget about. What will keep the climate plan process in Dallas from producing the same bromides, especially given how it was created?
Maybe the folks that weren’t invited to the table finally come knocking at the door.
THE PROCESS FROM THIS POINT FORWARD
According to the Staff’s timeline, they’re already beginning to decide how to form what they’re calling “Working Groups” to consult with the consultant. How will the membership of these Working Groups be decided, and by whom? At a recent community networking meeting where an OEQ(R)S staffer showed-up, he couldn’t answer those questions. But let’s pretend we’re Theresa O’Donnell. Who might she invite from the environmental side of things?
The Nature Conservancy for sure. The Trees Foundation. EDX. Those are givens. Next comes mainline green groups who won her the support she needed to take money from the City’s only dedicated environmental fund.
Anyone after those usual suspects? What about representatives from local groups most impacted by climate change and adverse environmental conditions now? The Joppa Freedmans’s Township Association, West Dallas One, The Highland Hills Community Group forming around the Lane Plating Superfund site, North Texas Transit Riders, The 10th Street District, Inclusive Communities Project, NAACP Health Committee, Society of Native Nations, Beyond Coal/Dallas? And maybe the leading clean air group in DFW for 25 years? Don’t hold your breathe.
Besides deciding the membership of the plan’s Working Groups by spring, there’ll be some of those “brainstorming sessions” and then a back and forth in the process between consultants and Working Groups that lasts up until the plan’s scheduled release in April of next year (to be unveiled at that 2020’s EDX no doubt). These Working Groups will be the crux of the public participation part of the plan.
What kind of decision is made is determined by how that decision is made and who makes it. The first sign of whether Dallas new climate plan will follow Old Dallas ways is how the staff picks who’s eligible to serve on those Working Groups.
INJECTING “EQUITY” INTO THE PROCESS
Regardless of who staff names to the official process, the groups that have the most to lose from climate change might want to intervene in its drafting, with or without an invitation.
That’s because besides the contortion of titles it causes cities who get their grants to go through, the Rockefeller “Resilient Cities” effort puts a lot of rhetorical emphasis on “equity.”
This is why, even as the OEQ(R)S officially approves new industrial sites in West and South Dallas one after another, it then sends staffers to community meetings to speak about the need to reduce the number of black kids with asthma. It now must tow the Rockefeller “equity” line, in words if not deeds.
Job One in O”Donnell’s Resilient City Report was to “Advance equity in City government” and recommended partnering “with anchor institutions and community-based efforts to advance equity initiatives across Dallas by recognizing and reconciling a history of inequity and fostering communication of social differences between diverse communities and individuals.”
Disparities in Dallas pollution burdens are certainly one of the variables that can impact a neighborhood’s quality of life. But so far the city has gone out of its way to exclude the groups and individuals who suffer from those disparities and/or work on their behalf to address them.
Residents may have a chance to change that behavior. Environmental Justice, aka “Equity” is now a rhetorical challenge for Dallas to live up to in order to justify its Rockefeller money. Future grants and job titles could be imperiled if Dallas isn’t seen as being responsive enough to its Black and Brown populations. That gives citizens who want real reform some leverage with they don’t usually have.
Who do the crop of Mayoral and Council candidates, including Ms. Montaya and Mr. Solis, think should be represented in those climate plan Working Groups? Who are the incumbent council members recommending for membership on those Working Groups? Are they even being asked? What should the Working Group agendas be? What effective, real, climate change responses can we do right now without waiting for a plan to come out in a year and tell us?
Despite its business-as-usual origins, this climate planning process is still an opportunity to test just how “equitable” Dallas politics and City Hall really want to be. But it’s up to residents themselves to administer that test.
Otherwise this time next year all Dallas will likely have to show for its $500,000 is another splashy roll out.
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Rising air pollution linked with increased ER visits for breathing problems
Air pollution could be as bad for pregnant women as smoking
Racial disparities in asthma related to health care access, environmental factors
High PM exposure nearly doubles dementia risk in older women
Air pollution is greatest environmental threat to global health in 2019, according to the World Health Organization
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It’s the 5th time in the last 13 months residents of
South and West Dallas have beaten back City staff attempts to put more polluters in their backyards
But this time they had to take on
their own Council Member and Plan Commissioner.
Channel 5 Coverage
City Hall Videotape Plan Comm. Mtg
(batch plant case begin about 20 minutes in)
In one of the most impressive recent displays of South Dallas neighborhood empowerment, residents won their fight last Thursday at the Plan Commission to keep yet another batch plant from setting-up shop among them.
But unlike past battles, they had to overcome their own Council member and his Plan Commissioner to do it.
Residents, as well as representatives from the Joppa Freedman Township Association, Paul Quinn College, the Inclusive Communities Project, and Downwinders at Risk all spoke out against the idea of transforming another piece of South Central Expressway property into a hub of heavy industry.
Leading the other side in support of the Bird Lane batch plant was of course the company proposing it, Estrada Concrete, and their consultants, but also District 8 Council Member Tennell Atkins’ Plan Commissioner, Chris Lewis. Bird Lane is in District 8.
Usually the support or opposition of the home district Council Member and Commissioner is key to the final tally, but in this case, the strength of the case against the plant was so solid, and Lewis’ plea to approve it so feeble, that a majority of his peers rejected his request. As these things go, it was a huge, humiliating smack down.
Lewis’ anti-citizen stance is more shocking once you know that only five days earlier he’d assured District 8 residents he’d be voting against the batch plant. Instead, the moment the last of the opposition speakers finished (there were no residents speaking in favor), he immediately made a motion to approve the batch plant.
Needless to say, that turn of events caught everyone opposing the plant off guard and provoked a rowdy backlash in the audience that built until the final vote was taken.
If it hadn’t been for District 11 (Kleinman) Commissioner Jaynie Schultz, District 3 (Narvaez) Commissioner Deborah Carpenter, District 5 (Callahan) Commissioner Tony Shidid, and District 1 (Griggs) Commissioner Jarred Davis raising objections, asking hard questions, and pointing to specific guiding language in the Dallas Planning Code, the vote would have gone against neighbors. In other words, there were at least four other Commissioners doing the work on behalf of District 8 residents that Mr. Lewis was appointed to do. Both Kevin Felder’s and Casey Thomas’s slots on this important body are currently MIA because they haven’t yet named replacements for their departed Commissioners.
That’s not a traditional liberal-conservative alliance that defeated the batch plant– you won’t find Scott Griggs and Rickey Callahan tossing back beers together. Nor is it a strictly black and white split. Of the two black Commissioners present, the only one voting for the batch plant was Mr. Lewis.
It was a neighborhood/Citizens Council split.
Not in any “big” issue, lots-of-phone-calls-before-the-vote kind of way. Rather, in a small, looking-out-my-own-backdoor kind of way.
Commissioners who opposed the batch plant couldn’t imagine looking out their own doors and seeing this thing as a neighbor. Those voting in favor knew such a fate was impossible for them.
Final proof is found in looking at who voted in favor of Lewis’ original motion to approve the batch plant. It included longtime Dist 15 (Rawlings) Commissioner Gloria Tarpley who’s distinguished herself in the past by voting for illegal gas drilling, and the Commissioners from Districts 13 (Gates), and District 10 (McGough).
As per usual, Dallas City staff had recommended approval of the Bird Street Batch plant, so residents really were fighting the entirely of City Hall – including the guy that’s supposed to be their full-time advocate at the place. And yet they persisted. And they won.
As it happens, the knock -out was a twofer. Not only did District 8 residents defeat the Bird Street batch plant, but they also learned that plans for Estrada’s other proposed batch plant around the corner on Zonie Road were being pulled as well.
Their victory – your victory too thanks to over 100 emails of opposition sent through our Citizen Action portal – was one event in a series of recent events that have given environmental justice issues in South Dallas some real traction of late. The first Joppa batch plant fight last March, announcement of the new Superfund site near Paul Quinn, discovery of Marsha Jackson’s “Asphalt Alps,” and other open wounds are beginning to provoke community self-defense responses.
Whether those responses can overcome South Dallas business as usual at the ballot box in May, or produce systematic change at City Hall, is a large and important question not only for South Dallas, but Dallas as a whole. We all live in neighborhoods. We all live downwind.
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