Dallas Gas Drilling Task Force: Recommendations So Bad They Needed Police Protection

It was the entirety of the last ten years of the Barnett Shale compressed, geologic-like, into one meeting. There were the traditional clean air allies melting into the woodwork when it came time to not only protect the air, but the water, and people affected by gas pollution. There was the Big Green, conflicted environmental group representative shuffling between voting for industry and with citizens. There was the transparent duplicity of public officials. There were the minority of steadfast Cassandras, trying to explain over and over again why putting a 25,000 tons-a-year polluting compressor station 500 feet away from a home is a bad idea. There were the angry residents on the outside looking-in, complaining that their voices were not being heard over the din of drilling rigs. And there was the industry, happy to lead a last-minute assault on all the previous protections citizens had won in prior meetings. In the end, the majority of Dallas gas drilling task force members decided they wanted the city to learn about the Shale the hard way. The way that rural Wise and Parker County residents have learned. The way that residents of Ft. Worth, Arlington, and Grand Prairie have learned – by experiencing the poisoning and industrialization of their communities up close and personal. It was truly hard to watch Chairwoman Lois Finkelman, in perhaps her last civic role for the City, transform herself from a long-time clean air advocate to someone who rode roughshod over recommendations that would make Dallas air dirtier, and DFW smog thicker. She voted with industry when it would otherwise would have lost, and abstained from voting when it meant citizens might win. But she often seemed so embarrassed by what was taking place that she appeared to almost gag in announcing the results of votes, or often didn’t bother to announce the results at all. Joining her was former Dallas County Judge, and green cement advocate, Margaret Keliher, who had previously argued that gas drilling in the Trinity Floodplain was OK because it had always been used as a dumping ground anyway. Even Dr. Ramon Alvarez with the Austin-based Environmental Defense Fund chimed in and helped industry roll back various protections depending on whether it was drilling in parks (for), or reducing the original setback from schools (against). But none of them matched the 9th circle of Hell soul-selling of Joan Walne, President of the Dallas Parks and Recreation Board (originally appointed by Council member Jerry Allen), who in almost consecutive sentences, first protested that she had, of course, never been in favor of allowing drilling on city park land, and then proceeded to offer a motion to do just that. As she began to do so, a handful of Occupy Dallas members stood up and began one of their “mic checks,” i.e. a call and response. Finkelman directed the police squad that was already lining the conference room wall in anticipation of such an outburst to please remove the People Who Were Talking Too Loudly and then led the whole task force membership in a hasty run out of the room and into a hallway like frightened little children. It as an embarrassing overreaction.They were followed by Downwinders Director Jim Schermbeck, equipped with a digital camera, to make sure no official business was being done while the rabble was being cleared. Awkward, but necessary as it turns out because that was the first instinct of a couple of industry reps before Finkelman reminded them they couldn’t talk shop in the hallway. Rabble cleared, and reconvening, the vote was taken, and Walne’s motion to allow drilling in parks, with council approval, passed 8 to 3. That’s when Schermbeck began Talking Too Loud in complaining that they had just rolled back a protection that had passed unanimously only two months earlier with no real reason for doing so other than industry’s complaint that prohibiting parks removed too many potential drilling sites. Apparently his arguments were so compelling that the police got caught up in the moment and failed to shuffle him out of the room as fast as Finkelman wanted. “Can you move more quickly to end the disruption,” she scolded the cops. He sat out the rest of the meeting watching it on Dallas City Hall TV at an undisclosed location (and for the record, had a very congenial talk about drilling in Dallas with the nice officer who escorted him out of the building) After that, it was one a steady whittling away of one protection after another. Instead of a solid 1000-foot buffer zone, or setback, for “protected uses” like homes, schools and parks, there is now a less protective sliding 500 to 1000 foot zone. Instead of the straight-ahead 300 foot property line-to- property line setback for business and offices, there is now a 300 foot setback from structure-to-structure, meaning you could be soon looking out your office window at a gas rig next door. And so forth. What does it say about the quality of this entire last-minute policy reversal when you know in advance that your decisions will be so unpopular as to require police protection? There were a few bright spots. There are now more “protected uses” like churches, and hospitals, and such…even though they’re less protected than they were when the meeting started. Thanks goes to Downwinders board member Cherelle Blazer, who fought valiantly on behalf of residents, as did attorney Terry Welch, and Dr. David Sterling of the UNT Health Science Center.  Also, to their credit, Finkelman and Keliher did bequeath an opportunity to begin looking at ways to address the huge amounts of Greenhouse Gas emissions produced by the gas industry at all phases of production by supporting a “suggestion” to the council to explore the issue. While short of an official recommendation, this does give the Council a chance to clean-up the gas industry the way it cleaned-up the cement industry with passage of the nation’s first green cement procurement policy in 2007.  Gas drilling is the Keystone Pipeline of Dallas. It’s the local in the “think globally, act locally” cliche. An innovative policy that would require gas companies to reduce as much GHG pollution as they generate in Dallas has the potential to be a huge incentive to reduce pollution of all kinds from the gas industry and other sources. This tantalizing possibility and all the rest of the Task Force recommendations now go to the council. There could be a vote as soon as April. This is going to be an issue where the margins are going to be 1 or 2 votes. We need your help as a Dallas citizen….. Now is the time to become active in this issue if you don’t want Dallas to suffer the same fate as its sister cities in the Shale. The Dallas Residents At Risk alliance is sponsoring a city-wide organizing meeting on Gas Drilling in Dallas on Tuesday March 27th, from 7 to 8 pm at the Center for Community Cooperation at 2900 Live Oak in Old East Dallas. Representatives from neighborhoods, civic groups, PTAs, and churches are invited to attend. We’re going to be laying out what issues we need to concentrate on and what strategies we need to pursue to win back the protections we must have for urban drilling in Dallas. Please come and plug-in to the largest and most important environmental fight in Dallas’ city limits since West Dallas residents rose up in revolt over inner city lead smelters in the 1980’s and 90’s. They did their part then. We need to do ours now. Only you can prevent this environmental disaster.

Showdown at Dallas Gas Drilling Task Force This Afternoon

Per our warning last week, industry representatives on the Dallas Gas Drilling Task Force, assisted by turncoat “resident representative” John McCall, will indeed be trying to rollback setback protections for homes, schools, and hospitals, as well as attempting to allow drilling in city parks at this afternoon’s meeting, beginning at 1:30 pm in room 6ES on the 6th floor of Dallas City Hall. Despite getting hundreds of e-mails from clean air supporters over the weekend, they may be successful, depending on which Task Force members show up and decide to switch their votes. At stake are the current recommendations that require a 1000 foot setback, or buffer zone, from the fence line of the drill site to the property line of any “protected use” which now includes homes, hospitals and schools, and the prohibition against any drilling in Dallas parks. Industry wants that 1000 foot distance cut to 600 feet and to go ahead and drill in parks anytime the city council votes to do so.  It’s obvious that industry has mapped out the number of locations afforded them under the current, democratically-approved recommendations and decide they can’t make enough money with them in place – so they’re seeking to revisit past votes and overturn them at the very last Task Force meeting. That’s their M.O. Will they succeed? We know more residents will be showing up to express their displeasure at the prospect. This could get very messy. Stay tuned.

Six-Year Green Cement Campaign Wins, Ash Grove to Decommission Last Wet Kilns in Texas™

(Dallas)—-Kansas City-based Ash Grove Cement Company has submitted a permit amendment to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that seeks permission to convert its Midlothian plant from three wet process kilns operation to a single dry process kiln by 2014. In a cover letter to the TCEQ dated January 13th, Trinity Consultants’ Kasi Dubbs writes that, “With this permit amendment application, Ash Grove is proposing to modify Permit Number 1 to decommission two kilns at the plant, and reconstruct that third kiln from a wet process kiln to a preheater, precalciner kiln system.” According to the permit amendment application, total plant manufacturing capacity will decrease by 230, 000 tons a year, from a maximum of 1,182,000 tons of cement to 949,000 tons. Ash Grove claims that this decrease in capacity combined with cleaner dry process kiln technology will reduce pollution from its Midlothian operations by almost 105,000 tons of air pollution a year, including 98,000 tons of CO2, 6,000 tons of Sulfur Dioxide, and 560 tons of smog-forming Nitrogen Oxides. Ash Grove’s decision means that in two years, Texas will no longer host any obsolete wet cement kilns that were the industry standard throughout the 20th Century but whose energy inefficiency and pollution made them disadvantageous in the 21st. As recently as 2008, Midlothian had almost a fifth of the nation’s total wet kilns. Wet kilns depend on massive quantities of water to mix the ingredients of cement and then uses equally massive amounts of energy to evaporate the water out of the cement through exposure to extreme heat. They began to fall out of favor after the second Arab oil embargo of the 1980’s when energy prices climbed significantly. Their numbers have been steadily declining for decades. In 2010, TXI Cement announced they were closing their four wet kilns in Midlothian, almost a decade after operating side-by-side with its huge new dry “Kiln #5”. With Ash Grove’s conversion, there will be only a handful of wet kilns left in the entire U.S. Citizens who had spent years campaigning to close the Midlothian wet kilns were celebrating. “This is truly an end to an era. These kilns have been operating since 1965. They were the dirtiest cement kilns in Texas. They inspired a grassroots rebellion in DFW that forced Ash Grove to court. Their closure is one more step in bringing all of the Midlothian cement plants into the modern era,” said Jim Schermbeck, Director of Downwinders at Risk, the local clean air group founded almost 20 years ago to oppose the burning of hazardous waste in the Midlothian kilns. It was Downwinders who broke the story on January 4th that Ash Grove was finally considering dry conversion in Midlothian, while also being the target of a national EPA enforcement action. The group encouraged it supporters to launch waves of e-mail blasts to both the company’s headquarters and EPA administrators urging Ash Grove to commit to dry conversion, while also seeking to include the switch as part of the agency’s list of demands in any national settlement. Nine days later, Ash Grove submitted its permit amendment to the TCEQ. Regulators admitted that the publicity probably accelerated the final corporate decision in Kansas City. In 2006, Downwinders successfully pushed for inclusion of a recommendation in that year’s DFW smog plan that urged local governments to buy cement exclusively from the state’s dry kilns to provide an incentive for wet kiln operators to modernize. Schermbeck and the group then began their “green cement campaign” that methodically collected agreements from city and county governments that cut Ash Grove off as a potential cement supplier for municipal and county projects. Dallas passed the nation’s first green cement policy in May of 2007 during the last days of Mayor Laura Miller’s term. Over the next two years, Ft. Worth, Arlington, Plano, Denton and the Dallas County School District passed green cement policies – all unanimously. When Tarrant County passed a green cement policy by a vote of 5-0 in November 2008 Ash Grove decided it couldn’t afford to lose any more customers and took the County and all the rest of the green cement cities to court. Last January, when it looked like Dallas and Arlington might be forced to give up their policies as part of a settlement with Ash Grove, Downwinders stepped in and was praised for reaching a compromise that saved the policies’ intent to force modernization, but removed the threat of Ash Grove legal action. Meanwhile, in the 2007 and 2009 state legislatures, green cement bills garnered a bi-partisan group of sponsors including former State Senator Kim Brimer, his successor, State Senator Wendy Davis, and Tarrant County State Representative Vickie Truett. Schermbeck noted that the green cement campaign had been of the few grassroots environmental success stories during the tenure of Governor Rick Perry. Ash Grove’s decision was also just the latest victory in a string of wins by citizens that have transformed each of the three Midlothian cement plants into more modern facilities. In 2005, Holcim Cement reached a settlement with Downwinders that resulted in the first use of a specific pollution control technology that is now standard equipment on new kilns. In 2008, TXI Cement suspended operation and then closed its four wet kilns, and stopped burning hazardous waste. Now Ash Grove is converting the last wet kilns in Texas. Comparing the emissions generated by all of the Midlothian cement plants before and after the changes sought by Downwinders over the last two decades, there’ll be at least 23,000 tons less air pollution when the new Ash Grove kiln goes online in 2014 than at the peak of the bad old days in the late 1990’s and early part of the 21st Century at all three plants – not including the reduction of an estimated hundreds of thousands of tons of greenhouse gases like CO2 that weren’t even officially counted until recently.“I think anyone will be hard pressed to find a more successful grassroots group in the state of Texas over the last 10 years than Downwinders at Risk,” said Schermbeck. “It’s hard work to win even one of these concessions from industry. To be able to reduce this amount of air pollution from all three plants is an accomplishment that will be hard to duplicate. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be trying.”Schermbeck noted that the group has been busy pressing for the adoption of advanced pollution controls at the cement plants that have been used for a decade in Europe but have yet to reach the U.S.  He expects to see those controls included in the next DFW clean air plan. “We’re not stopping until every cement plant in North Texas is a state-of-the-art facility.”

 

Gas Wells Create “Wintertime Ozone” Throughout West

Remember when we only had to worry about smog during the 7-month “ozone season?” Those were the days. Now, thanks to the natural gas industry, people who live in the West also have to worry about it during the other five months of the year. First discovered in Wyoming, then Colorado, and now Utah, “wintertime ozone” is showing up regularly in places that have a lot of gas wells and also have a lot of snow that reflects sunlight. Ozone is created by a combination of either Nitrogen Oxides or Volatile Organic Compounds, time, and exposure to the sun. Diesel engines from gas drilling often release tons of Nitrogen Oxides, but it’s the tons and tons of escaping VOCs from gas fields that seem to be at the heart of wintertime ozone. We are finding a huge amount of methane and other chemicals coming out of the natural-gas fields,” said Russell Schnell, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 2011, the Utah basin being studies had some of the highest ozone readings in the country – over 130 parts per billion. Even with our worst ozone season in five years, DFW never came close to those kinds of smog levels in 2011. Although industry says its spent a lot of money adding controls in Wyoming trying to take care of the problem, smog levels there still peaked over 120 parts per billion. In North Texas we don’t have the snowfall necessary to make wintertime ozone a realty, but we have as many or more gas wells than Utah and Wyoming gas fields and many citizens believe they play a larger role in our own local summertime ozone smog levels than the state or industry would like to admit. There’s no reason to think that gas wells produce any fewer VOCs in the summertime, and in fact heat tends to accelerate fugitive releases from tanks because heat cause pressure to build inside of them. What’s causing ozone problems in the wintertime in Utah and Wyoming is most likely causing ozone probelms in DFW in the summertime too.  

What Causes Autism? Genetics and Pollution are “About Equal”

“….genetic factors and brain changes triggered by man-made chemicals in the
environment are equally to blame for the development of autism in young
children,”
according to panelists at a recent American Association for the Advancement of Science panel in Vancover as reported in the Irish Times last Monday. Professor Scott Selleck of Penn State is quoted as saying A number of genetic alterations have emerged as important in autistic
disorders but persistent chemicals in the environment including flame
retardants and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were also important. The balance of genetic and environmental contributors is about equal.
It is 50/50.”
  Dr. Janine LaSalle of the University of California, Davis talked about her research on “how exposure to persistent chemicals such as flame retardants could
cause long-lived changes in how collections of genes were expressed, for
example the genes associated with building neurological networks.”
She referred to this phenomena as “epigenetics”. That’s when the genes themselves are not mutated but they way the genes express themselves is changed. And it can be caused or made worse “by low-level environmental chemicals.” LaSalle
“exposed mouse models to the flame retardant PBE-47 and polychlorinated
biphenyl MECP-2 at minute levels that matched human exposures. It affected both sociability of these mice and also their learning behavior.
” The article ends by noting that “There were now upwards of 80,000 non-natural chemicals in the
environment produced by industrial processes and other sources. Few had been tested for their neurotoxicity despite human
exposures to these substances.” 
Autism now affects more American children than
childhood cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined. In the last decade, the
number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum has grown significantly.
The Centers for Disease Control now puts the rate at one in 110.

First Annual Green Source Environmental Leadership Awards Tuesday Evening

Seems like just the other day we were commiserating with some fellow activists about the lack of infrastructure in the DFW environmental community. Here we are in the nation’s fifth-largest metropolitan area and yet the amount of staff and resources and institutions doing or supporting basic environmental work is still the same as it was 20 years ago. It doesn’t feel like the movement has grown up here the way it might in Houston or Austin. So we’re looking forward to attending the first annual Green Source Environmental Leadership Awards being held at Dallas new “Eco-op” space near White Rock Lake from 5:30 to 7pm Tuesday. After over a month of online balloting, the top three vote-getters in each of three categories are now in contention for top honors and a nice cash prize of $500. It’s about time DFW had this kind of community-building, cross-denominational annual rite of recognition for green good works. And the nominees are…in the Grassroots Group/organization category, In-Sync Exotics Wildlife Rescue, your own Downwinders at Risk, and the Plano International Festival. In the Volunteer category are Josephine Keeney , Katie Jensen, and Downwinders’ board member and Arlington Conservation Council activist Grace Darling. In the Entrepreneur category it’s Bonnie Bradshaw with 911 Wildlife LLC, our good friend  Thomas Kemper of Dolphin Blue paper products, and Heather Rinaldi of the Texas Worm Ranch. Finally in the For Profit / Business Professional category, there’s Tom Bazzone with Green Living, Grier Raggio of We Consume Too Much, and Mitch Fine of Earth NT. It only costs $25 bucks to attend and it benefits a local group that’s trying to build a network that wasn’t here before. In our book, local folks have already won.

Revolving Door Exit to Industry in 3, 2…

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Executive Director and figurehead Mark Vickery announced his retirement from government yesterday. He’ll be departing in May to “write a new chapter” in his life. The smart money is betting that the title of this new chapter is, “Using My Government Service to Benefit the Polluters I Supposedly Regulated, or, How I let Taxpayers Fund my REAL Retirement Plan.” Is there a state agency that has had more of its former Directors end up as industry handpuppets? If so, we can’t think of any off hand. The position is seen as a lucrative jumping-off point into the world of very high dollar Austin corporate lobbying. Start you own office pool now as to when Vickery will resurface as a Hillco employee, or a Chesapeake lobbyist. And while Executive Directors at TCEQ come and go, Governor Perry remains running the show through his mini-me Commissioner appointees. After so long a time in office, no agency reflects Perry’s personality as much as TCEQ. Currently the Chair of the second largest environmental agency in he world is a Poultry expert who thinks smog isn’t bad for you and doesn’t believe in global warming. As long as these folks are in charge, expecting anything from this agency in the way of science-based coherent environmental policy is a gas pipe dream.

Is Dallas About to Roll Back Drilling Buffer Zones for Schools and Parks?

If gas industry representatives get their way during the final Gas Drilling Task Force meeting next Tuesday, fracking will be allowed much closer to homes and schools, and even inside Dallas parks, a reversal of previous positions. What’s ironic is that the President of the Dallas Parks and Recreation, Joan Walne, may facilitate these efforts. Walne has been voting with industry throughout the course of the Task Force meetings, participating in votes this week that removed protections already agreed to for flood plain drilling. In the past, she’s had no problem with the idea of sacrificing city parks to drilling rigs. She’s expected to be a key vote next Tuesday. “As it turns out, putting Joan Walne in charge of protecting Dallas public parks from the gas industry on this Task Force was like putting John Dillinger in charge of protecting the city’s bank account,” said Downwinders at Risk Director Jim Schermbeck. Besides allowing rigs and giant compressors in parks, the Task Force is also expected to be asked by industry representatives to “revisit” the current recommendation requiring a 1000 foot setback from all homes, schools, churches and hospitals. They want it rolled back to between 500 and 700 feet, similar to how drilling is handled in Fort Worth. “After already agreeing to inadequate 1000-foot buffer zones weeks ago for these ‘protected uses,’ industry now wants to go back and have another try at drilling right in our back yards,” warned Zac Trahan of the Texas Campaign for the Environment. “They want to put a well pad as close as 500 feet from a school, hospital or home – and as close as 300 feet from an office building, retail store or restaurant. A well pad could mean as many as 24 wells, a battery of storage tanks, and a large compressor that generates thousands of tons of air pollution a year. That’s unacceptable to us, and we think, most Dallas residents.” Waln, as well as Texas Business for Clean Air Director Margaret Keliher, and Dallas attorney John McCall are expected to be key votes on the setbacks issue. Keliher had led the effort to disregard the current ordinance and allow drilling in the Trinity River floodplain, while McCall is supporting rigs as close as 300 feet to commercial pieces of property like office building, restaurant or other place of business. Both Schermbeck and Trahan urged Dallas residents to e-mail the Task Force member and express their concern at the upcoming votes. “With only 11 members, and previous protections hanging on lots of 6-5 votes, an absence or change of heart has large ramifications,” said Schermbeck.  “We need Dallas residents to wake up and realize their fate is hanging on only a couple of votes from people they didn’t elect.” E-Mail Addresses of Dallas Gas Task Force members: joniwalne@aol.com loisgfinkelman@sbcglobal.net  john@attorneymccall.com   RAlvarez@edf.org biegler@southcrossenergy.com  cherelle.blazer@gmail.com   bbullock@mail.cox.smu.edu  margaret@margaretkeliher.com   pshaw@woodshawlaw.com  David.Sterling@unthsc.edu  twelch@bhlaw.net

Yesterday’s Debut of a Citizens’ Map of Dallas Drilling

You might have already heard or read about
the Dallas City Hall news conference that took place yesterday where a
new and startling map of gas-drilling leases already approved by the
City of Dallas was unveiled for the first time. It wasn’t a product of
city staff. A citizen put it together from Open Records Act requests
submitted over the last two-three months. Mountain Creek Neighborhood Alliance President Ed Meyer assembled
the information and then plotted it on a map. Downwinders, along with
the Dallas Sierra Club, Texas Campaign for the Environment, and
Earthworks Oil and Gas Accoiuntaibility Project all participated in
presenting the finished product to the
public and press under their new coalition name of “Dallas Residents at Risk.”
Even though the controversy over gas drilling in Dallas has been going
on for almost two years, there’s never been an attempt to plot the
inventory of gas leases in the city. Instead attention has been focused
on a handful of sites that were already partially through the city’s
permitting system when the current moratorium was declared and the
effort to write a new drilling ordinance was begun. When Meyer finally
got all the dots on his map, even he was surprised at the result. In
total, there are 110 leases for gas drilling on land owned by the
City of Dallas, totaling 130 tracts of land, and covering almost 1400
acres, from Royal Lane in North Dallas to the new Margaret Hunt bridge
in West Dallas to Joe Pool Lake in the South.
Copies of the map,
along with a explaniton of how it was made were delivered to all city
council members. It was released on Tuesday, the day of the penultimate
Dallas Gas Force Drilling Task Force, when new issues and old,
unresolved ones were up for debate. Next Tuesday, the 28th will be the Task Force’s last scheduled meeting and the stakes could not be higher.  On
the chopping block are the 1000 foot set-backs now recommended for
homes, schools, hospitals and churches, as well as a proposal from
industry to be allowed to drill in parks.
If successful, this industry move could be the single largest rollback so far in the process. Stay tuned. We’re going to have more on this attempt to roll back the protections already won in Dallas.

 

 

“Neither Left nor Right, but straight ahead”

That’s an old grassroots slogan and it’s one of Downwinders guideposts as a grassroots group. Since the moment we were founded, our board has included a wide spectrum of ideological points of view. When your property, family and community are under assault, you’re not really that interested in the politics of the person working beside you other than the common goal of ending the threat. Urgency trumps ideology. And so it is in Frisco these days. When Downwinders was invited to come to Frisco and help citizens defend themselves against and unresponsive government and corporation, there were those knee-jerk thinkers who condemned us as a manifestation of the vast left-wing, tree-hugging conspiracy. We knew better, and so did the citizens who established Frisco Unleaded, our sponsored local group, last summer. Now comes the announcement of a new city-wide group in Frisco organizing under the name “We are Frisco” who proudly proclaim that they are “Your Conservative Vision For Frisco.” Originally a Frisco residents group who wanted access to Frisco ISD facilities, the organization is spreading its wings and endorsing a broad platform of local issues, including, er, the Exide lead smelter controversy. Now if you’re a knee-jerk thinker yourself, you’re already imagining a diatribe on how the city’s efforts to relocate Exide are a prime example of unjust “takings” and how those lefty enviros have ganged-up on this poor company that was here in 1964 and deserves to stay no matter how many schools are near-buy. And you’d be just as wrong as your counterparts who stereotype Downwinders. Here’s what the Conservative Vision for Frisco has to say about the lead smelter: “Lights Out At Exide! No amount of lead contamination is acceptable. Exide executives and many civic leaders have claimed for years the battery recycling plant in Frisco is “a good corporate partner”. If true, why have they not been cleaning up their own mess without being forced to do so? The Exide lead contamination problem first became a major issue after the discovery they were in violation of pollution laws. The company worked with elected officials to craft new, more stringent pollution guidelines. Exide’s absurd “good faith” move in respect to adhering to the new agreement was to attempt to revert to building codes from 1964 to begin construction on modifications. If Exide has already been violating existing pollution guidelines, how can we trust them not to violate new ones? However, the question is moot as new rules will not fix the problem. There is no acceptable amount of lead contamination we can expose the area businesses and children to. Additionally, economic development is hampered by the location of the facility. Would you locate a business in old downtown Frisco knowing it was close to a lead contamination threat? Exide employs 135 people.  The loss of jobs by moving the plant is very concerning. More concerning, however, are the hundreds of jobs that will never be without removal of the facility from Frisco. The city has outgrown Exide.  It’s time for them to go.  Period.”  Couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Welcome to the fight WAF.