10 years to clean up concrete batch plants?
At the grand reopening of James Driver Park in East Aldine, Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia got emotional addressing the crowd of excited residents and children in wheelchairs, ready to roll across the park transformed for kids of all abilities thanks to a $7.6 million yearlong project.
“I’ve got your back here, this is your park,” Garcia said on a blustery Saturday in December 2021.
“You will be protected here,” he promised. “This is your home.”
Just a few months after, however, the community learned that yet another concrete batch plant would be opening. The eighth in the community. This time, right next to the park where children in wheelchairs now zoom around and physical therapists use the equipment to help their clients grow stronger and more confident. Residents worried not just about the noise and truck traffic but the health effects of the dust that can come from the facilities that create ready-mix concrete.
The community held a meeting to voice their disapproval. Representatives from the state’s environmental agency that issues industry permits even attended. But it was only for residents to later discover that their opportunity to challenge the permit had passed.
“That was just a slap in the face,” resident Shirley Ronquillo told the Houston Chronicle.
It’s an all-too-familiar frustration for certain parts of the county, which has more than 100 concrete batch plants, largely concentrated in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Plants with a standard permit can operate all day and night, emitting crystalline silica dust and fine particulate matter that have been linked to all manner of lung disease and cardiovascular problems.
All of this weighed on Garcia during the back-and-forth with the state. Even today, that moment that the community realized there was nothing they could do to stop the permit moving forward still stings.
“It is something I am never going to forget,” Garcia said. The park was transformational for a community that had long “accepted just crumbs,” he said, from local government and with some of the lowest life expectancy rates in the county. Garcia had to find another way to make good on his promise. Unable to halt the permit, Garcia has instead been negotiating to buy the land.
“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. We hope Garcia’s persistence pays off. While the lack of zoning in Houston can be a good thing, allowing owners to quickly adapt and reuse their properties, our most vulnerable communities deserve better than industrial polluters popping up with limited warning at their fence line. Even if Garcia’s one-time intervention works, it won’t address the wider problem. In lieu of such drastic intervention, vulnerable communities deserve more protection.
Which is why the new state permit requirements that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality adopted in January of this year were such a victory. After legal fights with the county and a revealing review by the state, the new requirements would lessen the impact of the plants by requiring, among other measures, better dust management and greater machinery setbacks from the property line as well as setting stricter production limits.
That victory, however, doesn’t help residents who want change now. The problem was that facilities would have either two years to meet the new requirements or until their 10-year permit is up for renewal, whichever is longer. At least 50 facilities in the county have more than five years on their current permits, according to the county attorney’s office, which is now suing the state to speed up the implementation timeline.
“If the TCEQ, by its own modeling, has decided that the previous permit was not protective of human health and the environment, they should require companies to comply with the updated permit as soon as reasonably possible,” said County Attorney Christian Menefee.
“This is stuff that every single company could do tomorrow.”
Industry leaders, apparently, agree. They have been largely supportive of the new requirements, at least on paper.
“I think it’s a good update to the standard permit,” Josh Leftwich, president of the Texas Aggregates and Concrete Association, told the Chronicle in January.
He reiterated his support in a statement to the editorial board this week: “TACA members are committed to abiding by the rules and regulations of the agencies that oversee them, as they continue to deliver the vital construction materials to a growing Texas.”
Slow-walking change doesn’t necessarily help businesses. “This isn’t an anti-industry approach,” Garcia said. “Industry wants a level playing field where everyone is held accountable.” That wouldn’t be the case if some companies have a decade to modernize and others have to do so now.
So what’s the holdup?
TCEQ hasn’t filed its official response to the lawsuit, and a spokesperson declined to comment on the pending litigation.
Surely, the state agency can move quickly and adopt an approach that truly honors the urgency of protecting the health and environment of our overburdened communities.
The county has already had to step up where the state doesn’t. Between January 2020 and June 2023, its pollution control division conducted 313 concrete batch plant investigations, issuing 172 violation notices. In the case of one north Houston facility, the county said it found repeated violations over the course of 12 inspections, including poor reporting, emissions above the maximum limit, unpaved entry and exit routes, stockpiled material kept too close to the property line and, worst of all, dust that had floated into the surrounding neighborhood, accumulating in ditches and creating “slurry-like solids,” which were discharged into drains.
With its latest lawsuit, the county continues to fill a regulator role.
“We are becoming the de facto state enforcement arm,” said Garcia.
Houston has long relied on the ready-mix cement that the industry supplies — we all use the roads and buildings made from that cement — but the prosperity of some Houstonians shouldn’t sicken others.
“Our communities deserve immediacy,” said Menefee. “Our state environmental regulators should not be negotiating with industry on a delayed timeline to implement necessary measures that we all agree will protect people who live by polluting facilities.”
In this state, unfortunately, it takes a lawsuit to get some urgency.
Neighbors near sites with pollutants that can hurt health deserve better