Former employees say the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality gutted the unit soon after the fracking boom swept the state oil industry. The operation never returned to what it was before.
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Fifteen years ago, the mobile monitoring team was regularly surveilling the largest industrial complexes of Texas, documenting emissions violations and knocking on refinery doors unannounced. It used to issue reports detailing key findings, identifying polluting facilities by name and presenting evidence that sometimes led to enforcement actions or fines.
“They worked hard to not know that there were problems,” said Jim Marston, a retired attorney who directed the Texas office of the Environmental Defense Fund for 32 years. “Maybe the best example of that is the elimination of the mobile monitoring program, which made it a lot easier not to know where pollution was and how it was affecting the public.”
Cann rejected claims by former TCEQ employees that the mobile monitoring team was ever dismantled, or that the agency’s monitoring program has weakened. She declined to make mobile monitoring managers available for interviews. “They want investigators to pump out these investigation reports,” said Sheila Serna, a former TCEQ investigator who left the agency in 2022 and now works for the City of Laredo. “But they are not looking at the quality of the work, just the quantity.”
It’s not from a lack of acquaintance, Stone said. She includes several TCEQ representatives in her group’s regular email updates about pollution in the area. Texas law prohibits any facility from creating concentrations of hydrogen sulfide above 80 parts per billion, averaged over 30 minutes, that affect homes or businesses. Federal ambient air standards limit concentrations of hydrogen sulfide, also known as H2S, to 10,000 parts per billion in any instant or 200 parts per billion averaged over one hour.
The oil and gas industry has long played a dominant role in Texas politics, ever since the discovery of oil here more than a century ago. But the fracking revolution of the last two decades breathed a new generation of life and wealth into Texas oil and gas, fueling a massive expansion of industrial activity across the state.
“They were really great, a lot of very smart people in mobile monitoring,” said Buddy Stanley, a 73-year-old retired manager of the Corpus Christi regional office. In 2006 the team returned twice to Corpus Christi and made a five-day survey of the nearby Formosa Plastics complex in Point Comfort, about 90 miles up the coast. In 2007 the team returned to survey 24 facilities in the area, and spent another three days at Formosa Plastics.. First the teams surveyed the area, searching for elevated chemical concentrations. Wherever they found chemicals in the air, they returned repeatedly, under varied wind conditions, to monitor the air for hours at a time.
Those projects coincided with a change in leadership at the TCEQ. In September 2009, the commission chair went from Buddy Garcia, a former Democrat from South Texas, to Bryan Shaw, a future oil lobbyist and former associate professor of agricultural engineering at Texas A&M University appointed by then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.
“I’m going to tell you the truth, but you know this is going to ruin my career,” he recalled telling the auditor. His managers were hiding air monitoring data, he reported, by selectively not analyzing certain air samples, and by failing to reveal the technical limitations of their analysis methods.Even if those readings didn’t represent an urgent threat to public health, Doty considered it unethical not to report what the mobile monitoring team had found.
“They took a highly skilled mobile monitoring team and basically disbanded us,” Doty said. “It was total retaliation against me and my entire team.” “This was done to better utilize agency resources and enhance our monitoring capabilities for both routine and emergency events,” Cann said. “We just stopped being able to go out and do things. said, ‘You’re not doing that anymore, that’s not federally mandated,’” said a former TCEQ employee who requested anonymity because they still do business with the agency. “We were just told we were lucky that we had a job and that this is going to be our new work.”
The mobile monitoring team would no longer produce reports documenting emissions violations at specific facilities, or listing emissions violations observed in Texas’ biggest petrochemical and refinery complexes.“That really embarrassed the agency. That’s what kind of kicked them back into gear. They said, ‘OK, we need to start doing something,” the former TCEQ employee said.
They measured benzene above the TCEQ’s long-term limit dozens of times, and several times above short-term limits, including in residential areas. In a section titled “areas for improvement,” the TCEQ acknowledged it struggled to process the large volumes of data from its monitoring vans, and to effectively communicate it to the public.
In 2023 the team also spent three days monitoring a Shell Refinery fire in Deer Park, one day at a Sherwin Williams paint factory fire in Garland and two days monitoring a fire at Sound Resource Solutions in Shepherd. None of those trips generated reports, either.Former employees suggested several ways the mobile monitoring operation could improve.
Energy Environment State Government Texas Commission On Environmental Quality (TCEQ) Texas Legislature
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