Looking Beyond a Cancellation
by Jane Dale Owen
The Houston/Galveston Photochemical Modeling Technical Committee, the leading
advisory group for technical and scientific issues relating to air quality in Texas, has
distributed the following announcement:
The PMTC meeting scheduled for Wednesday, February 19 has been canceled. We have
been looking into potential agenda items to present during a February meeting and have
concluded we would have more substantial information to present at the March 19
meeting.
In addition, as most of you are aware, we are in the midst of the Legislative Session
which requires our attention. Also, there are some serious issues with state agency
budgets and shortfalls. Accordingly, we have had to examine our travel budgets and
make adjustments. The shortfall should not affect our meeting schedule significantly, but
we want to ensure that when we do meet we have new technical information to brief.
How disappointing that the PMTC meeting will be cancelled, and how frustrating that
to date there is no new technical information emerging.
This committee is the definitive body to examine in particularized detail the
petrochemical industrial, and other ozone related environmental factors that are included
in the modeling studies aimed at bringing this region into State Implementation Plan
compliance by 2004, as mandated by the Federal Clean Air Act.
The Modeling Process--Recumbent, or DOA?
What this meeting cancellation reveals is a lethargy that is reflective of what is
happening to the modeling process under the aegis of the industrial interests that are now
advisers to the modeling effort.
Inaction has a domino effect. When there is no agenda to meet about, there is no
meeting. When there is no meeting, there is nothing to report. When there is no reportable
progress emanating from PMTC, there is no incentive for a meeting to be held by TFORS
(Task Force for Ozone Reduction Strategies). Such a state of affairs adds one more
domino to a chain of inertia and lack of compliance.
Real progress is needed on environmental quality, and we need to make sure that we
can attain the 2007 emissions standards--not only for the $4 billion in funds that hangs in
the balance, but also for the purpose of eliminating the toxic rapid ozone precursors that
continue to degrade the health of our citizens. Currently this committee is very tardy in
the modeling, in the analysis and in the budget items.
This is all about our health--the health of every one of us, including even the
modelers, the legislators, the administrators, and, above all, the most at-risk among us,
our children and our elderly.
May we hope that the Committee will be increasingly mindful of these stark realities,
and will be further chastened by the other looming specter of that rapidly approaching
2004 deadline. These considerations should be viewed as imperatives to stimulate a more
vigorous effort on their part to convene in March equipped for an action-oriented agenda.
The PMTC are custodians of the keys to correcting industry's underreporting in the Toxic
Release Inventory, and also to our compliance with the State Implementation Plan.
