Jim Tarr: challenging industry and government to protect public health
by Vicki Wolf, January 2008

Jim Tarr was the first and only engineer at the Texas Air Control Board (TACB), Houston Regional Office, when he went to work for the agency in 1972. The board was appointed by the Texas governor and staffed by the Department of Health in those days. The agency later became the TCEQ (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality).

Originally hired to do permit application review for new construction projects, Tarr later became involved with enforcement to ascertain compliance with air pollution regulations. During that time, he became interested in bringing environmental polluters to justice when he had the opportunity to work with Terry O’Rourke, one of the first environmental attorney’s in the state attorney general’s office to be charged with that task. Tarr has been working with air pollution ever since.

Tarr describes a life-changing event that led him to focus on preventing human exposure to air pollution. “One of the things that changed my life is that I spent a year as a volunteer in the pediatrics ward in M.D. Anderson Hospital,” Tarr recalls. “When you see those kids, and think about the diseases they have, and realize most of the those kids aren’t going to live very long, it is hard to view chemical emissions into neighborhoods the same way - there is no insignificant dose concerning carcinogenic chemicals,” Tarr says.

Today, Tarr and his company, Stone Lions Environmental Corporation, specialize in enhancing the understanding of air pollution situations or events. Many of their projects involve human exposure to a wide variety of toxic and hazardous industrial chemicals.

His projects included a cluster of anencephaly cases (neural tube defect resulting in infants being born without a brain) in Brownsville, Texas. It was thought that the fatal birth defects were the result of exposure to toxic chemical emissions originating from a group of export assembly plants known as maquiladoras. Tarr’s company developed air emissions inventories for 48 maquiladoras and a complex air dispersion modeling technique to estimate toxic chemical exposures for the years 1989-1992.

In Corpus Christi, Tarr’s company developed air dispersion modeling to calculate benzene concentrations coming from a group of refining and petrochemical facilities. In Point Comfort, Texas, they conducted a study of the atmospheric emissions of ethylene dichloride (EDC) and vinyl chloride (VC) from sources located at the Formosa Plastics Corporation. Through air dispersion modeling, engineers were able to calculate pollutant concentrations at specific locations in and around the town.

Tarr’s experience as he works to provide accurate information about human exposure to pollutants in various communities around the country has led him to be very critical of the TCEQ and the EPA for their lack of enforcement of pollution prevention laws. He condemns the use of Threshold Limit Values (TLVs), as a basis for developing acceptable community exposures to toxic chemical emissions. TLVs were originally developed as the maximum average concentration of contaminants to which workers may be exposed on an 8-hour shift, day after day, without injury to health. Tarr contends the TLV concept is flawed in a number of ways and explains this in his article,“Ethics, Threshold Limit Values, and Community Air Pollution Exposure.”

“I do environmental work all over the country with some interaction with every state, and the TCEQ is the worst, most indifferent, incompetent regulatory agency I have ever personally been involved with,” Tarr exclaims. But Tarr is hopeful that better efforts are beginning to be made to reduce pollution “I believe change for the better is coming and happening due to the efforts of environmental organizations, and people like Mayor White and Neil Carman (Lone Star Sierra Club air quality director) and others in Austin who continue to try to make things better. We need to recognize these people for the work they do,” Tarr says.

Tarr is married to Donna, who is from New York. They live in a suburb of Los Angeles. They have a daughter, Debra, 42; and two sons, David, 27 and Daniel, 16. Tarr says he loves his work. “I’ve been doing environmental work for a very long time. I love being able to help people with their environmental problems . I’m grateful that it worked out this way.”

For fun, Tarr says he plays poker with very good players. “Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose.”

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