Official heavy-handedness is usurping already-suspect environmental regulation in Texas.
Desperation over Houston's intractable ozone pollution has produced mistakes both silly and serious. Under pressure from federal regulators, regional authorities recently lowered expressway speed limits in and around Houston to 55 mph from 70 mph.
Houstonians, who tend to ignore speed limits, treat the move as a joke. They know lower speeds produce no environmental benefit. Most are not slowing down. Some are getting tickets.
A county prosecutor says ticketed drivers demanding jury trials might prevail in court by arguing that the former speed limit had been deemed safe. There will be many demands for jury trials.
On May 1, a toughened system for testing vehicle exhaust emissions went into use. The test itself costs $14 more than its predecessor. More motorists than before will face the choice between costly repairs that don't always work and distress sales of noncompliant vehicles.
Doubt already clouds the new test system. According to early reports, it has flunked 1-year-old cars.
Although the reduced speed limit and toughened emissions tests will raise costs for motorists, they won't make Houston meet federal ozone standards.
For a sprawling metropolis of 4 million people, situated on a sunny coastal plain in the middle of the world's largest concentration of hydrocarbon processing facilities, ozone pollution is inescapable.
But regulators regulate. They act for the sake of action.
At a recent mediation session of regional county officials understandably resistant to regulation as strict as Houston's, an Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator made everyone sign a confidentiality agreement.
That's serious. Even if technically legal in this case, secrecy among officials meeting to conduct public business is inexcusable. Brazoria County Dist. Atty. Jeri Yenne properly ordered her county's representative not to sign the agreement. According to the Houston Chronicle, she saw no justification for secrecy in a meeting dealing with "the most public of all issues."
She's right. The EPA's confidentiality agreement is wrong. And costly, futile manipulations, concocted in secret, do nothing for public confidence on environmental regulation-especially in Texas.
(Online May 10, 2002; author's e-mail: [email protected])
