Legislators’ Salaries Should Be Paid by Special Interest!
I’m tired of my tax dollars going to pay legislators who listen more to special interest than they do to We the People who pay their salaries and health care and all their other benefits!
Local legislators struggling to pass injection well bills
By Lucretia Cardenas
Updated: 04.06.09
Three Montgomery County lawmakers aren’t having much luck passing their injection well regulatory legislation out of the House and Senate natural resource committees.“The odds of passing it out of either committee aren’t good,” Rep. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe said. “It’s hard. Special interests groups are working the members.”
Creighton and Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, filed the bills in November and, since then, Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, has signed on as a co-author of the House bills.
In an attempt to address local issues, Nichols, is proposing the bills be passed only for Montgomery County, said Nichols’ Press Secretary Alicia Pierce.
The bills were heard by the natural resource committees two weeks ago, and numerous Montgomery County residents and officials went to Austin to testify. But also testifying were officials with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and representatives of TexCom Gulf Disposals, the company proposing to pump non-hazardous wastewater into an existing well at the old Conroe oilfield, and representatives from other entities that depend on injection wells to dispose of waste, Creighton said.
The bills – House Bills 177-179 and Senate Bills 273-275 – would require regular reporting of injection well water and soil testing, set limits on where an injection well can be placed and require the TCEQ to establish rules for injection well surface facilities.
The second hearing on TexCom’s permit before State Office of Administrative Hearing judges is July 20. If the bills are passed, they may not have any affect on TexCom’s proposals because the application for a permit is already on file.
The only reason they call it “non-hazardous wastewater” is because toxic drilling waste was is exempt from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Seem reckless?
“We are not politicians or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connections, our purchased senators, our hungry congressmen, our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislature, any political platform, any presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our estate.”
– Frederick Townsend Martin, in his 1911 book, The Passing of the Idle
Rich, describing how the wealthy view politics.
About Sharon Wilson
Sharon Wilson is considered a leading citizen expert on the impacts of shale oil and gas extraction. She is the go-to person whether it’s top EPA officials from D.C., national and international news networks, or residents facing the shock of eminent domain and the devastating environmental effects of natural gas development in their backyards.
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You’re right TXSharon–take their lobbyist money and donation out of their salaries! They are by and large worthless in Texas.
this post if *filled* with outrageous facts that point up and underscore the self serving attitudes that erode all manner of well being and common good, have been eroding it since time in memoriam and will no doubt continue in perpetuity, as what are the odds of people setting aside
their personal agendas for the well being of something as abstract (however vital) as Life Itself, when most feel their immediate survival as the bottom line.
i keep being reminded of the french riddle of the lily pads… and the shocking suddenness of exponential change. it goes like this:
at first there is only one lily pad (gas well) in the pond. the next day it doubles. they continue to double each day. after 29 days, the pond is half full. how long, the riddle asks, before the pond is completely filled with lily pads?
the answer, though we may not imagine it, is the very next day!
those with analytical minds, and who are paying close attention may realize the dire consequences already in place on the 29th day, but the bigger problem is the complacency of those who do not know and do not understand to care.