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Building a New and Effective Grassroots Force for Clean Air in North Texas
Downwinders at Risk
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Growing Citizens
Downwinders At Risk
In 2000, Downwinders challenged a new permit by Holcims cement plant that doubled air pollution. We won the first advanced controls to ever be installed in a U.S. cement plant Those controls cut pollution at Holcim by more than 50% over two years. They are now standard equipment on all new U.S. cement plants.
In January 2012, Ash Grove Cement submitted a new permit to close and convert the last wet cement kilns in Texas. In its application Ash Grove stated the move would eliminate over 100,000 tons of air pollution a year by 2014.
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Growing Citizens
Further expanding the reach of the group was an historic 2006 settlement with one of the Midlothian cement plants. Among other provisions, it made Downwinders the trustees of a clean air fund totalling $2.3 million - the largest private clean air fund in the state. Named after the groups founder, the Sue Pope Fund is in its fourth round of grant-giving devoted specifically to projects that reduce smog pollution in DFW. Although the fund cant be used to support Downwinders program work, its widely-dispersed grants have had the effect of building regional influence for the group, as well as forcing its leadership to examine clean air issues far beyond Midlothian. The same settlement that created the Sue Pope Fund also allowed Downwinders to hire a then little-known SMU associate engineering professor as its full-time technical advisor. In this role, he attended his first legislative hearings and over time became a much sought expert witness on DFW air quality. In 2009, Dr. Al Armendariz became the Regional Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. No previous local EPA Administrator has emerged from such a grassroots background. Downwinders continues to be on the front lines of clean air struggles throughout North Texas. The group is leading the charge to reduce toxic and smog-forming air pollution from gas drilling in the Barnett Shale. Its in Frisco helping residents to close a dilapidated and dangerous lead smelter. Its assisting Dallas citizens and city council members in drafting new strategies to reduce Greenhouse Gas pollution. These days, the entire North Texas airshed is Downwinders backyard.
Three electric-hybrid delivery trucks were bought for the Fort Worth Independent School DIstrict with a Sue Pope Fund grant. The Sue Pope Fund paid for the solar panals on this Congo Street house near Fair Park in Dallas as part of a Central Dallas Development Coporation project.
Downwinders standing in a legal action resulted in the most successful good neighbor agreement in Texas history, including a clean air fund that allowed ordinary citizens to decide how to spend millions on new projects to reduce their own regions smog pollution. So far, almost $2 million has been given to projects and programs in four North Texas counties, ranging from commuter bus service in Arlington, to lawnmower exchanges in Plano, to energy efficiency upgrades in Ft.Worth, to solar energy panels and air-conditioned trollies in Dallas. Its the only clean air fund of its kind in the nation.
Downwinders At Risk board members with former advisor Dr. Al Armendariz upon his swearing-in as EPA Region Six Administrator in February 2010
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Downwinders At Risk
Ive learned (and continue to learn) more about government on multiple levels in the past six months than I ever knew I COULD! Most importantly, Ive learned that I have the right to speak up for what I think is fair for my family. Its all so empowering and I would encourage any citizen to take an active approach in local politics. Meghan Greene, community leader with Frisco Unleaded, sponsored by Downwinders at Risk
A Frisco Unleaded member addresses his city council on lead contamination with stackhead supporters in the audience.
Almost 200 years ago, Alex deTocqueville warned that unless individuals were actively involved in their own governance, American-style democracy would vanish.
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Since WWII, Americans have increasingly ceded responsibility for public health and environmental decisions to either large, inaccessible, government bureaucracies, or to the large, inaccessible corporate bureaucracies theyre supposed to regulate. The people most affected by those decisions have often not been invited to the table. When things go badly, what looks at first glance to be environmental policy failures are in fact failures of our democracy. Downwinders doesnt just want to win better decisions from government and industry. We want to build a more citizen-friendly process for making those better decisions. How you win change is as important to Downwinders as the change itself. The group is in the business of bringing old-fashion American selfdetermination to modern environmental problems.
A local resident shows her displeasure with the new state clean air plan at a 2011 public hearing in Arlington.
In doing so, we give people the skills and confidence they need to be better participants in the ongoing American experiment.
air group that also grows citizens. Downwinders is also the only group thats relentlessly focused on North Texas clean air issues. Environmental groups active in DFW are usually local chapters of a state or national group. They work on public policy from the top down. Priorities are set somewhere else and the local membership is used to fuel state or national fights. Downwinders at Risk reverses that flow. Its board is from the DFW area. It works from the bottom up, with local priorities driving its efforts in North Texas. Through effective organizing on local issues, the group wins national precedents.
Downwinders At Risk has a national reputation as a group that, through its actions, is leading to a number of significant developments in pollution control. When you look at the history of the group and the history of their accomplishments in the DFW area, there are a large number of firsts that happened directly because of Downwinders at Risk. Dr. Al Armendariz EPA Regional Administator
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Downwinders At Risk
Number of Clean Air Violations 2011 was the worst year for smog in DFW since 2006.
In 2012, more smog-forming VOCs will be released in DFW by oil and gas industry sources than by all the cars and trucks in the region.
Despite three separate clean-up plans submitted by the state of Texas to the EPA , six million North Texans still arent breathing safe and legal air during the seven-month long ozone season every year. In fact, 2011 was the worst year for smog pollution in DFW in the last five. We went from two air monitors out of compliance with the Clean Air Act to six; our ozone pollution levels rose from a benchmark of 86 parts per billion to 90. North Texas now has worse air than Houston. Despite this, the state is officially predicting the regions ozone levels will plunge to unprecedented lows in 2012 because residents will buy newer cars to replace their older, dirtier ones. Meanwhile, the EPA will begin enforcing a new, lower ozone pollution standard of 75 ppb over the next five years that will be even more difficult for North Texas to meet than the one we have yet to conquer after a decade of trying. That new standard will require its own, separate clean-up plan that begins with meetings of the North Texas Clean Air Steering Committee. A major reason for the lack of recent progress in improving DFW air quality is the inability of government or industry to rein-in the huge volumes of air pollution from a growing north Texas oil and gas industry. Although it accounts for more emissions of smog-forming Volatile Organic Compounds than all the cars and trucks in the region combined, most of this gas industry pollution is unregulated for its impact on North Texas ozone levels.
Oil and Gas: 114 tons per day Cars and Trucks: 80 tons per day
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Growing Citizens
In addition to adding to DFWs chronic smog problem, pollution from gas industry sources can be also toxic, releasing thousands of pounds of carcinogens like Benzene and Formaldehyde into North Texas skies. Gas and oil sources are also major Greenhouse Gas polluters. Despite the public health impact of gas industry air pollution on North Texas residents, there is still no region-wide strategy to significantly reduce it. Nor is unhealthy smog DFWs only violation of the Clean Air Act. Besides the nine-county federal non-attainment area for ozone, the EPA has declared a two square mile non-attainment area for lead air pollution in Frisco, just north of Dallas. Unlike the DFW smog non-attainment area that has many causes, this new lead pollution violation has one cause - the nearly 50-year old Exide lead smelter. Since 1964, an estimated 300,000 pounds of lead has fallen out from the smelters smokestacks over an area encompassing most of current-day Frisco The smelter refuses to install the same state-of-the-air controls that could reduce pollution by 90%. The states proposed clean-up plan for Exide was rejected by EPA on the same day it was submitted.
Smokestacks from the Exide Lead smelter poke out between downtown Frisco and the citys High School, less than half a mile from Exide.
Because scientists have linked even low levels of PM pollution to such a wide variety of health effects including heart attacks strokes, diabetes, and IQ loss, many experts believe air quality standards need to be tightened.
DFW is a Hot Spot for PM Pollution DFW already has a PM pollution problem. From 2007 to 2011, there was an average of 41 days when PM readings at one of two monitoring stations in Dallas were at levels associated with increased risk of heart attacks and strokes. By comparison, DFW experienced 38 days in 2011 when the new ozone standard was exceeded.There are about three times as many ozone monitors as PM monitors in DFW.
DFW is also still downwind of the largest concentration of cement plants in the U.S. Despite giving up the burning of waste officially classified as hazardous, all three Midlothian cement plants are still burning other kinds of industrial wastes for fuel. In 2011, TXIs plant was granted a permit by the state to burn a longer list of wastes, including plastic garbage, tires and car interiors, without any public notice or opportunity for public comment. Long-standing chronic air pollution problems persist for DFW. New threats abound. North Texas air needs effective defenders.
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Downwinders At Risk
In July of 2011, Downwinders launched its first new local grassroots group not centered on cement plants or smog when it accepted an invitation by Frisco residents to help them close the almost 50 year-old Exide lead smelter. Operating in the middle of Americas fastest growing city, the smelter has created DFWs second nonattainment area by violating federal ambient air pollution standards for the toxic metal. Exide releases a selfreported 3 to 4 thousand pounds of lead annually. There is no safe level of exposure to lead, especially for children, who can have their nervous systems permanently damaged by even small amounts in their bodies.
Downwinders has been involved in every clean air plan written for the DFW area since the mid-1990s. The group used these plans to help draft innovative public policy and bring about a host of new pollution reduction measures, including new smog controls for the Midlothian cement plants and central Texas coal plants. Beginning in the summer of 2010, the state began to draft a new do-over air plan for DFW that was supposed to bring the region into compliance with an old ozone pollution goal by 2013. Through funding provided by grants to the Safe and Legal Air Project, Downwinders at Risk was able to bring needed transparency to a process An example of the live-blogging Downwinders at Risk Director Jim Schermbeck did on the groups thats often Facebook page during a North Texas Clean Air cloaked in Steering Committee meeting. obscurity despite its importance to regional public health. Downwinders provided continuous coverage of the air plans progress on our websites, pressed for web-casting of the meetings, and publicized the Committees work to the media.
Downwinders is acting as a sponsor, resource center, and experienced guide to a group of residents who believe the smelter is fundamentally incompatible with modern Frisco and the surrounding land uses, including schools and parks.Theyre promoting amortization and closing of the smelter by the City of Frisco - the same measure Dallas implemented in the 1980s with its urban lead smelters. In just six months, Frisco Unleaded was able to claim a significant victory when the Frisco City Council voted to deny Exide new permits and declared the smelter a nonconforming use the first step toward amortization.
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Growing Citizens
This new transparency was critical in winning the incremental pieces of progress that emerged from the Steering Committee and the states Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). After an embarrassing vote in December that prevented the adoption of new control measures for consideration in the new state air plan, Downwinders sounded the alarm in its enewsletters, blogs and social media sites. The group was particularly critical of the vote in light of rising volumes of gas industry pollution that had never been regulated under previous air plans.
As a special project within its on-going Safe and Legal Air campaign, Downwinders has launched an effort to reduce smog-forming pollution from the gas industry doing business in the Barnett Shale.
The Fair Share for Clean Air campaign is specifically aimed at the need to cut gas industry releases of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). As part of this effort, we commissioned a report by Dr. Melanie Sattler of The University of Texas at Arlington to estimate the amount of money saved by gas operators by implementing existing pollution controls. Leaking Money: Potential Revenues from Reduction of Natural Gas and Condensate Emissions in North Central Texas concluded over $50 million in lost product could be captured and sold. In our effort to include more gas industry pollution cuts in the 2011 DFW clean air plan, Downwinders won the support of seven DFW city and county governments representing three and a half million residents, as well as both daily newspapers. Because of this public support, the state did cut gas emissions in a DFW clean air plan for the first time, albeit insufficiently. Downwinders is still working for more.
In March, the Committee reconvened for a second vote on the question of new controls on gas industry sources. This time, the recommendations passed by a wide margin and they were one reason why the TCEQ ended up adopting a small cut in gas storage tank emissions - the first ever proposed by the state. Soon, a new air plan will begin being built to meet the new ozone pollution standard approved by the Obama administration in 2011. Downwinders will once again use the process to try and win further clean air progress for North Texas and make the decision-making system itself more accessible and responsive to citizen participation.
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Downwinders At Risk
Call (Downwinder Director) Jim Schermbeck anything you want: community organizer, environmental activist, true believer or even tree-hugging nut job. But on the whole over the past 22 years, call him tenaciously successful. Mike Norman, Columnist, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Building a Bigger and Better Force for Clean Air in North Texas
For over 18 years, Downwinders at Risk has won results completely out of proportion to its size and budget. Working as a perpetually-underfunded grassroots group, its achieved more than many larger, and better-financed environmental organizations. Downwinders has been extremely lucky to have a loyal base of supporters and major funders whove enabled the group to keep working long after most grassroots efforts like theirs have gone out of business. However, with an expanded regional mission has come expanded responsibilities that Downwinders cannot meet with our historical levels of support or organization. To become a regional clean air group strong enough to carry out the mission weve assigned ourselves, Downwinders must grow its infrastructure. The group has prioritized a fiveyear path to reestablishing itself as a much larger, more resource rich, institutionalized force for cleaner air in North Texas. Over 100 people attended a citywide This time line organizing meeting on gas drilling in corresponds to the Dallas that Downwinders co-sponsored. schedule for the building of a new clean air plan for the region. Downwinders believes that without more and better-organized attention from the public, the chance to write a truly effective clean air plan for DFW will once again be lost.
Downwinders at Risk Director Jim Schermbeck speaks at a TCEQ air quality hearing.
Downwinders Jim Schermbeck is the go-to guy on clean-air activism in Texas. Jim Schutze, Columnist Dallas Observer
Downwinders At Risk
Growing Citizens
Downnwinders At Risk is a great example of a group of interested citizens who were willing to stay committed to the effort until some results began to develop. You have to stay involved for a long time or youre not going to get anything done. That kind of commitment is hard to come by, especially in a volunteerbased group. Richard Greene Former EPA Regional Administrator, 2003-2008
Growing Citizens
Downwinders At Risk
The most persuasive reason for funding grassroots organizing as a strategy to achieve environmental victories in public policy and public opinion is quite simple: mobilized and organized communities can challenge power and create lasting change with ripple effects that benefit us all. Sarah Hanson Cultivating the Grassroots
Directors Salary $50,000 a year for five years Director of Development $25,000 a year for five years plus commissions Field Organizer $35,000 a year for three years Canvass Director and Canvass Expenses $50,000 a year for three years Staff Scientist Staff Attorney Office rent and utilities IT hardware and software Research and publishing IT Services Travel Five year total: Annual totals: Year One Year Two Year Three Year Four Year Five $131,500 $131,500 $181,500 $271,500 $271,500 $45,000 a year for two years $45,000 a year for two years $26,000 a year for five years $2,500 a year for five years $20,000 a year for five years $1,000 a year for five years $7,000 a year for five years $970,500
Downwinders At Risk
Growing Citizens
Downwinders at Risk is one of the best environmental groups I have worked with as both a journalist and an elected official. Downwinders at Risk is a strong advocate for clean air, and it does its homework meticulously. Laura Miller Former Mayor of Dallas
A DFW resident speaks about the costs of air pollution to his family at a rally before an EPA hearing.
Growing Citizens
Downwinders At Risk
Adults take 10-20 breathes per minute Infants take 20-40 breathes per minute Pre-schoolers take 20-30 breathes per minute
Who Benefits?
Everyone in North Texas who breathes air will benefit from reducing smog, lead and gas pollution. The National Academy of Sciences has concluded that even short-term exposure to ambient levels of smog are linked to heart attacks and strokes. We dont have to be exposed for weeks or months or years, to see these effects, according to one doctor involved in a recent international study. The same thing is true of lead. In the last year, the federal level of concern for blood lead levels has been cut in half and scientists now believe theres no exposure to the toxic metal that isnt capable of doing some harm. Toxicologists have identified hundreds of toxic chemicals in the fracking fluid used in Barnett shale gas drilling. A Colorado School of Public Health study concluded that residents living within half a mile of a gas well had a 66% higher cancer risk. However, there are sub-populations that are more susceptible to air pollution and would benefit more if that pollution was reduced or eliminated. 1. Asthmatics Studies show exposure to smog increases the risk of death among people with severe asthma. Patients with the condition have a greater risk of not only suffering an attack but of actually dying on days with higher levels of smog. According to the American Lung Association estimates there are at least 110,000 asthmatics living in Dallas alone. 2. Children A ten-year USC study of children produced evidence that ozone can cause asthma in children. It also showed that the most athletic children in polluted areas are three times more likely than inactive children to get asthma.
Who Benefits?
Because we need so much air to survive, breathing is the way that most people can be exposed to the most pollution.
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Growing Citizens
According to a University of California at Los Angeles study pregnant women exposed to high levels of smog are more likely to give birth to children with heart defects. It found as much as a threefold incidence in infant heart problems where mothers were exposed to air pollution. Locally, a Cooks Children hospital study on childhood health in DFW found an epidemic of asthma among school-age children. It located the heaviest concentrations of childhood asthma directly downwind of the Midlothian cement plants. 3. The Elderly Along with children, those over 65 are among the most vulnerable to the effects of dirty air. Theyre the population with the highest percentage of existing chronic conditions that can be exacerbated by air pollution. The Harvard School of Public Health found that deaths from stroke among the elderly increased consistently with rising concentrations of smog and other kinds of air pollution. 4. Women Besides being more susceptible to stroke than men, and thus more vulnerable to dirty air, women are twice as likely as men to visit the emergency room due to asthma and women accounted for 65% of asthma deaths according to the American Lung Association. 5. Communities of Color According to the EPA, asthma is almost twice as common among African-Americans as it is among whites. African-American children are three times as likely as whites to be hospitalized for treatment of asthma. African-Americans are four times more likely than whites to visit the emergency room because of asthma. Emergency room visits due to asthma was almost twice as high for Hispanics than for non-Hispanic Caucasians. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention close to 50 percent of all Hispanic-Americans live in counties that frequently violate ozone standards.
Scientists now link air pollution to many cognative disorders. One study found children exposed to urban air pollution were already developing debilitating proteins in their brain similar to those found in Alzeimers patients.
Whats interesting about air pollution is that other factors that may cause dementia are generally found at the more individual level diet, weight, smoking. And we can help to try to prevent them at that level. But in this case, were looking at something that we can do to intervene at a broad scale, with society at large. Its a whole new way to think about prevention for dementia and cognitive decline. Dr. Jeanifer Weuve Rush University Medical Center
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