Rick Perry Fast-Tracks Coal Power Plants

UPDATE: On February 20, 2007, Judge Stephen Yelenosky issued a ruling granting a temporary injunction to end the State Office of Administrative Hearings' (SOAH) adherence to the Governor's executive order. This judgment comes one day before the formal hearing on the merits for 6 of the proposed TXU permits was to begin.

On February 21, the administrative law judges at SOAH postponed the TXU hearings until June 27, 2007. This will give the parties more opportunities to conduct limited discovery and prepare their cases for and against the permits.
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Rick Perry issued an executive order in 2005 that fast-tracks the contested case hearing process for coal-fired power plants in Texas. The contested case hearing is the formal venue through which citizens are legally able to protest these permits.

Through the process of a contested case hearing protestants have the opportunity to analyze the proposed permit applications, gather evidence (through a discovery process) and present a formal case that identifies how the application or proposed permit is deficient. This process takes places before an administrative law judge at the State Office of Administrative Hearings (SOAH).

At the end of the hearing process, the administrative law judge then makes a recommendation to the 3 Commissioners of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to grant the permit, deny the permit, or grant the permit with modifications that are, hopefully, more protective of the public. The Commission then has the final say on whether to accept the recommendations of the administrative law judge.

A case of this kind involves many steps and usually takes between 9 and 11 months. Rick Perry has said that this process should take 6. In a practical sense, this is an awful squeeze of time and resources for those citizen and groups who wish to formally protest the permit. With 18 new proposed power plants (11 by TXU alone), all coming down the pike in this same window, protestants are slammed. The week of October 30th, 5 of TXU's proposed power plants began the contested case hearing process. This fast-tracking and overloading of applications is a deliberate move to overwhelm protestants and make the coal plants a done-deal.

The contested case hearing process takes time and money on both sides, but even when permits are finally issued, it is often the case that they have been improved by the process.

Links and References

Environmental Defense's stoptxu.com contains more information and maps of the locations of the proposed plants.

TXU's Powering the Future of Texas plan ReliableTexasPower.com

Goodwyn, Wade "Critics Blast Texas Plans for New 'Dirty' Coal Plants" NPR 9/25/06