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Update on Contested Case Hearing and TCEQ Commissioner's Vote . . .

What can we say, it's Texas politics as usual! We expected to be on the TCEQ Commissioner's agenda next Wednesday so the commissioners could vote to uphold or overrule the Judges' decision that the permit should be denied. And according to normal TCEQ procedures we should be. But, we are not. Why? There have been a couple of news reports that commissioners were considering amending the Judges' ruling. The Executive Director of TCEQ has suggested amendments to the ruling. According to the Dallas Morning News his proposal includes changing the phrase "failed to establish by a preponderance of the evidence" to "has presented evidence in support of its representation," and "failed to prove" should read "has presented evidence in support of its representation." He also wants to delete the phrase "unproven" in a section assessing TXU's air quality impacts. Isn't deciding if something was established by the evidence and proven or unproven the job description of a judge? Why does a bureaucrat, presumably working for the people, want to take the words out of the Judges' mouth? This all clearly suggests that the Commissioner's intend to outright overrule the Judges or make superficial changes to the permit and approve it, claiming the changes satisfy the Judges' concerns. Are those the concerns in the Judges' actual decision or the reworded version? The most persuasive evidence that the Commissioners will bypass the Judges' decision, and that Texas politics still works on the golden rule - He who has the gold makes the rules - is the outrageous change to the normal scheduling procedure. Our attorney and expert witnesses had to suffer the burden of Governor Perry's fast tracking, which compressed a legal proceeding that usually takes a year, into six months. Now, when it appears that the Commissioners will decide they know better than the Judges who listened to days of testimony, suddenly permitting is on the slooow track. Our attorney can't even get TCEQ to commit to when they will put the vote on the agenda. We can only conclude that they intend to overrule the Judges and want to postpone that decision until after the election.