“You Need To Air Out Your Dirty Laundry”: An Anatomy of a TCEQ Public Hearing
- Alex Ip
- 7 hours ago
- 13 min read
A rainbow coalition of Texas Coastal Bend residents tried every tool in the regulatory process to stop the crude oil export industry. Did they ever have agency?
This is the third story of a three-part series produced by The Xylom and co-published by Drilled, Floodlight, and Deceleration News. Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.
As around 200 residents and advocates trickle into Portland Community Center on the evening of January 11th, 2024, they are greeted by a panel on a stage: Enbridge representatives to the left, TCEQ lawyers and permitting staff behind another table on the right. Standing in the middle is moderator Brad Patterson from the TCEQ Office of the Chief Clerk.
Leading the four-person Enbridge delegation is Clayton Curtis, a five-year veteran at the terminal dating back to its Moda days. Tejana climate advocate Elida Castillo, a lifelong resident of San Patricio County, recalls that she’s seen an uptick in engagement from the Enbridge delegation since they teamed with Yara to launch Project YAREN, even opening a space in Ingleside and hosting a native plant giveaway. However, she has concerns over how Enbridge has not been very forthcoming with the actual details of the project, such as environmental impacts, safety risks, and water usage.
When reached for comment during breaks, Enbridge representative Austin Taylor repeatedly declined to speak in person but directed a colleague to present a business card containing Enbridge’s media inquiry email. However, spokesperson Michael Barnes declined to be interviewed.
TCEQ staff explain the rundown: First, a 30-minute informal Q&A and discussion between residents and the panel, then a formal comment period. This is the first and last time residents directly interact with Enbridge and TCEQ representatives before the comment period for the permit renewal process closes immediately after the hearing.
Despite Enbridge’s significance within the American crude oil export industry, no other media is present, a common complaint of residents who feel overlooked and have to do their legwork to get the news out. Castillo straps her phone on a tripod and streams the meeting on Facebook.
At this time, residents, many choosing not to provide their names to speak freely, line up behind the mic for the informal discussion. And the back and forth begins:
Is there a time limit on when an incident, like an oil spill or chemical leak, must be reported?
“They do have 24 hours to report to the state of Texas.”
On average, how many federal operating permits does the TCEQ deny versus approve?
“As far as I’m aware, we haven’t denied any permits.”
The entire hall groans.
When you review a permit, do you take into consideration the ability of a city to effectively handle or not the emergencies as a result of a hazmat release, major incident, daily releases, or major emergencies?
“I'd like to encourage you to make this comment during our formal portion. That way, we can better address it in writing.”
“I don’t know really what kind of emergency you’re expecting,” Curtis interjects.
The crowd hollers.
Is the oil terminal and the LPG terminal in one Title V permit?
“We’ve been looking at the issue, we don’t have a final answer. When we do have a final answer, we will respond formally in the response to comments.”
But who decides when there needs to be an air monitor placed somewhere?
“There's a lot of factors that go into determining where those monitors go. But I do know that they take public comment,” says Patterson.
Enbridge, can you tell us how many violations you've had in the US in the last five years for environmental violations?
“I hate to say this, but right now all we’re really familiar with is that terminal. Enbridge's operation in the U.S. is outside of my scope,” Curtis concedes.
The crowd sighs.
Finally: TCEQ, do you guys verify the data Enbridge provides, or is it just up to them to make sure it's good to go?
“ The data provided by Enbridge is certified as true by them using a proper certification process.”
Laughter.
After a five-minute break, the first to formally comment is Jim Klein, then at-large Corpus Christi City Councilmember. A tall, wiry man with white hair and a deep baritone voice, Klein knocked off an incumbent in 2022 as part of the “Clean Slate” with Sylvia Campos.
During their first year in office, the two newcomers successfully pushed the nine-member Council to halve the pay rate gaps between industrial and residential users of Corpus Christi Water. They had less success in opposing the renomination of Port Corpus Christi Commissioners whom they considered too industry-friendly, or stopping a proposed desalination plant. The plant would meet the needs of water-intensive petrochemical reactions but could pose unknown effects on the Bay, which has already been destabilized by oil spills and dredging.
Klein and Campos ran for reelection last fall while supporting like-minded reformist challengers. Their growing strength could provide an opening for San Patricio County to demand more representation on the Port Corpus Christi Commission to compensate for their disproportionate impact, an issue Klein is open to.
Although Enbridge has received six Notices of Violation from the TCEQ, Klein noted that it maintained a perfect TCEQ compliance record at the time of the hearing. “The Coastal Bend Sierra Club recommends that TCEQ needs to fundamentally reform violation penalties. The Coastal Bend Sierra Club opposes permit O-3906. It is harmful to the human and environmental health of this region.”
Next up is Boone. He reads out two consensus demands by residents, advocates, and allies. “I’m opposed to the renewal and issuance of Federal Operating Permit O-3906. And I also request that the comment period be extended to provide adequate time for the public to access the information.”
Wearing a blue “Stop Enbridge” cap, inhalers in her hands, it’s Porter’s turn. “I'd like to thank you that now at 63, I have two inhalers,” she says.
She circles back to her students. “As a state agency, I can’t believe you are allowed to approve every permit. The Texas Education Agency would never allow schools to self-monitor. We spend billions of dollars testing children — well, ours get fumes — that proves to the state our kids are learning, and [yet] you're allowed to take their data and approve a permit?”
And then there’s Love Sanchez, wearing a bead and sea turtle necklace. The fight to stop Enbridge is deeply personal to her.
Unrecognized by the federal or state government and thought to be on the brink of extinction, the Karankawa Kadla tribe, which she belongs to, has lived along the Coastal Bend for centuries. The Coastal Watch Association’s Secretary, historian Patrick Nye, personally returned some artifacts to the tribe as a gesture of respect and allyship.
However, more than a decade after Port Corpus Christi sold NS Ingleside for oil and gas development despite the established cultural significance of McGloin’s Bluff, Enbridge's chicken-wire fence prevents tribal members from entering without risking arrest.
“Enbridge has totally disregarded any pollution and destruction they have done to the Karankawa ancestral lands and to other native people across the nation,” Sanchez commented. “They have not bothered consulting with any of the tribes in the area.”
The Coastal Watch Association filed a failed federal lawsuit along with the tribe to stop Enbridge's expansion plans. Undeterred, the tribe has brought protests to the state capital of Austin to make sure statewide decision-makers hear their plight, according to Chiara “Sunshine” Beaumont, a member of the Karankawa Hawk Clan.
“If I was in your seats making this decision, I would say to Enbridge, ‘you need to go iron out your stuff,’” Sanchez continued. “‘You need to go air out your dirty laundry, halt until infractions or decisions are made in court.’”
Castillo steps away from manning the Facebook live stream and up to the mic. She has long fought oil and gas projects in San Patricio County and is familiar with the structural barriers disadvantaged San Patricio County residents face.
“When [my niece] was five years old, she got her little fake camera. When we were going to go on a trip, she got her camera, and when her brother asked her, ‘Why are you taking that? What do you need it for?’ She's like, ‘So I can capture pictures of the flares.’ A 5-year-old talking about flares!” Castillo recounts. “But we don’t want this for our kids. They don’t need this kind of future.”
“We don’t need Enbridge; Enbridge, you need us. You need our Bay,” she stresses.
As the night goes on, residents see the writing on the wall, but they are in the line anyway, so they might as well make sure their thoughts are on the record, or yield the time to someone else more knowledgeable who needs it. One commenter calls out TCEQ officials for rolling their eyes at other commenters as they speak. Ingleside on the Bay resident Roy Raleigh is more blunt. “I really don’t want to waste my breath on people that don’t listen, so no comment.” He leaves the mic to raucous applause.
Tim Doty, the final speaker, is the only commenter outside of the Coastal Bend. He is from Driftwood, a ghost town one-sixth the population of Ingleside on the Bay, built around an old Texaco gas station half an hour from Austin.
What Doty brings that others don’t is nearly 30 years of regulatory experience. Before retiring in 2018, Doty was the TCEQ’s mobile air monitoring manager, conducting and overseeing ambient air monitoring and environmental assessments at hundreds of industrial facilities. He is also a certified expert in optical gas imagery, the same technology Earthworks uses.
Before the meeting, Doty told me he couldn’t think of another geographic area in Texas undergoing such massive expansion as Ingleside on the Bay. “When I came back in 2021, I was in disbelief. What was going on?” he asked. He has also documented what he considered "significant" hydrocarbon emissions from the three facilities.
Now, Doty has to speak up against his former colleagues, some he still addresses on a first-name basis.
Doty is skeptical of the TCEQ Executive Director’s recommendation to issue the draft permit as early as November 2023, weeks before the hearing. “Why would that be on here? The public meeting hasn’t even been held yet. That's a misrepresentation of the elected officials that asked for this meeting,” he refers to one of Rep. Lozano's staff in attendance.
“Are y'all saying that ‘We're just going through the process here and we're just rubber stamping it’? Or are y'all saying that people's comments are not going to be considered?”
Doty reserved his harshest words for Enbridge. “You're not doing right by this community. You have not been a good neighbor.”
“I have seen and experienced sometimes great things out of your agency through the years I’ve worked there. I know y’all can do that kind of stuff," he makes a final appeal to the TCEQ. “There shouldn't be one air monitor, there should be multiple air monitors for the community in Portland, Ingleside, Ingleside on the Bay!”
“That's what the public wants you to do. To be a proactive agency and try to do the right thing. Not take the law into your own hands, but to hold regulated entities accountable for their actions and minimize public exposure. And that is not done.”
The hearing adjourns after three hours. Each of the 40 formal comments vigorously opposes any permit renewal, but on Feb. 7th, 2025, the TCEQ greenlit Enbridge’s permit renewal. In particular, the TCEQ Executive Director’s Response to Comments letter affirmed that “Enbridge Ingleside LPG Terminal (RN111588505) and Enbridge Ingleside Oil Terminal (RN101225746) are separate sites for the purposes of both [New Source Review] and Title V permitting” because they are each “owned by separate subsidiaries of … Enbridge.”
This means that Enbridge is on the one-yard line of a process that would cement five more years of operational risk and greenhouse gas emissions. However, there is a final public petition period before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which ends on May 27th.
In response to a query to The Xylom, TCEQ Office of Air spokesperson Richard Richter wrote in an email, “Air monitors are placed in accordance with federal air monitoring requirements. The Annual Monitoring Network Plan is made available for public comment for a 30-day period before providing it to EPA on July 1st of each year.”
Richter also pointed to The Texas Administrative Code (TAC) Title 30, which requires a Responsible Official, or appropriate designee, to certify all documents submitted to the TCEQ in support of a federal operating permit with the following statement: ‘I certify that, based on information and belief formed after reasonable inquiry, the statements and information contained in the attached documents are true, accurate, and complete.’
“The Operating Permits Section uses the application materials in conjunction with our Requirements Reference Tables, Unit Attribute forms, and applicable regulations to identify application deficiencies,” he added. “The Operating Permits Section works with the applicant to correct these deficiencies, and all application updates are certified using the process described above.”
I asked residents how they felt after the hearing. There is a general disappointment over the apathy and lack of preparation by Enbridge staff and TCEQ officials. “The narrowness of their knowledge was alarming,” adds Porter, who joined the Coastal Watch Association board as a private citizen after her retirement, in an email conversation.
Ingleside on the Bay’s predicament could have been mitigated by representatives who shared their concerns. Yet, the region has repeatedly voted for candidates, mostly Republican, who have advocated for unchecked oil and gas development.
In November 2024, Jim Klein lost reelection by an excruciatingly close 1,123 votes, placing fourth in a list of 10 candidates running for three at-large seats. The lead vote-getter, former City Councilmember Carolyn Vaughn, ran on a conservative platform that drew from her experience building a multimillion-dollar oil and gas business.
The same day, Morgan LaMantia lost her State Senate seat by less than 3,000 votes, after her predecessor, Democrat Eddie Lucio Jr., endorsed her challenger, Adam Hinojosa, who accused her of supporting “overreaching regulations” on the oil and gas industry. LaMantia’s loss allowed Republicans to control South Texas in the state legislature’s upper chamber for the first time since Reconstruction.
The lone bright spot was Castillo, who was elected Ward 1 representative and Mayor Pro-Tem of her hometown of Taft. “Once we have more people engaged and being a part of this decision-making process and not feel like they're left out of the conversations, left out of what is happening, I feel like I will have done my job as a representative of the community because it's all about bringing other people into something and not keeping them out,” she told KRIS 6 News at her swearing-in ceremony.
The issue of who to vote for never came up in any conversation between me and Coastal Bend residents over three years of interviews and visits. However, advocates like Castillo and Ramos-Avilés are mentally prepared for the worst-case scenario for San Patricio Country when public officials fail to stand up for its residents.
Across the Bay, grass has swallowed up Corpus Christi’s Black-majority Hillcrest neighborhood, leaving abandoned house foundations here and there. In the previous decade, vulnerable residents were cornered, bought out, and severed from the rest of the city, first by oil refineries, then by a sewage treatment plant, a new highway bridge taller than any building in the Coastal Bend to allow the passage of supertankers, and finally by a proposed desalination plant.
Now that they find themselves in the crosshairs of Big Oil, Ingleside on the Bay has realized that power doesn’t discriminate. By choosing to band together with those who have had it worse, they find themselves in an unfamiliar place. Despite being late to the environmental justice movement, Ingleside on the Bay residents are now enmeshed in the fight, and their yearslong fight are beginning to see results.
Five days after the hearing, 160 attendees flooded the Ingleside, Texas City Council, leading Councilmembers to unanimously deny Project YaREN’s objectionable use permit because of concerns over potential chemical spills. (Yara Clean Ammonia declined to be interviewed for the story.)
On July 25th, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice finalized a settlement totaling nearly $1 million regarding Flint Hills’ 2022 Christmas Eve oil spill, which violated the Oil Pollution and Clean Water Acts. This was equivalent to the value of crude oil Flint Hills exported roughly every 16 minutes. In November, the Biden EPA granted in part a petition filed by the Coastal Watch Association to object to the TCEQ state operating permit for Flint Hills Ingleside. A group of 2,300 commercial fishermen, many of whom are Latino and Vietnamese, filed a federal civil class action lawsuit to seek damages from Flint Hills.
“Flint Hills Resources has worked cooperatively with state and federal agencies to resolve all matters related to a release of crude oil that occurred at our Ingleside, Texas terminal in December 2022,” wrote Jake Reint, Flint Hills’ Vice President of Public Affairs, in an email statement. “We appreciate the collaboration throughout this process.” Enbridge did not respond to follow-up questions on their potential involvement in the restoration plan.
Residents and advocates had not heard of the proposed consent decree before they were reached for comment in April 2024. There was zero local media coverage of the proposed consent decree until June 2024, and there is again zero local media coverage of the voiding of Flint Hills Ingleside’s operating permit either. That said, Valdes recognizes that their activism is making ripples on a national level.
“Unfortunately, Texas state regulators such as TCEQ rarely take action to hold industry accountable for these incidents that harm and negatively impact local communities and citizens. We are encouraged that the federal government pursued the matter and is taking decisive action that can make a difference,” she wrote in part in an email statement. “As the community closest to and most directly impacted by the spill, we look forward to working with the trustees on the restoration plan.”
As of May 2025, Valdes has not heard of any community members being approached to participate in the restoration plan.
Ingleside on the Bay residents and their allies don’t know the ultimate fate of their small town. But their multiracial, cross-class coalition may provide hope — for other communities across the Gulf Coast, for future generations, and perhaps more importantly, for one another.
“I'm using my access to different networks and information to inform our community members on the tradeoffs we're making in exchange for all the industrial build-out,” Castillo writes in a follow-up email interview.
“The compassion, honesty, and concern the speakers showed was overwhelming,” continues Porter. “I was honored to be among them.”
Reporting of this story was supported by the Society of Environmental Journalists, Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, and the Kelly-Douglas Fund at the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
