This week, KUT News is teaming with NPR on a project highlighting industrial air pollution. NPR reporters, working with the Center for Public Integrity, reviewed never-before published lists compiled by the U-S Environmental Protection Agency to track polluters. Roughly one in 10 factories on the most recent list is in Texas. Some of those facilities have been on the watch list for years. For the KUT/KUHF StateImpact Texas project, Mose Buchele reports on the regulatory environment that allows industries to keep polluting.
You can visit this story on the StateImpact website.
Correction: An earlier version of this story link mis-attributed the word “byzantine” to former TCEQ commissioner Larry Soward. While Soward and other critics described a confusing and uneven system of enforcement at TCEQ, Soward himself never used that word to describe the Agency’s system of enforcement.