TCEQ To Hold Final Hearing In Asarco Air Permit

By ALICIA A. CALDWELL Associated Press Writer

EL PASO, Texas (AP) – The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is set to decide the future of a shuttered West Texas copper smelter.

The three commissioners charged with deciding if Asarco, a Tucson-based copper company with a smelter in El Paso, should be granted a renewed air quality permit are to meet in Austin Wednesday afternoon.

El Paso city officials have opposed the bankrupt company’s plans to reopen the plant, which closed in 1999 amid a global drop in copper prices. They will be at the hearing to remind the commission of the city’s staunch opposition.

Mayor John Cook told reporters last week that the city plans to sue if the TCEQ does grant the permit. “I’m optimistic that in the end we will win,” Cook said. “We will fight until we have used the last argument we can get our hands on to object to the permit renewal.”

State Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, an El Paso Democrat and one of Asarco’s most vocal opponents, said the commission’s decision will decide the future for the city of nearly 600,000 people.

“Asarco wants to put 7,000 tons of contaminants in the air every year, so this permit is the turning point for El Paso,” Shapleigh said. “We go to a clean air future or take a step back to a polluted past.”

The city and a coalition of residents opposed to the reopening plan have argued that the copper company is a major polluter whose previous operations have left toxins, including lead and arsenic, in the soil in residential neighborhoods near the century-old smelter.

Opponents have also argued that if the plant reopens, it will produce more air pollution in El Paso. Asarco officials have routinely denied that the plant’s operations would cause or contribute to air pollution, a requirement to renew the permit first issued in 1992.

“We have faith in the process and the rule of law and are looking forward to the Commissioner’s Agenda Meeting on Wednesday,” plant manager Bob Litle said in a written statement.

If the permit is granted, Asarco’s smelter would be allowed to produce thousands of pounds of pollutants, including sulfur dioxide, lead and carbon monoxide, annually.

Asarco, in the midst of a federal bankruptcy case that includes as much as $6.5 billion in environmental liabilities, has argued the plant would bring hundreds of high paying jobs to the area and contribute nearly $1 billion to the region’s economy.

The permit battle has been ongoing for about six years and has cost the city about a $1 million, according to Cook.

In 2005 a pair of administrative law judges concluded that Asarco should be denied a new permit because the company “failed to prove that its operation … if renewed would likely not cause or contribute to air pollution or that its compliance during its last five years of operation under that permit warrants renewal.”

But last year the executive director of the TCEQ recommended renewing the permit if the company took a series of steps to ensure “effective pollution control equipment and practices.”

At the time, a lawyer for Asarco said the company would accept those conditions if allowed to reopen the plant.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)