Sharron Stewart Interview, Part 1 of 2

DT: My name is David Todd. I'm here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. It's October 23, 2003. We're in Lake Jackson, Texas and we're at the home of Sharron Stewart, who is a coastal advocate who's been working on issues here for many years. And I wanted to take this chance to thank her for joining us. SS: Thank you, David.DT: Sharron, I was hoping that you could help us understand when you first got introduced to issues that involve the outdoors or place or nature, some sort of appreciation or love of it?00:01:57 - 2285

SS: Okay. Well, as-as an environmental activist, air pollution was the first thing that interested me. After I moved here and realized that, you know, chemical companies were emitting things that did not smell very good and one of my daughters and I were quite sick as a result.

But there was not much information and I spent about a year and a half reading everything on the reading list of American Association of University Women's Beleaguered Earth Study Group list. You know, and one book would lead you to another book before I ever, ever did anything.

And then, I got involved with a local organization 00:02:59 - 2285that was basically labor unions and they had issues with Dow Chemical, the largest employer in the areas, over labor issues. But they were also fighting over environmental issues.

And the first issue was the Brazos River, which at the time-as you know, the Brazos is red and muddy. But the lower reaches from Lake Jackson through Freeport and to the Gulf of Mexico were bottle green. They were. And that was-we're back in about 1970 now. And the union leaders had asked-they formed a separate organization called Citizen's Survival Committee. Terrible name. They had 4000 members, which does make a difference.

And they went to the legislature and asked them to do something and 00:04:21 - 2285to get someone down here and check out the lower Brazos River and so the legislature directed that such a study be done because Babe Schwartz was on the Senate Finance Committee and Neil Caldwell, our state representative, was on House Appropriations. So a study did get done and it was done by Parks and Wildlife in the old water board. And it showed that the lower two miles of the Brazos River had flocculating solids on the bottom from glycol, antifreeze and that were no benthic organisms living there. And this-this was the first attempt to look at anything environmental in this area.

As a result of that, I also met Neil Caldwell and Babe Schwartz and became involved in working for 00:05:33 - 2285their campaigns. First time I heard Babe speak, it was on the first anniversary of Earth Day. He gave a speech at the Methodist Church by the capitol to over a thousand people who were there on environmental issues. And he said you cannot beat the big guys with all the money, but you can make a difference. And how you do that is you get involved in people's campaigns and you let them know that you were involved and that that really can mean a lot. Well, Babe had a very tough campaign at that time and I got involved. And the next thing I knew, he had me working in the legislature as the first environmental aide. 00:06:32 - 2285DT: Well, tell us about that experience, being an aide in the legislature focusing on environmental issues.00:06:42 - 2285

SS: Well, you know, this, again, is back in the-in the early 70's. And he put me on the Senate Finance Committee and another lesson. That lesson is that your budget is your policy statement. Doesn't matter what pretty words you write on policy, your policy is where you put the bucks. I learned that one well.

Sissy Farenthold was in the legislature at the time and my husband ran her campaign for governor. And so, when there was an environmental issue in the House, Sissy would come over and ask me to brief her. I 00:07:31- 2285loved it.

Babe Schwartz would tweak laws by passing some little change to make things better. It's sort of l-how freshwater inflows, for example, got done. In recognizing that bays and estuaries need freshwater inflows for fisheries purposes.DT: Maybe you can give us that as a sort of example or case study.00:08:04 - 2285

SS: Well, it is. But back in those days, the interesting thing is he used to have hearings on bills that he would introduce, or have somebody else introduce, and I would lead the industry lobbyists to those hearings while Babe was off at another hearing, actually getting something significant done. And...DT: You were the decoy.00:08:33 - 2285

SS: I was a decoy. Yeah. And I spent lots of time lobbying both Senate members and House members for what I thought were good environmental choices. Seldom won, but it's amazing how many times, even if people can't go with you, they do things to help. Like help with the debate on the issue, even if you know they're not going to vote for it or they will abstain and not vote against you. I mean, there-there are a lot of ways-ways to help. And doing that for a couple of sessions, you know, helped with contacts. For somebody in a-a small town down on the Texas coast, it was a good way of getting to know who the players were in Austin.DT: Can you give us an example of, say, one of these environmental issues? Perhaps the freshwater inflows that she mentioned? How it moved through the legislature and how it might've gotten shepherded along?

SS: Well, you know, Babe started it and Babe, again, made it a little stronger a few years later and Mike Martin from Galveston was involved. And I-I think it's been strengthened about three times since that first recognition. It was a very difficult thing to do. You need to ask Babe about that because I wasn't actually there.00:10:20 - 2285DT: How about another example? I understand that Babe Schwartz was involved in the Open Beaches Act here. Did you have a hand in that as well?

SS: No. No. Eckhardt drafted the Open Beaches Act and Babe passed it, so he is truly the father of the Open Beaches Act. And he-he, even now, is concerned enough about the Open Beaches Act that he's-has started another nonprofit organization to try and protect the Open Beaches Act.00:11:02 - 2285DT: Is it under threat right now that you can describe?

SS: You never know what's going to happen. Every time you change commissioner at the Land Office, you sort of reinvent the wheel all over again and it takes years to get people up to speed. And now we have a Land Commissioner who's new again. The one 00:11:32 - 2285before him was only there for one term. It takes a while to understand the importance of the job and the importance of the issues. So you just never know because the folks who challenge it are always going to be there because they have the economic interest to challenge it. You know, you just never know. DT: Maybe we should back up a little bit to how you first got introduced to some of these environmental issues. I think you mentioned in passing that air pollution was one of the first stories and problems that you confronted. And my understanding is that you actually stood outside of some of these chemical plants and monitored what they were doing and what sort of emissions they were having? Can you tell about that experience?00:12:42 - 2285

SS: Well, it-it was interesting. People from the Texas Air Control Board came to my husband and I and asked us if we could get together enough people to do monitoring. They wanted to monitor in early February. They wanted cold weather and they would have three stations around Dow. One would be out at Quintana Beach, one would be in the Jones Creek area and one would be across Highway 332 in Clute. And we found locations for them. And two other couples, besides my husband and myself, we did the monitoring for them, checked the stations. You know, they tr-Dick Flannery. You've 00:13:48 - 2285met Dick? He's just recently retired and he's now working in air pollution issues in California with Erin Brockovich. He was the one who trained us. And we did. We did the monitoring. Was interesting. And then the Air Board came back and said they needed a monitor down here-this was the head of the Houston area. His last name was Stewart, too. Bill Stewart. And we found him a site and they decided the-this many would've dedicated his property to the state to put the monitor on it, but they decided that wasn't probably such a good idea, so they put it at the softball field in Clute. And until the 2000 AQS study on air, it was the only monitor in the whole county. And I also got Babe and Neil to fund it.DT: I understand when you were monitoring this, you were essentially checking up on some of the bigger employers in the county and this municipality. What sort of reaction did you get from some of your neighbors and people you might meet in church, whatever? Was this a difficult stance, position to have?00:15:42 - 2285

SS: Oh, yeah. Yeah, back in those early days, I even had people that we had socialized with cross the street rather than talk to me. And in old-the old part of downtown Lake Jackson, you've got to walk a long way, as there are parkways out in the middle of all of the streets with parking on either side. So it's a long distance to cross the street.DT: And why did they see this as an unpopular thing to do?00:15:57 - 2285

SS: Well, you don't do anything that Dow wouldn't approve of. Dow didn't approve of people fighting on environmental issues. And certainly, not working with labor. DT: Perhaps you can go into that a little bit. I understand that one of the early nonprofit groups you worked with, the Survival Committee, was a creation of the union here.SS: Right.DT: What sort of role did the union have in environmental issues around here?SS: Well, that organization lasted for several years and really, really did go after Dow 00:16:42 - 2285on air and water issues and sort of hung in there. But, like all grassroots organizations, you know, they fold once their main mission is-is accomplished. And they never, by the way, even one time, addressed a labor issue. They just did the environmental issues. DT: They didn't bring up workplace exposure problems?

SS: The unions themselves did. But the people involved with the Citizen's Survival Committee did not. 'Cause the officers and the people who worked with that organization were not the union leaders themselves, although some of them later became union leaders.DT: You had your own work as well. You were the principal consultant for Quintana Environmental Services. Can you tell us a little bit about your work aside from some of the volunteer work that you were just talking about?00:18:04 - 2285

SS: Well, you know, over the years, my interests changed and I learned a whole lot about a lot of things I had not expected to. And I've done a lot of marketing research, particularly science connected with the offshore industry, because I had contacts with those people and I also had contacts with the kinds of people they might be, you know, interested in finding out information about. As you know, I've also done some resource work as I-I recall being involved with one of your former employers when you were 00:18:52 - 2285still in school, doing environmental assessments in coastal areas. And doing that kind of work, for the most part, I've preferred to work for government entities rather than for industry or developers.DT: Well, when you were doing these assessments, what sort of resources can you describe on the coast of Texas that people should appreciate and understand more about?00:19:43 - 2285

SS: Well, hmmm. I don't know, I-if you're talking about coastal resources or wetland habitat resources. I mean, right here, we're sitting in Lake Jackson and this whole area was once nothing but a bottomland swamp. You know, right where this house is, there were once giant trees and it was in giant trees when I moved here. This was not developable land; it's all been logged and developed. Dow built this town; this is a Dow company town. They came in here in '41 as the head of-because of the natural gas available, because of the saltwater available to build a magnesium plant for the 00:20:46 - 2285government for tanks and airplanes. And Freeport didn't want the workers in Freeport, so they bought all of this land in the Lake Jackson area and the old downtown area; they put up duplexes for workers to live in. And they were supposed to be gone in ten years, but they're still here. And that-the streets were laid out by Aldren Dow, the son of the founder of Dow Chemical, who was an architect and was a teacher for Frank Lloyd Wright. The streets were laid out with strings to protect big trees, so there are no straight streets. Oyster Creek Drive is the only through street in the city. Yaupon, out here, is 00:21:58 - 2285another through street, but it wasn't then. I mean, that's it for through streets. If you're not on Yaupon or Oyster Creek Drive, you're going to get lost. The first house I lived in was only 927 square feet and it was designed by Aldren Dow. The-those older parts of town that had the Dow houses, they were really efficient. Space was well used, you know, and they're-they're still doing well because those tracts he laid out still have all of the beautiful giant trees with 90-foot canopies. Incredible. 00:22.47 - 2285DT: Maybe you can mention some of the work that you've done to protect these trees in that bottomland system. I understand that you've, over the years, helped U.S. Fish and Wildlife preserve large portions of the Columbia bottomlands. Can you talk about those experiences?00:23:11 - 2285

SS: Yeah. Back in the 80's, the city of Lake Jackson bought a large tract of land for a wilderness park. And it was land that had been marketed all over the world, but to develop it, you'd have had to have built a very expensive levy all the way around it because it's in the flood plain of the Brazos River. It's on the Brazos River. And only about 7 ½ miles, river miles, from the Gulf of Mexico. And it's also-was an uncut area. And part of that tract, they purchased in 1990 for a golf course, the tract next to it. And 00:24:18 - 2285the Corps of Engineers made them go back and redo their environmental assessment because it was wetlands. And it took them five months to get on site because it was too wet to do the evaluation. There was a battle between Fish and Wildlife and the Corps over the amount of wetlands. One of the most significant things from that battle that occurred in the 90's is that they now understand that all of that area was wetlands. They've done further studies on what's called the Dance Bayou Tract that was the first piece of preserved Columbia bottomlands for the Columbia Bottomland Refuge. And 00:25:22 - 2285they've done soil test studies for the past five years that show that in these bottomlands, where you have this dense Pledger clay soil, that they are wetlands, but they are formed differently than from saturated soils. So when the new manual comes out for the Corps, there will be a section-and I'm not sure whether they're couching it in terms of 00:25:58 - 2285wetlands in Brazoria County with dense clay soils, or just wetlands with dense clay soils, which is what it ought to be. Because all of the really important, significant soil scientists from Soil Conservation Service-what are they now? NRCS [Natural Resources Conservation Service"? And from the Corps and Fish and Wildlife, Parks and Wildlife, all agree that these are definitely wetlands. That, however, was not what the federal court found.

You know, I sued, along with Houston Audubon and Sierra Club, the city of Lake Jackson and the Corps of Engineers over that assessment. And it was in court from '96 to '98. And appealed to the 5th Circuit and the 00:27:12 - 22855th Circuit threw it out. But in the meantime, in '95, Fish and Wildlife circulated their environmental assessment for the Columbia Bottomlands Refuge and because the controversy over the lawsuit was raging, and raging is a good word for the controversy. You know, I filled volumes of newspaper clippings in five-inch binders that stood this high. Blackburn was the attorney, I made copies for them. Richard Morrison worked on the case. We came very close to winning that issue, but we didn't.

There was a bond election that had the largest voter turnout ever. We lost by 56 votes. I-that was very discouraging, I think, to the city because our elections-from that bond election in January of '97, each election cycle, the percentage of people voting kept smaller and smaller. And we had the largest percentage of people who voted in elections in this county prior to that. Anyway, they're building the golf course. They're stripping the land as we speak.00:28:46 - 2285DT: How do you think they got their permit if the soil scientists agreed that it was a wetland?SS: But that was after, you know, the legal-the court-the case was in court.(silence on tape)

SS: The Corps-the Galveston's-Galveston District of the Corp of Engineers is the worst district for wetland preservation in the United States. They are far worse than Louisiana. They never saw a wetland. They are really, really bad.00:29:38 - 2285DT: When you say they're bad, maybe you can give us examples and try and help us understand, is it incompetence or negligence or just disregard of the law? What is it?00:29:54 - 2285

SS: Some of mo-both. Their mission is military and Congress gave them the authority to regulate wetlands. And I think that the biologists in the Corps district are basically looked down on by the engineers as not being significant. I really think that has an awful lot to do with it.DT: Just a culture within the agency. SS: I think that's a very big part of it.DT: And why is the Galveston district unusually poor?

SS: Location.00:30:44 - 2285DT: And, in what sense?SS: They're in Texas. They're in Houston. They're at the heart of the oil industry. Lots of developers. And what the Corps does like, the Corps likes big water projects, i.e. 00:31:11 - 2285Houston Ship Channel. Those kinds of things. Wallisville. Do you remember Wallisville? It eventually got modified, but you know, that was a big project. And there were also Congressmen pushing it. And the Corps of Engineers is also sort of a Congressional playground. Big projects, send money back home, get reelected. Maybe-maybe it's not getting reelected in all of the citizen voters who want that project, but big people who help finance campaigns might want that project. So it is-it's-it is Congressional playground.00:32:06 - 2285DT: Can you help us understand it by maybe describing the ship channels, dredging, which, I guess has gone on for many years and with some controversy, to try and get it deeper to allow larger ships in?00:32:24 - 2285

SS: Well, you have to remember that when Texas was a republic, Galveston Bay's average depth was 3 ½ to 4 feet, that you could literally walk across the bay. You know, you might have deep spots, but you could walk across the bay. In fact, when Audubon visited Texas, he walked from the end of Galveston Island out to Bird Island. That-you couldn't do that now. And when you dredge that deep channel, you change the dynamics of the bay and you lose the habitat. You lose your sea grasses. You know, there used to 00:33:15 - 2285be a turtle-gosh, what would you call it? A factory? That processed turtle meat over in Chambers County and that area of the bay wasn't called East Bay, it was called Turtle Bay. The sea grasses went from Chambers County all the way through Brazoria County. Probably not up in the San Jacinto area because it would be too-too much fresh water. Now, the last remaining sea grasses are only found in Christmas Bay, as-as I'm sure you're well aware of. Galveston Bay Foundation, along with state and federal agencies, has been transplanting some of those grasses into West Bay, where the ga-the grasses have been gone for 30 years. And reestablishing them. 00:34:14 - 2285DT: And why did the grasses disappear?

SS: Change of the dynamics due to the deep, draft channel and all of the traffic. Sedimentation. It's what dredging does, it-you know, it's muck, it's mud. And it-you need clear water for the sea grasses. So the small area known as Christmas Bay is a last place where we have them. And mostly at-up towards the Galveston end, where you get more circulation and more fresh water both. You know, around Cold Pass.00:35:08 - 2285DT: So the problems with opacity in the water, transparency, are not just where the ship channel is, but it's also the Texas City Channel and the Galveston Channel and the Intracoastal Waterway. And the Corps of Engineers is the agency that lets and approves these contracts?00:35:37 - 2285

SS: Well, the Corps of Engineers not only approves the contracts, they-I mean, they're responsible for the projects. Initially, the channel to Houston was built with private funds, but the Corps took it over. It's their responsibility. DT: I understand that there's a new project underway, or at least being proposed by the Ship Channel Authority, for Bayport that might involve another channel. Have you been involved in that issue?SS: Yes.DT: Can you tell us some of the controversies about it?00:36:14 - 2285

SS: Not-not one of the leaders, but it's-that's the same issue. When I got Galveston Bay into the Clean Water Act, the biggest threat that I used-and the Bay System had to be threatened-was a 50 foot channel to Houston, which was before Congress at the time. And after Galveston Bay was declared an estuary of national significance and we began the development of the Ga-Galveston Bay program, Senator Bentsen helped the newly created Galveston Bay Foundation and-and the state program, the Galveston Bay Estuary Program a lot and helped us keep the Corps from getting the 50 foot authorization through Congress. He was chairman of the Senate Environment 00:37:28 - 2285and Public Works Committee at the time. And yet, I had spent a year lobbying him and couldn't get the-the program submitted. You know, he could've just done it and I ended up having the Bureau of Economic Geology and Texas Sea Grant prepare a formal submission. And Texas Sea Grant and Texas Environmental Coalition, that I represented, signed the initial document and submitted all-answering all of the Congressional question with the environmental study. The first submission was done by an education entity and a nonprofit. So after-after it-Congress included it and the House accepted it unanimously after the Senate passed it on the floor. And this was at a time that Reagan was president and Reagan vetoed the Clean Water Act. Phil Graham, who voted against the Clean Water Act, took a walk for me. He was off the floor, which meant to the Republicans he wanted it to pass. So we got a unanimous vote in the House and the Senate. DT: Can you speculate about the politics of these environmental bills? And you, earlier, talked about the passage of some of these bills in the state legislature, but here you're mentioning ones in the Congress. And I'm wondering how it is that environmental issues, which generally seem to poll well, have such difficulty often in the legislature and the Congress. Why is that? Why is there this disconnect, do you think?00:39:43 - 2285

SS: Because the opposition has more money. That money goes into maintaining friendships, that money goes into campaign coffers. It's why, you know, reform of campaigns is still the biggest issue for democracy to survive. And, you know, it doesn't matter whether the issue is in-environmental or is an issue of public health, welfare, whatever it is. You know, it's-it's the same thing. DW: Going back just a bit, you said you entered all of this sometime around 1970, 71, about the time of the first Earth Day. Perhaps you had read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in school.SS: Was one-no, I read it then.DW: Here you come to all of this and it seems like in a very short time, you get, what I would subjectively call, a rather rude awakening, it sounds like, to the realities of politics. Or the idealism of the first Earth Day and the next thing you know, you're in these hallways where guys are shaking hands behind backs and slapping each other on the back and this would be a good ol' boy network. SS: Hmmm-mmm.DW: How did that either disillusion, energize? I mean, what was it when the rubber met the road and the reality that the goals for the environment and the guys, you know, the boy's club in charge of it, was clearly antithetical to that? Did you have reactions to that at the time, in terms of either getting-was it anger? Was it energy? What was it that worked for you at that time?00:41:30 - 2285

SS: You're right. Energy, wish I was 30 years younger. More than 30 years younger, so I had a lot more energy. And anger goes a long way. And the decision that, at some point in your life, you have to fight problems, not ignore them. And, for me, that was a decision I made at that time. And, in fact, by the first Earth Day, I already thought there was, you know, an incredibly serious problem. I just didn't realize how long it was going to take to address it. And once we began addressing it, how seriously, 30 years 00:42:29 - 2285later, we would start backsliding. I always believed things would continue to get better. And I-I think the fight itself was energizing. DT: Was it a personal sort of impact on yourself that being exposed to malathion and having the allergic reactions, both yourself and your child? Or was it the more public policy issues you'd read about in the newspaper or see in Congress when you were lobbying? Which was it that really got you energized?00:43:14 - 2285

SS: It was more the fact that industry was so blatant with their disregard.(misc.)00:43:35 - 2285SS: I-I'm not sure how to get back to where we were after the interruption, but how I got involved with statewide organizations was testifying on air issues before the Air Board in Austin. I was contacted by Ned Fritz, who then came down and visited with us and stayed with us in Lake Jackson and, at the time, they were getting ready to do a statewide umbrella organization, Texas Environmental Coalition. And he asked this-the CSC to...DT: Which stands for?00:44:26 - 2285SS: Citizen's Survival Committee. The local group? To come to the initial two-day workshop to try and form TEC. They're initially San Jacinto Lung Association. You know, the Houston Area Lung Association had put up a 45,000 dollar grant, which was a lot of money back in the early 70's. And so, I went. And it's very interesting, John Rogers was a delegate there with AF of L-CIO, and I had met him down here because he had gone into the plant with O.D. Kennemore and photographed a lot of these rather egregious things that were going on. And he had his wife come to the meeting and it turns out I had gone to junior high and high school with his wife and had not seen her since we both went off to college. But we recognized each other instantly, and you may know her. Mary Beth Rogers? It is a small world, isn't it? That-sorry. I've forgotten why I was on that topic.00:46:04 - 2285DT: You were explaining how you first got involved in statewide environmental politics.

SS: Oh, well, truly, that was-was it. I ended up becoming a delegate, initially, to 00:46 :25 - 2285Texas Environmental Coalition for Texas Committee on Natural Resources.

And doing that got me involved with Texas League of Conservation Voters. That, and I believed in Babe Schwartz's idea of being involved in campaigns and that if-if you want to change the world at all, you have to be involved in politics. You know, and that's not a real popular thing to do in the environmental community. And so, you really need to do that when you're younger, anyway, because it does take a lot of energy.00:47:11 - 2285DT: Well, that's an interesting remark, because I've noticed that some environmentalists believe that if you present the story, make sure your facts are accurate, tell everybody, you know, get it out through the news media or through the schools, that people will do the right thing. But it sounds like what you're suggesting is that there's some real politic involved, that you've got to not just make the case, but somehow do some horse trading and do some politicking. Is that accurate?00:47:49 - 2285

SS: Pretty much. You definitely-you may not have a whole lot to do a lot of horse trading with, but if you're going to be persuading just because you're right and you get your message out, nothing's going to happen. You have to be pushing all of the time and if you don't push, either on the administration side-if you're not continually pushing the agencies, and if you don't go to the decision makers in the legislature, in Congress, you know-and let me tell you, Texans don't go to Congress a lot. In Congress, you don't see a lot of environmentalists from Texas being there, trying to influence legislation. 00:48:45 - 2285People are flying from California or Oregon or Washington all of the time. They're there. They're coming from a longer distance. Probably doesn't cost much more, but we Texans don't do that. And, you know, it's-I know it's expensive. I know it's difficult. I was doing it raising three children and sometimes wondering where the money was going to come from, but I had a husband who made sure I could do those things. He was committed to the same causes I was, but, you know, one of us had to earn a living. 00:49:36 - 2285DT: Why do you think it is that Texans are somehow different from those in California, other states that have had more successful, or more aggressive, environmental programs?00:49:47 - 2285

SS: I really don't know. I'd-I'd hate to say it's because, for the most part, Texans don't care. And we are the good ol' boy state and that really does influence what we do and how we do it. But, you know, it's-it's just like conquering of the West. There is no West to conquer anymore and we didn't conquer it in the first place. We may have destroyed it, but we didn't conquer it. I don't-I can't answer that question. I mean, those may be some hints, but I don't think that's the total answer. I'm sure there's much more to it. DT: Well, let's try something that's not maybe as rhetorical and, you know, unanswerable. Getting back to coastal issues, you've told us about the bottomland issues of wetlands and about dredging and about public beach access. As I understand it, another coastal issue you've been involved in is oil spills and that you've helped write some of the first oil spill ordinances along the coast. Can you tell about why you became concerned about this? Maybe some of the instances of earlier oil spills that you were aware of?00:51:17 - 2285

SS: Sure. Again, going to back to the 70's, I read that Dow wanted to-along with other large companies-build an offshore port to import oil. This was called the Sea Dock Consortium. The port was going to be called Sea Dock, as it would be 26 miles offshore. And, at the time, I was also reviewing a proposal for dams on the upper Brazos for Friends of the Earth. And so I got into reviewing environmental impact statements and I reviewed the environmental impact statement. I also, for Texas Environmental 00:52:11 - 2285Coalition, was looking at a proposed 60-foot channel into Galveston. And, as I looked at these proposals, became clear to me-you know, we're talking about environmental impact statements that were many, many, many volumes thick. Very, very big. The first ones were really awful. I-I read them and I felt like the offshore proposal for the oil port was the smartest, most sensible thing industry ever proposed. And I developed a taskforce on TEC to look at those issues. And we looked at all of the port issues and came up with a statewide position supporting the Sea Dock position.DT: And why did you support it?00:53:20 - 2285

SS: Because it was safe. It didn't come through a single bay margin. There was no necessity to dredge deep channels into shallow bay estuarine areas and cause all of the-the problems associated with that and destruction of habitat and loss of fisheries resources. So I literally sold that position to statewide organizations, particularly Sierra Club and they supported that position strongly. And what happened with the Sea Dock proposal is that after the energ-second energy crisis in '78 and '79, the government 00:54:21 - 2285believed that we were going to need to import a whole lot more oil and they wanted the facility to be built a whole lot larger than what industry thought it should be. And so, Congress had passed the Deepwater Ports Act, whereby you can site a port offshore, but they required at the time that it be very large and some of the bigger companies like Exxon were not willing to back the bonds. So Dow, Phillips, Conoco, some of the others, went to the legislature and got them to pass a Deepwater Ports Act and set up a 00:55:13 - 2285Deepwater Port Commission strictly for the purpose of building the Sea Dock facility. And I was appointed to that Port Commission, I was the environmentalist on that commission. And Bob Casey, a former Congressman from the area, was chairman and I was vice-chairman and together we walked 27 permits through the system. We got the Deepwater Port permit. But with Exxon not backing the bonds, none of the others were willing to spend enough money on the bond issue that the whole thing collapsed. And it was never built.

At the same time, they did a similar proposal in Louisiana called Loop. 00:56:16 - 2285And Loop was 18 months behind Texas, but Shell backed the bonds because they needed to get the oil to go up the Caprock Pipeline from Louisiana to Chicago and various other-other spots. And they were used to dealing with bureaucracies that were much worse than U.S. bureaucracies. You know. We should've done it. It was-it was the thing to do. And industry was right; there wasn't a need for a facility that big. But there was the need for the facility. As a result, we have the Port of Houston, one more time, going after deepwater. They all want 50 feet, then they'll want 60. And it's the wrong place to do it.00:57:21 - 2285DT: You explained part of the problem with having these onshore oil loading and unloading facilities is the risk of simply dredging and changing the hydrodynamics of the bays. But I understand that spills are another problem. Can you talk about some of the more notorious spills in this area and some of the ordinances that you've worked on to protect against them?00:57:50 - 2285

SS: Well, yeah. While I was a Deepwater Port Commissioner, I've had the opportunity to participate in a lot of conferences dealing with the importation of oil. And while doing that, I met the head of NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] Oil Spills and he said, you know, you ought to be trained, as an environmentalist on the Port Commission, you ought to know everything there is to know about what it takes to clean up an oil spill. And I said, do you know what? You're right. Because one of the things we were required to do was to write an oil spill plan. So I took the NOAA training and spent a week being certified as an oil spill responder for the Scientific Support Team for NOAA. And within a couple of weeks, there 00:58:58 - 2285was a major spill off Puerto Rico and they called for me to go work.

Also, shortly thereafter, we had the Ixtoc oil spill and by this time in my life, I was serving also on the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere [NACOA]. It no longer exists but it's-it's been replaced by the Ocean Policy Commission, some of the same people I served with are on the Ocean Policy Commission. And we were holding hearings on the Ixtoc oil spill. There was an oilman from Houston who was on NACOA, who just happened to be the Chief Operating Officer of Zapata Offshore. And you know, he was aware that it 00:59:57 - 2285was Governor Clements oil rig and actually what had happened and we literally held hearings in Congress on the spill. And I was getting phone calls daily from the NOAA people. They were mad in Mexico at the U.S. and mad at Texas, in particular, because there had been a natural gas pipeline that was being built in Mexico to the United States that President Carter, after listening to some Texas people, cancelled. So everyone was onshore in the Bay of Campeche at the spill site, except the U.S. Government. Bob 01:00:50 - 2285Armstrong was the land commissioner and the NOA Scientific Support Team held a meeting on tar balls and it just happened to be in the same building where the Land Office is located. And some of the members of the Scientific Support Team met with the land commissioner and the next day, they went flying to Mexico because the oil was rapidly approaching Texas shores. Now this is the largest spill in the world. It happens in '79, people have forgotten about it. You know, it was eclipsed by what happened in Alaska. But this went on. We responded for 16 weeks directly to that spill and I worked 01:01:48 - 228512 of those for the Scientific Support Team. We were in Corpus Christi and I was out everyday in a helicopter for 8 hours mapping the oil. Then it-we would come back at 6 o'clock, have a meeting and hear from all of the different teams on what they had found. And then, I would go with a Scientific Support Coordinator to the Coast Guard, brief the Coast Guard, stay for the press conference afterwards to hear how the Coast Guard would describe what was happening. DT: And what was happening?(misc.)[End of Reel 2285]