Dennis the Menace

The chair of Texas' House Committee on Environmental Regulation, Angleton Republican Dennis Bonnen, is perhaps the Legislature’s biggest impediment to cleaning up the Texas environment. From the May 4, 2007, Texas Observer.

Texas leads the country in air pollution, hazardous waste, mercury contamination, carbon dioxide emissions, and any number of other ways you might measure a sick state. This session, legislators created a bipartisan House Environmental Legislative Caucus to try to fix some of those problems. Its chair, Rep. Ana Hernandez, is a Democrat from Houston, home to some of the state’s worst environmental problems. Hernandez, perhaps mindful of the political environment in which she operates, has filed several modest bills to start addressing environmental issues—without overly burdening the local economy. One proposal would create a cap-and-trade carbon dioxide emissions program; such programs allow commercial interests to buy and sell pollution rights. Another would notify homeowners of polluters in their midst. Yet her legislation faces an insurmountable hurdle—the House Committee on Environmental Regulation.

Sadly, the 35-year-old chair of the committee, Angleton Republican Dennis Bonnen, is perhaps the Legislature’s biggest impediment to cleaning up the Texas environment.

Bonnen has raised willful ineffectiveness to an art form. He is refusing to give hearings to 42 House bills and 8 Senate bills in his committee. While other committees have met 15 or 20 times, Environmental Regulation has heard bills on just nine days. Bonnen didn’t even call his first meeting until mid-March. It has grown so bad that pro-environment legislators write bills in ways that try to avoid Bonnen’s committee, betting instead on a brighter future in committees like Government Reform and Regulated Industries. When Bonnen deigns to hold a hearing on a bill he doesn’t support, he runs the committee like a dress rehearsal for “The O’Reilly Factor,” interrupting witnesses, grilling them on minor questions, and calling them names.

Read the rest at texasobserver.org