Opinion: Stop Sacrificing the Coastal Bend for Corporate Profit

As published in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times on April 4, 2025

A newly-published study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University has delivered a message that Coastal Bend leaders urgently need to hear: traditional methods of evaluating health risks from industrial pollution don’t tell the real story.

The study focused on communities in Southeastern Pennsylvania living near refineries and industrial complexes. Just like Corpus Christi, Gregory, Portland, Ingleside and other communities here, those studied in Pennsylvania sit just beyond the fence line of massive plants, meaning their air contains a mix of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like formaldehyde and benzene – pollutants with known links to cancer, neurological damage, lung disease, and more.

The new study compared two approaches to assessing health risks from industrial pollution. The traditional method, typically used by regulatory agencies, only considered the impact of compounds on the most susceptible organ systems, while the new method evaluated each chemical’s impact across all organ systems. The difference was profound, and alarming.

Using the traditional method, researchers found limited evidence of risk in the communities they studied. But with the more comprehensive approach, they identified significant hazards to the neurological, respiratory, renal and endocrine systems – some at exposure levels nine times higher than what’s considered safe. In total, they discovered risks from 28 pollutants, whereas the traditional method only flagged 16.

The Johns Hopkins study makes one thing clear: people living near polluting facilities are being exposed to far more harm than our outdated risk assessments have previously revealed.

That brings me back to the Coastal Bend, where many communities are breathing in exactly the same kind of pollution, and, outrageously, where many local officials  jump at every chance to use public resources to incentivize companies to keep producing it.

Consider the huge property tax breaks that big polluters have received from local government. A 2022 study commissioned by my organization and conducted by AutoCase showed that Coastal Bend counties, cities and school districts have given away nearly $2.5 billion in tax revenue to companies like Cheniere, Citgo, Flint Hills and Valero. That’s lost tax revenue that could have been used to pay for roads, parks, emergency response, or other public services for our communities; instead, we gave it away to rich CEOs and their shareholders.

Adding insult to injury, the City of Corpus Christi is pushing forward with a plan to build a $757 million desalination plant – funded through increased water bills for ratepayers like you and me – to deliver more water to big industry, which according to some reports uses up to 80% of our regional water supply. That’s right: desalination isn’t needed for residents or small businesses, it’s only needed by polluters. (Neither is it safe, according to experts who have warned that the discharge will create ‘dead zones’ in the bay. Indeed, to call baywater desalination safe because it has a TCEQ permit is like calling a henhouse safe because a fox said so.)

Inevitably, when you ask Coastal Bend officials why they vote over and over to give away the store to big polluters, they say it’s to create jobs. But what they seem unable to understand, or unwilling to acknowledge, is that technological advances have led to significant decreases in worker employment in the fossil fuel and petrochemical sectors, even as production increases. That means the actual rationale for subsidies isn’t jobs; it’s bigger corporate profits.

Enough of this. We can’t keep paying big corporations to poison our air, hog our water, and hollow out our local tax base, all in exchange for empty promises. And we certainly can’t keep doing it based on faulty science that fails to account for the true cost to our health and future.

The Pennsylvania study should be a wake-up call for the Coastal Bend. We must:

●      Reject new tax abatements for fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities that emit VOCs and other toxic pollutants.
●      Prioritize water for residents and local businesses over polluting industry.
●      Require comprehensive cumulative health risk assessments, reflecting the latest science, before permits of any kind are granted.
●      Demand full transparency from industry, including real-time air and water monitoring in the communities surrounding their facilities.

The Coastal Bend deserves better than to be a sacrifice zone for corporate profit. Finally, science is catching up with what we’ve known for generations: when you live near fossil fuel or petrochemical plants, you breathe in risk. You inhale injustice. And for what? The facts show there’s no good answer.

It’s time for our local officials to stop rubber-stamping sweetheart deals for corporate polluters and start putting the health of our communities first.