Texas environmental officials are once again planning . . . to clean Houston's air.

Meetings will be held on March 22 and March 27 to discuss traffic, rail, construction and other such sources. Pollution from industry and smaller fixed point sources will be discussed at meetings on April 19 and May 24.

- submitted to the Houston Chronicle (but not published) 

"Stay inside until the smell is gone, or until the air isn't so heavy." That's what Rosaria Marroquin, one of our constituents, tells her children when they want to go outside to play with squirt guns. Parents should be urging their children to go outside, but in the industrial east end of Houston, the toxic air creates a daily parenting challenge.

Similar concerns have been voiced in a project sponsored by Mothers for Clean Air and funded by EPA. The Southeast Houston Project is addressing the problem of air quality by bringing together elected officials, universities, regulatory agencies, residents and local industry at monthly meetings. Residents are monitoring the air using organic vapor monitoring devices at 23 stations.

Remarks by Andy Saenz at the Risk Communication session of the workshop, Air Toxics: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and What We Need to Know (October 17-18, 2005).

… we worked very, very hard on some of these same techniques where we made these presentations to these neighborhoods, tried to make our message clear and simple, and tried to avoid that technical jargon and we tried to always control who delivered the message.

On those 12 or 13 meetings we came to, it was always the same 4 people who delivered the same message, so that the message was consistent, so that the message was representative of what the agency was doing.