Fayette County Leaders Must Answer TCEQ’s Direct Challenge Regarding LCRA Permit
To the Editor:
To The Honorable Dan Mueller, Fayette County Judge: Please find attached a Formal Complaint and Demand for County Abatement and Investigation regarding the ongoing, severe environmental and financial fraud occurring at the LCRA Fayette Power Project (FPP). A copy has also been routed to District Attorney James Herbrich.
I am writing to you today not just to submit this complaint, but to bring to your immediate attention a shocking administrative overreach by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). In their rush to approve LCRA’s permit amendment, the TCEQ has formally and publicly attempted to usurp your statutory authority as the highest elected official in Fayette County.
When you submitted a formal request for a public meeting on December 4, 2025, to allow our citizens to be heard, the TCEQ Executive Director arbitrarily denied your request. They did this intentionally to freeze the timeline and shut down public comment. But far worse is what the TCEQ’s Office of Public Interest Counsel (OPIC) wrote into the official legal record in their attempt to dismiss your standing.
On Page 9 of OPIC’s Response, the state explicitly argued that if your request was made on behalf of Fayette County, “there has been no showing of the County’s statutory authority over, or interest in, the application.”
This is a staggering insult to your office and a direct attack on Fayette County’s sovereignty. For a state agency in Austin to formally declare that a County Government has “no statutory authority” over a facility discharging 1.16 billion gallons of industrial effluent per day into its own jurisdiction is legally indefensible. They are willfully ignoring your mandate under Texas Water Code § 26.171 and Texas Health and Safety Code § 341.012, which grants you and the Commissioners Court the explicit power to abate public health nuisances and protect our local groundwater.
By denying your authority, the TCEQ is stripping you of your legal ability to serve and protect the citizens of Fayette County. They are attempting to separate LCRA’s surface water permit from the catastrophic reality that 23 out of 23 groundwater monitoring wells at the FPP site have failed. The unlined ash pits are sitting in the Gulf Coast Aquifer, continuously leaching heavy metals into the water supply.
We have already launched a multi-agency counter-offensive. We have petitioned the Texas Attorney General, the Public Utility Commission (PUCT), and the federal EPA Inspector General, exposing how the TCEQ is illegally masking LCRA’s liability and helping them evade over $146 million in state penalties.
However, the final piece of this fight belongs here at home. We cannot allow an Austin bureaucracy to dictate that Fayette County has no say over the poisoning of its own aquifers and the Colorado River watershed.
We are formally requesting that you and the Commissioners Court: 1. Assert Your Jurisdiction: File an immediate, formal objection to TCEQ Docket No. 2026-0291-IWD that explicitly cites your statutory authority over county groundwater and public health nuisances, correcting the TCEQ record.
2. Invoke Local Nuisance Abatement: Utilize the County’s powers under the Texas Health and Safety Code to demand a halt to the unlined pit leakage.
3. Coordinate with the District Attorney: Review the attached complaint detailing LCRA’s deceptive reporting practices and the falsification of their environmental containment.
We have backed the TCEQ into a corner with federal and state law, but we need your office to drop the local hammer. Please let me know when your office has a moment to discuss these filings. We stand ready to support you in defending Fayette County’s jurisdiction.