Don’t Reduce Monitoring

To the Editor:

Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) is seeking to reduce monitoring requirements at the Fayette Power Project while also asking the state to deny requests for a public hearing on those changes.

That should concern more than just Fayette County.

Monitoring is one of the lowest-cost ways to confirm conditions, detect problems early, and reduce uncertainty. If everything is operating within acceptable limits, continued monitoring should validate that. Reducing monitoring does not reduce risk—it reduces visibility into that risk.

What makes this more troubling is how LCRA has responded to public input. In its filing, LCRA argues that requests for a hearing — including one submitted by Fayette County Judge Dan Mueller on behalf of county residents — should be denied on technical legal grounds. Multiple individual requests were dismissed the same way.

That may be legally permissible, but it avoids the larger issue of transparency.

The financial implications extend well beyond Fayette County. Customers of Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative, nearby cities served through LCRA’s system, and Austin Energy ratepayers are all financially connected to this plant.

If problems are discovered later rather than sooner, the resulting costs — cleanup, mitigation, or legal exposure — are unlikely to stay local. They are far more likely to be passed through utilities and ultimately borne by customers. We have seen before how coal ash problems can become far more expensive once they are discovered late rather than early. The 2008 Kingston spill in Tennessee ultimately cost more than $1 billion to clean up.

Reducing monitoring today may simply increase costs tomorrow.

Fayette County residents deserve a clear public explanation and a local public meeting before any changes to monitoring are allowed to move forward.