Photo by Leslie Minora

Lois Finkelman, drilling task force chair, gives city council their recommendations.

It was Dallas city council member Tennell Atkins who, during yesterday's discussion of the city's still-far-off gas-drilling regulations, posed the million-dollar question. "Do you think that it's safe to drill in the city of Dallas?" he asked task force chair Lois Finkelman.

Finkelman was noncommittal. That left others to speak up for the money, and the same old characters to speak up on behalf of the environment.

The task force is charged with making recommendations for a new gas-drilling ordinance that balances environmental concerns with financial ones. The group's current recommendations include 1,000-foot setbacks, land use restrictions and notification requirements, and they require gas companies to obtain a zoning permit that's subject to council approval and a permit granted by city staff. But they leave a lot of leeway for council to make case-by-case decisions, including on a particularly controversial question: whether to allow drilling in floodplains and on parkland.

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Sierra Club

Take a look outside your window. You've probably gotten used to that omnipresent, smoky haze that hangs over the Metroplex like a pall of economic viability -- upwind power plants a'chugging; cars snaking down tangles of toll roads and highways; shale gas production amid the cities and 'burbs slowed but steady. Says the state environmental regulator to its citizenry: Try not to breathe as much air, DFW. Today, it will be bad for you.

This afternoon in particular, that big laboratory in the sky will brew a potent, alchemical mixture of nitrogen oxide, volatile organic compounds, sunlight and heat to create something else altogether: Ozone.

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Trinity East holdings, click here for larger image.

Four years have passed since Trinity East signed on as the largest gas lease-holder with the city of Dallas, and the company still doesn't know when it will be allowed to drill its first well -- if ever.

As the company's name suggests, Trinity East wants to drill for natural gas along the east side of the Trinity River, but its plans have been been stymied while a city task force works to come up with recommendations for new rules on where gas drilling can take place in the city limits. The company's plans hit another hurdle last week, when the city released a map showing plans to drill in the river's floodplain, on city parkland -- a fact that doesn't sit well with anti-fracking groups, which fear potential pollution and loss of green space.

For Trinity East, another kind of green is at stake. The company has $19 million invested in mineral leases from the city in addition to other agreements with private landowners on a stretch of land snaking along the river from Royal Lane to west of downtown. The Dallas drilling task force had initially voted against allowing hydraulic fracturing on floodplains and parkland, but in a last-minute change, its members voted to recommend that the city's updated ordinance allow both if strict conditions are met. City Council has yet to vote on the revised ordinance.

That was good news for Trinity East, but other recommendations -- including set-back distances and land use restrictions -- would potentially prevent drilling at the company's planned sites. Further complicating Trinity East's plans, its Dallas leases lay at the center of a master plan that includes a system of pipelines and infrastructure linking to drill sites in Irving and Farmers Branch. What all this means is that the company's survival largely depends on its ability to drill and carry out hydraulic fracturing in Dallas, says Steve Fort, a manager and shareholder of the company.

Unfair Park discussed these issues and others with Fort to demystify the company's plans and learn how the city's updated ordinance may potentially affect not only gas exploration, but the company's very existence.

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Photo by Brandon Thibodeaux

Last summer -- the state's hottest and driest on record -- brought Texas ranchers to their knees. Rains have revived parts of the state, especially the east. But 50 miles west of Fort Worth and further, the drought varies from severe to exceptional.

So, what's in store for us this summer? Unfair Park chatted with Dr. Travis Miller, Texas AgriLife Extension Service agronomist and drought spokesperson, about reading the climate-modeling tea leaves and what he's seen in his perambulations across the state.

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Big Brown

Sierra Club on Tuesday sued Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, the state's largest unregulated generator of electricity, accusing the company's Big Brown coal-fired plant near Fairfield of thousands of violations of Clean Air Act standards.

The environmental group gave the company an ultimatum last fall when it discovered a litany of alleged violations and no planned enforcement by state regulators. The message: Clean up or go to court. The suit, filed in a Waco federal court, was brought on behalf of the Sierra Club by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit seeking effective enforcement of environmental law.

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Before SMU prof Al Armendariz had even warmed the seat at his post as EPA regional chief, he was pilloried as an activist whose research into the air pollution caused by fracking operations made him unfit to run a five-state office overseeing some of the industry's most important drilling grounds.

He was appointed by President Obama at the end of 2009, several years into a shale gas play that had already re-drawn the energy map in this country -- and whose development had gone virtually unchecked and unstudied. And as Republican presidential candidates vowed to put the EPA on its budgetary chopping block, the agency and Armendariz in particular found a cluster of targets on their backs.

His profile, he now says, has become a "distraction" from the EPA's mission. Earlier today he resigned.

As chronicled in this week's cover story, "Fire in the Hole," his office last month withdrew an endangerment order accusing natural gas producer Range Resources of contaminating a water well in rural Parker County. It was the first order of its kind in Texas, and its withdrawal was seen by his critics as a tacit admission that the agency had overreached, even though it came with an agreement that Range would conduct drinking water testing in the area for another year.

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When President Obama appointed SMU prof Al Armendariz to the EPA regional post in Dallas back in 2009, it was to the sound of collective groaning from the energy industry and Republican politicos. Only months before, he'd authored a study citing oil and gas production as a major source of air pollution in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And now he was supposed to regulate them?

Ever since, everyone from the industry right on down to the chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the Railroad Commission of Texas and Gov. Rick Perry has looked for an excuse to call for his head.

Then came the video above, which should be set to a soundtrack of knives sharpening.

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Watering can, $19.99. (Crazy lady not included.)

A key battle was won this morning in what cable-news commenters might call the War on Sprinklers: The Dallas City Council just voted 13-2 to permanently limit sprinkler use, either by hose or by automatic system, to two days per week, in what can only be seen as a huge victory for the hand-held water-bucket lobby.

Councilwomen Sandy Greyson and Ann Margolin voted no, representing the North Dallas "But Our Lawns Are Just So Dang Pretty" voting block. But with the area's population booming and Mother Nature not exactly cooperating rain-wise, fear of dying of thirst won out in the end.

"Our stewardship for the resources we have in this city is one of the most important things we do," Mayor Mike Rawlings said just before the vote. "It's easy when there's a drought, and when there's not a drought we don't care about it."

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Let's talk trees for a moment. They're a bit like orphans or endangered species in that when people cry out to save them, there's little push-back, even if little action is ultimately taken. But in an op-ed piece in today's New York Times, one sentence amid an opus of tree-praise citing studies and data from around the nation caught our attention: "The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning." Now that's something we haven't heard before.

With that, Unfair Park called Micah Pace, the regional urban forester who covers the Dallas area for the Texas Forest Service. We figured he could tell us how, exactly, trees affect air conditioning (and clarify whether that's a bogus statement), and let us know if and why we should care about trees in Dallas. Our chat is below.

The article went on to include that last year's drought killed more than five million urban shade trees in Texas, and another half-billion in state parks and forests. "We have underestimated the importance of trees," the article states plainly. We weren't aware that their importance was something in need of defense, but the tone of the piece was reminiscent of Michael Pollan's widely quoted In Defense of Food, which explains in very certain terms why people must re-evaluate what they eat and revert to actual food.

The writer credits trees with filtering and cleaning water and air, cooling the air, aiding the human immune system, lessening anxiety and depression and treating disease. Here, we should mention that the piece is written by a man named Jim Robbins, who penned an upcoming book called The Man Who Planted Trees.

Here's our chat with Pace, our local tree guru, who's less of a hugger and more of a pragmatist:

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Photo by Leslie Minora

Councilman Scott Griggs tells the crowd to keep writing and talking with council if they want to see change.

Councilman Scott Griggs kicked off last night's festival of shared discontent over the possibility of drilling in Dallas under the ordinance changes recommended by the drilling task force. Two city drilling task force members, a former member of the Fort Worth drilling task force, members of environmental advocacy groups and a room full of concerned community members gathered with a shared complaint and a common goal: They say the city's drilling task force's recommendations are not protective enough, and they want the ordinance to be more protective when city council votes.

"If there's one thing that's more important than natural gas, it's quality of life," Griggs told the crowd, gathered at the Center for Community Cooperation on Live Oak Street. He urged community members to show up at the open microphone portion of council meetings and write to the council and the mayor. "It's not too late," he said. "This is the time for action."

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