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BROWNSVILLE — Members of the city’s newly appointed Environmental and Conservation Task Force faced a barrage of criticism minutes after being sworn in Wednesday, as much of the public comments focused on calls to remove one of the members.
About 40 people squeezed into the conference room at the Brownsville Event Center, where members were meant to take their oaths of office before selecting a chair and vice-chair.
Members of an environmental activism group repeated past criticism of task force member Carolyn Wood, a senior environmental regulatory engineer for SpaceX, accusing her of having a conflict of interest due to her employer.
The group of 11 experts in engineering, water systems, public health and more were selected to research data centers’ environmental and economic impact on communities. They are expected to deliver in December a preliminary report on their findings and recommendations to the city commission, which will have final say on any data center regulations the city adopts.
City Manager Alan Guard kicked off the meeting by welcoming the task force members and addressing the tension. Public hearings on a pending data center moratorium have gotten heated, with public commenters at times lobbing personal attacks at city commissioners and demanding Wood be removed from the task force.
“I just want to talk about the elephant in the room,” Guard said. “This has been a very public, big issue for the commission, (and) for them to put this task force together is a very good idea.”
He said the task force was free to meet whenever it wanted and to hold public hearings to get community input. They could choose to submit both majority and minority reports if opinions on the group’s final recommendations diverged.
While city boards typically don’t have budgets allocated to them, he asked task force members to speak up if they felt they needed to consult an outside expert.
“There are multiple views on this, so I hope as this task force goes through its work,” Guard said, “everybody be respectful of each other, everybody listen to each other.”
Six members of the public gave comments, with most accusing Wood of having a conflict of interest. The comments echoed mistrust expressed during public hearings on the data center moratorium.
“It’s obvious that the city is trying to control the outcome of this,” Christopher Basaldú, co-founder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, said. “We should draft ordinances that actually reflect the interests of the environment, not SpaceX and not data centers.”
Assistant City Attorney Lena Muñoz cut through some of the tension as she cheerfully walked task force members through transparency regulations, including rules for publicizing meetings, public information requests, the city code of ethics and meeting procedures.
“Transparency is a pillar of democracy,” Muñoz said, “and though some people might believe what we have here is plutocracy, what we have here is a democracy.”
The conversation again turned to Wood’s employment during the conflict of interest section of the code of ethics review. Task force member Valeria Caballero, who works for the South Texas Environmental Justice Network as a just recovery coordinator, asked how the city’s process to report a conflict of interest could be initiated against Wood.
As task force members began discussing what did and didn’t qualify as a conflict of interest, First Assistant City Attorney Jennifer Avendaño interjected to tell members that requests for legal advice had to be conducted in executive session. Attendees left the conference room after task force members voted to go into executive session.
When the public portion of the meeting resumed and the orientation on city policies was complete, the agenda turned to selecting a chair and vice-chair. Only the seven community members on the board have voting power. Caballero volunteered to serve as chair and was voted in.
Task force member Etienne Rosas, a public policy researcher who has criticized Wood’s appointment to the group, volunteered to be vice-chair.
Wood asked if others could be considered for vice-chair and nominated task force member Scott Fry, who works as general manager for Cameron County Drainage District No.1. Fry declined the nomination, and Rosas was voted in as vice-chair.
After the meeting, task force member Joseph Hollmann said how well the group works together remains to be seen. He is president of the Southwest Regional Water Authority (SRWA) and a Brownsville Public Utilities Board board member.
“It’s an interesting group of people we have assembled, trying to solve this very serious problem for Brownsville,” Hollmann said. “I really hope that we’re able to come together and work together, and move this forward in a way that produces a result that will stick. Nothing’s worse than creating a whole bunch of recommendations that everybody ignores.”
Rosas said he feels cautiously optimistic. It’s not the task force’s tight timeline to deliver recommendations that concerns him but the quality of the work it will need to produce within six months.
“I don’t want to just check a box. I want it to be something that actually addresses a very real problem that the task force was being proposed as an answer to,” Rosas said. “I think the timeline is ambitious, but it is going to be necessary for us to pace ourselves and do it in a way that actually causes an impact, and leads to a significant change in how we are doing things.”