Audio By Carbonatix
Ahead of a vote next week in the Texas House of Representatives on a bill that would strip Texas cities of most of their power to regulate a certain resource extraction process that totally doesn’t cause earthquakes or flaming tap water and will carry the United States to energy independence, local leaders including Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins and Dallas City Council Member Philip Kingston denounced the measure at City Hall on Thursday.
Kingston, as you can hear in KERA’s audio of the press conference, gave what has to be the definitive quote of Dallas’ fight to stop HB 40.
“When we rely on [Dallas Fire Rescue], our public safety professionals to protect us, then we get excellent fire safety and emergency response from them,” Kingston said. “When we rely on the state of Texas, the state government of Texas to provide for local health and safety, we get the West explosion,” he said.
Boom. Too bad he didn’t drop the mic and strut away.
HB 40 would limit local control of fracking to above-ground activities like noise, traffic and setbacks from schools and homes for drilling sites. Any other regulations of the process would have to be made at the state level. The bill, written by Republican Drew Darby of San Angelo, seems designed to target both Denton’s complete fracking ban, passed in November and a 2013 ordinance passed by the Dallas City Council that made fracking basically impossible within city limits.
