Too tired to do much tonight, will put up audio and some video clips tomorrow, probably on this same blog space. Meanwhile, a quick impression. Government is way too compartmentalized. Here you have an issue about clean air, water endangered species AND blast mining, but can you take it to ONE entity? Oh, no. TCEQ ONLY handles the air situation and pretty much rubber stamps applications. They don't deal with any other issue.

UPDATE: Here's audio of the meeting, chunked (someone told me recently that having the audio in one big file in a slow internet connection-dialup-took forever, so I'm cutting them into sections.) Incidentally, TCEQ mentioned that they have a DVD and are going to try to make an MP3 of the meeting so that's another avenue to hear this, almost certainly from their website.

MP3- Opening comments from TCEQ (about 5.32 mg right click to download to listen from your computer)

MP3- Darrell Best comments about 6.7 mg

More on a new post                AND VIDEO

There were a lot of people at that meeting.

Darrell Best brought up some great points that I want to call out tomorrow, but one in particular was about how the meeting was announced the day before spring break, then the venue changed, mid-week, from the high school to the junior high. Did that prevent anyone from coming? Perhaps, who knows, although TCEQ did station somebody (somebodies) at the HS door to direct them to the junior high.

Tommy Davis was up there on the platform looking very disrespectful-he had on a gimme cap BACKWARDS on his head!