Resize textAAA TxDOT commissioner’s intervention on landfill project questioned Posted: 7:37 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 21, 2014 Email 3Facebook 1Twitter 0ShareThis 10 By Asher Price - American-Statesman Staff With its traffic analysis languishing at the Texas Department of Transportation, a Georgia-based company hoping to build a controversial landfill in Caldwell County was looking for help. So two of Green Group’s lobbyists turned to a commissioner at the state transportation agency, who also serves as second-in-command of a consulting firm where they are both associates. Within a week, the politically connected commissioner, Jeff Moseley, had contacted the Austin district engineer — someone not part of the headquarters administrative team — to ask about the project, emails obtained by the Statesman show. Shortly thereafter, state engineers decided to accept, with some ambivalence, the company’s traffic analysis of how the landfill would affect an accident-prone stretch of road. The Texas Ethics Commission, alerted to Moseley’s involvement by a Caldwell County rancher opposed to the landfill, has ruled that there is not evidence available to determine that the episode runs afoul of state law, but it raises questions of propriety as Moseley’s outside business interests appear to give him a stake in the outcome. The ethics complaint was filed by Rob Kohler on behalf of his father, Dan Kohler, who owns 130 acres of ranch land about two miles from the proposed landfill. +CHRIS SMITH A proposed landfill in Caldwell County has some of the hallmarks of a standard landfill fight: an out-of-state company says it ... Read More “One side of me says he was just getting the process going,” Dan Kohler said. “But he should have been smart enough to have steered clear. Either he was acting out of stupidity or full knowledge.” Moseley, who was appointed to the transportation board by Gov. Rick Perry and earns $15,913 annually for his work on the commission, declined to comment. Carl Griffith, head of the consulting firm Griffith Moseley Johnson and Associates, said his firm has been working with Green Group for several years. Griffith said Moseley, the firm’s executive vice president, has “never met anyone with Green Group” and “doesn’t even know what’s going on in Green Group.” Moseley, who had served as a county judge in Denton County and had headed economic development initiatives for Govs. George W. Bush and Perry, “is one most the ethical and religious people I know,” Griffith said. “No one would ever propose Jeff would do anything unethical or wrong for any money in the world.” He declined to say how much money the consulting firm has been paid by Green Group. But this year alone, Green Group will pay two associates of the consulting firm as much as $100,000 each for their lobbying work, according to state lobbying records. It was those two lobbyists, Ralph Marquez and Dan Eden, two former high-ranking state environmental officials, who turned to Moseley in January for help, frustrated with a lack of progress on the traffic impact analysis. Green Group needed TxDOT engineers to sign off on the traffic impact analysis it had submitted before it could move forward with the permit process at the state environmental agency. The 130 Environmental Park, as it’s been dubbed by Green Group, will include a landfill, a recycling facility and an industrial park. The 1,200-acre parcel — 250 acres of which will be dedicated specifically to burying waste — is largely flat, undeveloped land just east of Texas 130. According to Green Group’s application, the landfill will operate for 44 years and accept 26.5 million tons of waste, enough to nearly fill the Empire State Building if it were completely hollow. The traffic impact analysis submitted to TxDOT focused on a several-mile stretch of U.S. 183 that has seen three fatal crashes in the past five years and another pair of crashes that left people with incapacitating injuries, according to TxDOT records requested by the Statesman.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 16:37:21 +0000
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