EDITORIAL: For West Port Arthur, a satisfactory outcome

Published 3:59 pm Friday, April 19, 2019

If not a wholly happy ending for everyone, creation of a new community park and garden in West Port Arthur is as satisfying a story conclusion as citizens might have wanted.

The one-acre garden was opened Wednesday with 35 raised beds — adoption of a bed comes free — a covered gathering area for the community and a children’s playground area.

Valero paid about $1 million to plan and develop the park and garden and to establish a fund to maintain its care without demands on city resources. Community members shared in the planning.

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Valero’s efforts came about after the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality charged that the refinery — the area’s oldest — had violated standards on air quality emissions. Valero, which denied those allegations, offered to fund a supplemental environmental project to mitigate penalties.

Thus, the West Port Arthur Park & Community Garden, located not far from the refinery, for which ground was broken last May. The idea was to establish something good for residents who might have suffered from the refinery’s sins of emission. There is some justice in that.

Planting began after an hourlong ceremony that included comments from the community governing board that will oversee the facility, from representatives of TCEQ and from Valero. Those present seemed pleased with the outcome; 22 garden beds were adopted before ceremonies commenced.

Mark Skobel, refinery manager, recollected time spent from his own youth tending a family garden of about the same size in his western Pennsylvania home. His father mined coal.

But John Beard, former city councilman and chairman of PACAN, which advocates for a clean environment, shared with this newspaper his own take on the project, which was less celebratory.

Beard pointed to past environmental problems and industrial expansions that surround West Port Arthur, in an area which he referred to as a “toxic zone,” and suggested that, “While some precautions have been taken, it must be understood that there is no mitigation for the atmospheric fallout pollution from these sources; no protection from the dust laced with heavy metals, or acid rain from emissions, or petroleum coke dust from these sources.”

Nonetheless, the 125 or so people who gathered Wednesday perceived something else: A community coming together to make something good rise from something wrong. There was an error, and a penalty paid.

Make no mistake: Creation of the park and garden followed what the state believed was a transgression. The program itself suggested as much, bearing the words: “This project was performed as part of the settlement of an enforcement action with TCEQ.”

What’s best is to look forward, to be grateful a state agency watches over Texas citizens, to learn from mistakes and to move forward.

Can’t wait to taste the tomatoes.