Moments after leaving the gallery, House Speaker Billy Clayton, a lobbyist who hasn't presided over the House since 1983 but is still regularly referred to as “Mr. Speaker,” confirmed that H.B. 1171 would be up “in just a few minutes.” And within a few minutes, Pasadena Senator Buster Brown made the motion to bring the bill up for debate. The Senate doesn't have a calendar, but sometimes it works like a clock. Clayton is one of thirty-seven lobbyists who had worked on the radioactive waste disposal bill Brown was carrying in the Senate. In fact, so many lobbyists were working the bill as it was being debated in the House on May 6, that outside the chamber some lobbyists were reduced to lobbying reporters. Despite the intense armtwisting, the low-level radioactive waste bill voted out of the House Environmental Regulation Committee in April represented a real victory for the environmental community that earlier had prevailed in the fight to keep the rad-waste dump out of Sierra Blanca. (Last October, after eight years before courts and state agencies, that site was declared unsuitable for the burial of radioactive waste.) And the environmentalists had won more than a siting fight; they had convinced House Environmental Regulation Committee Chairman Warren Chisum that burial of radioactive waste is not a safe practice. Chisum, a Pampa Republican most notorious for his anti-gay legislative agenda, is by no stretch of the imagination an environmentalist. From the dais in the hearing room where his committee meets, Chisum often argues with pro-environmental witnesses. He has said that his cattle graze along the fence line of the Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Amarillo. “I don't see the hair standing up on their back,” Chisum said, dismissing an El Paso high school teacher's concerns about radioactivity. Chisum openly ridicules the state's finding that a fault line under the proposed Sierra Blanca radioactive waste site makes the site unsafe, referring to “the earthquake 10,000 years ago.” When Fort Worth Representative Lon Burnam said he would use a floor amendment to add a pro-environmental measure to the waste disposal bill, Chisum warned that the amendment “would get a cold, cold reception on the floor of the House.” And on one occasion Chisum was both bemused and bothered to find himself on the same side of an issue as the Sierra Club's Ken Kramer. But as radioactive waste disposal hearings progressed in his House committee, Chisum gradually embraced two fundamental environmental positions. One is that radioactive waste should not be buried, but instead stored in “above-ground, retrievable” containers, in what is commonly referred to as “assured isolation.” The other is that the state should hold the license for any private contractor that disposes of radioactive waste in Texas. The bill sent out of Chisum's committee more than two months ago included measures intended to keep the radioactive dump license in the hands of the state. It also encouraged above-ground assured isolation. Yet on the House floor on May 6 — despite the angry protest of Chisum and the House's small “green caucus” — Panhandle Republican Gary Walker passed an amendment he was carrying for Waste Control Specialists, one of two companies that had funded the lobby's rad-waste feeding frenzy this session. The Walker Amendment permitted private companies to hold a nuclear waste disposal license, a measure that Chisum warned would allow the Department of Energy to dispose of weapons waste in Texas. The private license opened the door to D.O.E. waste — more hazardous, less stable, and far far more voluminous than the electric utility, hospital, and industrial waste that Maine and Vermont will add to home-grown Texas nuclear waste destined for disposal in a Texas site yet to be determined. (Maine and Vermont have signed a federal compact, agreeing to dispose of their nuclear waste in Texas.) The Department of Energy — known for its contaminated weapons testing and production facilities at Rocky Flats, Colorado, and Hanford, Washington — is considering turning to the private sector to help dispose of waste that has accumulated for decades. And under federal law, a state cannot regulate the disposal of D.O.E. waste at a private facility opened for that specific purpose. After Chisum failed to stop the private license in early May, he warned, “We may be in a situation where we're going to get D.O.E. waste and there's not anything we can do about it.” By mid-May in the Senate Environmental Affairs Committee, Republican committee chair Buster Brown had seized Chisum's bill and made it even worse, using an unrelated sunset bill to kill the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority, and providing additional guarantees that a private company will hold the rad-waste disposal license. On the floor of the Senate on May 21, as Speaker Clayton waited in the lobby, Brown began his presentation with the rad-waste lobbyists' mantra: “The state of Texas has spent $53 million in a failed attempt to locate a nuclear waste site.” The argument that inevitably follows holds that the slow, deliberate siting process has failed and it's time to move quickly to license and build a dump. “We're not alone,” Brown continued, noting that Nebraska spent $96 million and failed, California spent $93 million and failed, and Illinois spent $88 million and failed. “No new, traditional low-level radioactive waste disposal site has succeeded in getting a permit in the United States over the past twenty-five years,” Brown said. Assisted by a well-intentioned but ineffective challenge from Corpus Christi Senator Carlos Truan, Brown made the case for a two-track system that would pit the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission against “a private entity” in competition for a permit, or two permits, to dispose of radioactive waste in Texas. Under Brown's bill, the Texas Department of Health would probably end up holding the state license for the federal compact dump, in which electric utilities, industries, and hospitals will dispose of radioactive waste by burying it in trenches. The more lucrative (and far more hazardous) D.O.E. waste would end up in a dump operated by a private entity with a private license — in this case Waste Control Specialists, which already operates a hazardous waste site in Andrews County, where elected officials from the county, city, and school district are working to attract a low-level radioactive waste dump. “All the sites failed,” Brown said, referring to Nebraska, California, Illinois and Texas, “because they have one factor in common. They were not wanted in that community. Texas has something of a unique situation. We have an area in Texas that wants the site. That area is Andrews County.” (Brown didn't mention the problems with geology and hydrology the T.N.R.C.C. found at Sierra Blanca and at another proposed site in Andrews County.) Brown continued, with what might be considered the public relations component of the bill he had reworked on behalf of Waste Control Specialists. Before any site can be approved in Texas: - a public hearing must be held in the community designated for the dump; - the county commissioners court must pass a resolution endorsing the project; - the company must agree to spend 10 percent of its revenue locally; - the company must agree to hire residents from the area in which the project is located. Brown used Truan's clumsy questions about D.O.E waste to his advantage, arguing that the D.O.E. waste that a private license is certain to attract cannot be kept out of Texas because the Department of Energy has the right to dispose of waste in any state, despite the objections of state government. Then, in the same breath (and unchallenged), Brown volunteered that D.O.E. regulations prohibit the agency from disposing of radioactive waste in a state if the state government objects. Brown went on to use to his advantage an Austin American-Statesman article that Truan had brought in to use in an argument against the bill — stopping short of taking the paper out of Truan's hand. “Are you sure you read the article, Senator, or did someone tell you about it?” Brown asked. Floor debate in the Senate is most commonly used to make pronouncements to the public or establish legislative intent — not to sway votes. When twenty-one votes are required to bring a bill to the floor, it's likely that the bill has the sixteen votes required to pass. In fairness to Truan, the most skilled, well-prepared, and agile debater in the Senate could not have stopped a bill being advanced by the largest team of lobbyists any private interests have set upon one single piece of legislation this session. Brown's deal was done. Lubbock Republican Robert Duncan added an amendment that ensured the dumpsite will be located in Andrews County. El Paso Democrat Eliot Shapleigh failed in an attempt to keep the license in the state's hands, then succeeded in tossing in a stealth amendment that caught Brown by surprise — prohibiting any Texas site from accepting D.O.E. waste created by the production of nuclear weapons. (Waste from weapons testing is already prohibited. In an interview on the floor just after passage of Brown's bill, when asked if his seemingly minor amendment might in fact eliminate all D.O.E. waste, Shapleigh said, “We'll just have to see.”) With only one environmental amendment encumbering its progress, Brown's bill easily passed the Senate. There's a widely recognized distinction between Representative Warren Chisum and Senator Buster Brown. Chisum is a Republican conservative with great deal of personal integrity. Brown is a Republican conservative. When the bill left the House, carrying an industry amendment Chisum had denounced and failed to defeat on the floor, Chisum said he might prefer a dead bill to a bad bill. After Duncan added the Andrews County amendment, Chisum argued that the bill was not worth salvaging. Three days before the session ended, Chisum ended the debate — in a conference committee. “I killed it,” he said. “I don't want Texas to become the dumping ground for the Department of Energy.” Chisum added that Buster Brown's killing of the Low-Level Waste Authority was irresponsible: “He did it in retaliation.” It was a small victory for the environmental lobby, which all along argued that the existing process was far better than a process that would open the state up to Department of Energy weapons waste. And a large victory for Billy Clayton. The Speaker was one of twelve lobbyists Envirocare had hired to derail Waste Control Specialists' plan to locate a radioactive waste dump in Andrews. Envirocare has a Texas site of its own — off I-20 near Monahans. “They'll all be back next session,” Chisum said. “This is not over.”