LETTERS: Candidate clueless on local water; solar farm not worth cost to environment, land

Curry not informed

I read with interest your Pat Curry interview [ "Businessman digs deep into voucher, border issues," Oct. 12]. While he managed to evade any discussion on reproductive rights, he was peculiarly engaged on the Texas water legislation (HB 2827) that threatened us in 2023 by weakening the permit process for concentrated animal farming operations.

While outgoing District 56 Rep. Doc Anderson initially supported it, he met with strong backlash from Waco city leadership, for which we are grateful. He switched positions and tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the bill in the House. Fortunately, it was stopped in the Senate. Of note, Angelia Orr, who currently represents East Waco in House District 13, had no qualms about destroying our water quality. She is running against Albert Hunter, who will protect our water system.

But I was curious why Curry chose to ignore Proposition 1, which amended our state constitution in November. The amendment, craftily called the "right to farm" act, mirrored our current statute but would raise the bar for local regulation from "generally accepted" farming and ranching practices to the higher standard of "clear and convincing evidence" that regulation is needed to protect the public from danger. It's one of the tricks legislators do — they pass joint resolutions (in this case, HJR 126 ) that they couldn't pass as laws during the regular session because of pushback from their constituents. Those joint resolutions go on the ballot as constitutional amendments that have a history of being passed with little to no scrutiny and extremely low voter turnout.

Additionally, Curry didn't mention HB 1750, which constricts the ability of cities to engage with upstream agricultural enterprises (calling governmental requirements a "nuisance"), or HB 2308, which protects farmers from liability, which will certainly be helpful when the next listeria or E. coli outbreak happens.

The passage of these bills and amendments in 2023 opened the door a bit for abuse by large-scale corporations. Our regulatory system must remain strong and comprehensive enough to protect our entire watershed, not just our little slice of the Brazos and Bosque rivers. We must remain vigilant where our water quality is concerned, because it doesn't appear that Pat Curry is watching closely enough. I'll be voting for Erin Shank.

Cheryl Foster, Waco

Not worth the money

I read Mike Copeland's column in Tuesday's Trib about the big investment Avangrid, Inc. has made in Falls County for the benefit of the new Meta data center in Temple. It stated 488,000 solar panels have been completed and Avangrid expects to pay $40 million in taxes due to this project.

A few key points were missing, however, like how many acres of flat Texas land it required and what type of solar panel was used. Whether microcrystalline or polycrystalline, they average 25 years of life, then it's off to the landfill. It is too expensive to effectively recycle that number to glean what metals and materials are reclaimable. High humidity can also affect their lifespan.

After reading the and doing research, I don't think Texas is so hard up for tax revenue it has to stoop this low to patronize a company and sentence untold acres of precious land to 25 years without sunshine.

Elaine Sonafrank, Waco