Turning Buried Pollution Permit Data Into Community Action

Complicated by Design

When a company applies to build or expand a polluting facility, Texans have a short period, sometimes as little as fifteen days, to submit comments, request a public meeting, or ask a legislator to intervene. Miss the window, and the decision moves ahead without community input.

For community members, finding out how to make their voice heard isn't simple. Information about how to participate in environmental decisions is scattered across layers of agency webpages, dense filings, and documents that run to a hundred pages. As Jennifer Hadayia, Air Alliance Houston's executive director, describes it, the state's regulatory system is complicated by design, structured so it isn't easy for community members to get engaged, "especially if they are going to oppose a decision like a permit."

For years, the only way to get permitting information was to manually dig through hard-to-find details. Air Alliance Houston staff would scrape the state's public notices, map them, weigh each one, and build campaigns from scratch, down to stamping and addressing the postcards to residents. It worked, but it couldn't scale.

There wasn't enough staff capacity to track every permit in the system, so the organization was forced to concentrate on concrete batch plants, while refineries, chemical terminals, and other facilities went without an advocacy campaign. Organizational bandwidth, not mission, was deciding which communities got a fight and which didn't.

Air Alliance Houston knew precisely what it needed built. "We have the subject matter knowledge about what the process is and what a permit's about and how we engage community," Hadayia says. "We could give that input. We knew what we wanted and needed to do, but we didn't have any of the technical expertise to make this automated system happen."

Building AirMail

January Advisors set out to understand the permitting system from the perspective of people who needed to navigate it. They listened to environmental advocacy organizations in Texas and the Louisiana Gulf Coast. What they heard reshaped the team's understanding of the challenge. A tool that only alerted Air Alliance Houston staff would serve a single organization, but the problem was far beyond an internal need. They realized AirMail would have a greater impact as a public tool so that other advocates and community residents could find permit information in time to do something about it.

January Advisors built AirMail so it pulls permit details from eight separate sources into a single map. Automated processes parse each notice for key details like action deadlines and meeting locations, geospatial queries count the households impacted near a facility, and legislator contact information is viewable so residents can engage directly in minutes.

We may have had the need. We may have identified the goal together. We may have ideated the outcome. But they built it.

Growing AirMail's Reach

Today, January Advisors continues to support the Air Alliance Houston team. "They aren't the computer coders who coded and walked away, and now it's up to us to make it happen," Hadayia says. "They have always wanted to be part of the dissemination and the democratization of this tool. They want to be part of that adoption." In five years, she notes, the team at January Advisors has never declined a request to run a training, hold office hours, or sit down one-on-one to help someone learn how to use the tool effectively.

Since building AirMail, January Advisors has expanded it from a handful of counties to statewide coverage and added features requested by the people using it: weekly permit-alert emails, downloadable mailing lists and postcards for organizers, and one-click sharing to social media. Today it's being used by five funded partner organizations across the Texas Gulf Coast, and a version for the state of Louisiana is underway in partnership with Air Alliance Houston's sister organization, Healthy Gulf.

A Few Good Words