Success Seeks TCEQ Records of YFZ Ranch Environmental Inquiry
 
The Eldorado Success
 
Wendy Cooper, an attorney in the Dallas office of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, confirmed this week that a field report filed by investigators from the agency's Region 8 field office in San Angelo, regarding environmental violations at the YFZ Ranch has been forwarded to TCEQ headquarters in Austin. "Basically all I can tell you is that I am aware of the report and I know it has been sent to the enforcement division," Cooper said Tuesday. "I really won't deal with it until it gets into litigation."

Other details regarding the report were not available to the Success on Tuesday and the newspaper filed an "open records" request that same day for the material, as provided for by Texas Open Records Act.

TCEQ investigators paid a visit to YFZ Ranch on April 15 of this year, three weeks after news broke in Eldorado that the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a sect of the Mormon Church that encourages the practice of plural marriage, or polygamy, was erecting large buildings on a ranch four miles north of town. That inspection, and a subsequent follow-up investigation, revealed a number of violations of the state's environmental regulations. At that time, inspectors reported finding air quality violations at a cement bulk plant near the construction site. They also indicated that water and waste water rules had been broken.

Environmental regulations have been on the mind of neighboring landowners, as well as townspeople in nearby Eldorado, ever since FLDS leadership recanted their story that the YFZ Ranch was intended as a corporate hunting retreat and admitted that they were planning to move at least a portion of the church's followers to the ranch.

Adding to the concern is the fact that a number of FLDS detractors, including anti-polygamy activists and a few excommunicated former members, claim that the YFZ Ranch, or New Zion, as they call it, is planned to hold several hundred of the Prophet Warren Jeffs' most faithful followers. "By that I mean a few hundred men," former FLDS member Ross Chatwin said in a telephone interview recently. "With their wives and children you could easily see more than a two or three thousand people moving out there."

For their part, YFZ Ranch officials deny that there will ever be more than 200 people at the ranch at any one time. Still, that number will require the installation of something a bit larger than a residential septic system. Also, an adequate water supply, or the lack thereof, is a concern to local citizens, as well as TCEQ regulators.

Meanwhile, The Eldorado Success will continue to monitor developments at the YFZ Ranch, where construction workers this week were completing the two large buildings shown in last week's Success and beginning construction on a large barn. The Success will also continue to follow the TCEQ investigation into environmental violations and will press ahead with its open records request.
 
MyEldorado.net
Originally published June 3, 2004
 
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