The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) held a public hearing today March 5, 2025 to receive comments regarding the proposed Title V program fee for FY2026. MDEQ is proposing a Title V fee rate of $27 per ton of regulated air pollutants (with no individual pollutant emissions cap), a tiered maintenance fee based on the complexity of each permit, and a tiered minimum emissions fee (if applicable).
Consideration for the rate change was the request of the Title V Advisory Council. The council was created to annually review costs of running the program and is made up of appointed industry officials.
Just in case you didn't catch that... industry officials make recommendations about the fee costs they should have to pay to run a program that holds them accountable to the law.
The proposed fee is nearly half the fee costs proposed in 2023 ($46 p/ton) and more than half of what the EPA has established a presumptive minimum fee rate: “The part 70 presumptive minimum fee rate ($/ton) effective for the 12-month period of September 1, 2024 through August 31, 2025 is $63.69.”
The Title V fee schedule needs to be adequate to ensure that the activities it funds are fully capitalized. Title V activities that must be funded by fees paid into the program include
issuing and renewing Title V permits
implementing and enforcing Title V permit terms
monitoring ambient air quality
preparing emissions inventories
training of staff.
Title V funds also support a permitting authority’s staff salaries, which directly relate to the permitting authority’s ability to issue permits in a timely manner. As such, insufficient and declining fees may lead to permitting backlogs and staff-retention challenges.
As residents living near several large Title V permitted facilities, we are particularly concerned about the proposed reduction in fees. There are already significant backlogs. The Office of the Inspector General found that Mississippi had unsustainable or potentially unsustainable Title V fees – during the 2018-2020 period, when the fees were $47/ton.
MDEQ is required to publish a draft permit for public review within 18 months after a permit expires. Most of the Title V renewal permits issued to facilities located on Bayou Casotte Parkway have taken more than 5 years. The Title V permit for the Pascagoula Chevron Refinery expired in 2014 and a draft permit has yet to be written and released to the public.
One more time... The Pascagoula Chevron Refinery, one of the largest polluters in the entire state, has had an expired permit for over a decade.
Additionally, staffing a steadily declined in recent years even as the work load remained the same. For example, the permitting division reported 12.22 full time employees in 2023, but it anticipates 8.93 full time employees in 2026, and the compliance and enforcement division has fallen from 11.62 full time employees to 10.32 in 2026 – and yet there were not significantly fewer permitted facilities from 2021 to 2023.
With fewer employees, less money, and the same amount of work, if not more, MDEQ’s Title V administration will not be able to fulfill its legal obligation to protect the environment and public health.
When we first started organizing in 2013, we were told by MDEQ staff that the Title V program was on of the best ways to address our concerns. In fact, most of the nearby facilities had Title V permits set to expire in 2014.
The Title V permitting process is our chance to participate in decisions that directly impact our lives -- delays undermine our democracy.
The Title V program is also responsible for enforcing the law. Based on our experience, MDEQ needs more staff and training not less to do its job. It took years of reporting to finally get MDEQ to take action on VT Halter's fugitive PM (heavy metal dust) and paint emissions. Chevron has for years been in violation of exceeding the flare rule (more than 4 flaring episodes in a year) and nothing has been done about it.
The EPA took VOC readings during a surprise visit in 2021 that far exceeded all regulatory and health based standards for cancer causing toxins, such as benzene ranges from 25 ppb to 217 ppb (EPA limit is 9ppb).
How can we confidently say MDEQ is doing their job with such high readings?
And when MDEQ does take the initiative to respond to community complaints, they often fail to adequately assess the situation. For example, we partnered with two scientists to evaluate the air monitoring MDEQ conducted in response to community complaints of visual plume, strong odors, and health effects from February 4-8, 2023. The scientists found that instruments they used and the evaluation metric were insufficient for community air monitoring leading us to assume at best MDEQ staff is not well trained or at worst deliberately fails to conduct proper studies to protect the interests of companies.
Lastly, the Title V program is responsible for monitoring ambient air quality that now includes the “Enhanced Air Quality Monitoring in the Cherokee Community of Pascagoula, Mississippi” Project. They received funding two years ago and have not yet begun monitoring. Some of the delay was due to the need to train staff, but with such a decline in program budget, we are very concerned that the project will not move forward at all.
The consequences of MDEQ failing to meet its legal obligations are very serious -- it is a matter of (quality of) life and death. Too many residents of Cherokee Forest are suffering from chronic health issues we know are caused and/or exacerbated by exposure to industrial pollution. Health issues such as chronic respiratory and sinus, rashes, asthma, miscarriages, memory problems, learning disabilities, dementia, stomach, kidney, heart, lung, and liver issues and cancer. More than 27 of neighbors have died in the last six years due to lung and heart issues unrelated to COVID or cancer.
Nearly every single one of our industry complaints, community science reports, public comments, and claims about health impacts have been met with resistance. Most of the time MDEQ responds by trivializing and minimizing our health concerns, ignoring our evidence, rationalizing their actions, and offering up false solutions and poorly conducted and evaluated scientific evidence – leading us to believe that their strategy for community engagement is to wear people down, hoping they give up. As it turns out, that is exactly what usually happens. We have learned of many instances where we people and communities have just given up trying to get MDEQ to do their job to protect the environment and public health.
No one else but us was at the meeting today. We know this is not an indication that people don’t care but rather that MDEQ community engagement approach (or lack thereof) is working perhaps as they intended.
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