Texas environmental regulators threw out the permit for a concrete plant near Rendon on Oct. 21, handing a win to neighbors who had spent three years and about $100,000 fighting it — after the company behind the plant stopped showing up.
The three commissioners of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality voted unanimously to dismiss J7 Ready Mix’s application “with prejudice” — the hardest of the endings available to them. The phrase is worth being exact about. It kills this application: the company cannot revive it or refile it. It does not, on the face of the commission’s own rules, bar J7 from filing a brand-new application for the same tract. Nothing in the withdrawal rule says so, and one subsection assumes a dropped application can come back. A fresh application would restart everything — new notice, new comment period, a new chance to demand a hearing. The agency has not said publicly how it reads the question.
What the neighbors won is the end of a particular fight — after three and a half years, that was what they came for. The plant was to go at 5428 East FM 1187, in unincorporated Tarrant County between Burleson and Mansfield — ground the Fort Worth Report places 600 feet from a future Mansfield school district intermediate school and 2,600 feet from a future high school. Brandon McElroy, who lives nearby and started a nonprofit called Green Air Solutions to fight the plant, told CBS News Texas in 2023 that two of his sons have asthma. He told the Fort Worth Report on Oct. 21 that neighbors held fundraisers to cover legal costs that now run to roughly $100,000. More than 20 of the objectors represented themselves.
J7 applied in May 2023. The commission granted 29 hearing requests in September 2025 and sent the dispute to the state’s administrative court for a trial-like contested case hearing. Then, on April 22, a consultant for the company emailed the agency to say it no longer wished to pursue the permit. It never filed the formal withdrawal that would have ended things cleanly. It never published the notice of hearing the rules required. And on May 26, when the hearing opened, nobody from J7 appeared.
Nobody told the other side. Adam M. Friedman, a lawyer for McElroy, said the objectors all traveled to a hearing for a case the applicant had already abandoned. When the agency asked J7 to file a proper withdrawal, he said, “they blew it off”. “But nobody told the protestants.” The objectors moved to dismiss with prejudice, and the judges agreed, recommending exactly that on Sept. 2. The agency’s lawyers and its public interest counsel both backed it, the latter calling what J7 sent “an informal email rather than a proper withdrawal”.
Chairwoman Brooke T. Paup ran through the company’s absences one by one — no notice published, no appearance, no answer to the motions against it, no objection to the judges’ recommendation — before landing on why the harsher ending fit.
“I believe dismissal with prejudice appropriately fits within our regulatory provisions in rule 80.25 and support it given the applicant’s failure to participate in the contested case process and the efforts that the protestants had to undertake to challenge this application”
Commissioners Catarina R. Gonzales and Tonya R. Miller each said they agreed, and the motion carried on a voice vote. The item took nine minutes.
What the neighbors did not get back was the money. Friedman told the commission it was “frankly a shame that the protestants are not entitled to additional relief like the cost of attorney’s fees or other costs”. The rule that lets an applicant walk away without prejudice requires it to reimburse the other side’s permitting expenses — but expressly excludes attorney’s fees. J7 never invoked it anyway.
The company has said nothing publicly about the dismissal, and it did not register for the meeting. Its position is on the record only from the beginning of the fight. In December 2023, as neighbors organized and the county fire marshal halted construction that had begun without a building permit, co-manager Fernando Garcia told CBS News Texas of the family-owned Alvarado firm, “You know, we’re not here to harm anybody”. He said then that the company had been unclear on the permitting process for unincorporated Tarrant County.
The paperwork has not caught up to the vote. TCEQ has posted no signed order and no marked agenda for Oct. 21 — its index of those runs only through August — so the dismissal exists publicly, for now, only on the agency’s own video. Whether the site is closed to J7 for good is a question the commission did not answer.
A sewage plant heads for trial. Commissioners sent South Central Water Company’s application for a new 600,000-gallon-a-day wastewater discharge permit to the state administrative court, granting hearing requests from an adjacent landowner whose property the discharge would cross and from the city of Taylor, which argued the area should be served regionally. Five issues go to hearing, with a 180-day limit and mediation alongside. An RV resort too. A 20,000-gallon-a-day evaporation permit for a 26.8-acre recreational vehicle resort in Gillespie County also goes to hearing, on one question: nuisance odor. The commission granted a neighbor’s request after her reply established she was a trustee and beneficiary of the trust owning the adjoining land, and denied a river alliance’s. A repeat name in the enforcement pile. Approving 55 agreed enforcement orders, the public interest counsel singled out the respondent on item 48, saying the company has 14 more enforcement actions pending and “may warrant higher scrutiny and enhanced penalties in future proceedings”. That count could not be independently verified and is the office’s own.