The three commissioners who run Texas’s environmental agency meet Sept. 25 to go straight into closed session. It is the first of four closed-door meetings they noticed across six days, the last of them two days before their executive director starts a new job at a business lobbying group.
All four items are closed. One is legal advice on lawsuits and settlement offers. One covers the appointment, employment, evaluation, discipline or dismissal of the executive director, general counsel, chief clerk, public interest counsel or chief auditor. One concerns an unnamed employee. The fourth has the commissioners discussing their own duties and roles. Identical notices went up for Sept. 28, Sept. 29 and Sept. 30, all four filed within ten minutes of one another on Sept. 10.
Those four items are not unusual in themselves. The same four ride nearly every regular commission agenda, tucked in at the end after the permits and the enforcement orders; they sit at the foot of the Sept. 23 docket too, below a contested wastewater permit, a concrete plant case and 45 enforcement orders. What is new is the format. Of the 74 commission meetings the agency posted from January 2024 through August 2026, exactly two carried no open business at all, both earlier this year. The four now noticed would make six in 2026, against none in 2024 and none in 2025.
The Texas Association of Business announced Sept. 4 that Kelly Keel, the agency’s executive director, will become its president and chief executive Oct. 2. She has led the agency since December 2023 and joined it in 2001; by the business group’s account it employs about 3,200 people and runs on roughly $665 million a year. The agency has announced no successor and no interim director, and has posted nothing about her departure. The commissioners hire the executive director. Whether these facts are connected, the notices do not say.
Closing a personnel discussion is permitted, not required, and the officer or employee who is its subject can force it into the open simply by asking. The commissioners must still convene publicly, announce the closed session and name the exceptions they are relying on before the doors shut. Anything they actually decide — a hire, a dismissal, a settlement — has to be voted in public. Three of the four items require a certified record a judge can later order released; the legal-advice item is the one that requires none. When the commission met this way in February, the record shows it took no action.
Meeting at a glance
- When
- 10 a.m. CT Friday, September 25, 2026. Notice TRD 2026005459 was filed September 10. Companion notices cover September 28 at 2 p.m., September 29 at 10 a.m. and September 30 at 10 a.m.
- Where
- 12100 Park 35 Circle, Building F, Fourth Floor, Room 4222, Austin. A Zoom link and dial-in number are posted, but every item is closed.
- Governing body & chair
- Texas Commission on Environmental Quality — three full-time commissioners appointed by the governor to staggered six-year terms. Chairwoman Brooke T. Paup. No seat is vacant.
- Format
- Special commission meeting, off the published calendar. Four items, all closed: litigation advice, the employment of the agency’s top officers, an unnamed employee, and the commissioners’ own duties. The same four appear at the end of most regular agendas.
- Live video
- Meetings normally stream on the agency’s YouTube channel. The commissioners must convene in public and announce the closed items before the doors shut; there is nothing further to watch unless they return to vote.
- Full agenda
- Secretary of State Open Meeting Viewer · Agenda · Marked agendas, 2026
Commissioners
- Brooke T. Paup — chairwoman; Austin; named chair January 2025; term to 2027.
- Catarina R. Gonzales — Austin; former governor’s budget and policy adviser; term to 2029.
- Tonya R. Miller — Austin; former state public utility counsel; term to 2031.
Roster from the agency’s commissioners page, checked September 18 and cross-checked against the governor’s appointment releases. The bench turned over completely between February 2024 and October 2025. The Senate has confirmed Paup and Gonzales; whether Paup holds a full six-year term or the remainder of a predecessor’s could not be established. The four officers who report to the commissioners are General Counsel Mary Smith, Chief Clerk Laurie Gharis, Chief Auditor Chance Watson and Public Interest Counsel Eli Martinez, who is listed as interim — that statutorily independent post turned over during 2026 and has not been permanently filled. Meeting contact: Georgia Carroll-Warren, 512-239-3313.