Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

We don't believe reopening the Asarco copper smelter will mean more jobs and more money for the El Paso economy.

It would offer quite a few jobs, all right, but if that big belcher is stoked up again, it's highly likely other companies and persons with business ventures will shy away from relocating here. No way, not in a town with a mega smelter adjacent to its Downtown and its University of Texas at El Paso.

We are making good strides -- historical strides -- in erasing our image as a dirty border town.

Sorry, but that's what many people think about El Paso. That's the perception. And we're trying to change that thinking.

Now large-scale military technology is setting up in El Paso -- billions of new dollars a year in positive economic impact.

We are placing our puzzle pieces to become a premier U.S. city in the biomedical/health care field -- financing for the four-year Texas Tech medical school, the centerpiece for it all, has been approved by the Texas Legislature.

We no longer need a smelter in our midst.

A study commissioned by Asarco shows, sure, it will offer a lot of jobs -- 291 directly and 1,819 indirectly. And at good pay and benefits.

The study, by the Institute for Policy and Economic Development at UTEP, also shows it would be worth $1.16 billion a year to the economy.

We ponders what a "reverse economic impact study" would show -- probably a loss of the $2 billion from businesses and people not willing to relocate here or want to continue to live here as the result of such a company being in operation.

Fort Bliss expansion will be good for some $3 billion a year to our economy, and we hope to welcome all the ancillary business that will come to El Paso in hopes of tying into both the military and health care/health research that will call El Paso home.

We're afraid a lot of good, clean industry will shy away if we're still perceived as "that dirty border town."

Asarco points out it has the technology in place to meet air-quality standards set forth by the state of Texas.

Air-quality standards allow for pollutants to be put into the air. Asarco would be permitted to put some 8,000 tons of pollutants into our air yearly and still meet air-quality standards.

We don't want that to happen, and we think the vast majority of El Paso-area residents have the same sentiment. In fact the mayors and councils of El Paso, Sunland Park, N.M., and Juárez, Mexico have strongly urged the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to deny Asarco an air permit.

That's just not a few people living in the vicinity of the big smokestack and the 1800s-looking factory. That's the leaders of three cities in three different states all saying we no longer need or want Asarco. We want to get better with business ways of the future.

Texas should deny Asarco it's air permit. We don't want to live in a Charles Dickens novel where the populace relies on soot-caked smokestacks for its bread and butter.