Brian Chavez is Republican rule in rural Ohio
Ohio Republicans have worked hard over the past 15 years to leverage an electoral system where a reincarnated "Captain Planet" villain is almost immune at the ballot box.
The average Ohio State Senator sees themselves somewhere between Alexander the Great and Cicero in civilization’s pantheon of Real Serious Guys.
Senator Brian Chavez (R-Marietta) is one such example. He arrived in Dec. 2023, when his predecessor, former Frank Hoagland (R-Adena), quit like a dog to focus on hoarding black-market military weaponry and ammo in his bomb shelter.
I jest with that last part.
In reality, then-Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima), who has never supplied a solid alibi for April 19, 1995, finessed Hoagland’s resignation and Chavez’s appointment to block either then-State Rep. Jay Edwards (R-Nelsonville) or Ron Ferguson (R-Wintersville) from joining the higher chamber through a contested election for an open seat.
Either man would have been about as welcomed by party leadership into Ohio’s most luxurious retirement home as either would have been about as welcomed as colon or brain cancer.
Chavez, a former fossil fuel executive, quickly rose the ranks to Energy Committee’s chairmanship, which is a sentence only possible in a place as cosmically condemned as the Ohio Statehouse.
Jake Zuckerman, who was then with cleveland.com, only needed six months to expose why Chavez might have a vested interest in steering not only his region, but the state’s energy policy in a certain direction.
Senator’s leaks: Two fracking waste injection wells owned by Ohio Sen. Brian Chavez have leaked toxic brine, via nearby gas production wells, on five occasions since 2010 according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
As Jake Zuckerman reports, one of those leaks caused a fish kill, 42 gallons per minute of brine spraying like a sprinkler, and a $1.3 million cleanup effort.
The state of Ohio paid for the cleanup and suspended operations at the two injection wells, but isn’t asking Chavez to pay it back.
God forbid a corporate polluter be asked to pay back a $1.3 million cleanup effort caused by their greed and negligence. Not in our polluted backwater outpost of a state.
It turns out, unfortunately for Southeastern Ohio, that Chavez is the symptom of a much larger disease, and that’s the State Legislature treating the poorest region of the state like a toxic waste dump.
From Quinn Glabicki of the New York Times:
For years, it has arrived in a caravan of tanker trucks that come night and day to deposit the toxic brine in injection wells that pump it thousands of feet underground, where it is supposed to stay forever.
But the brine is spurting to the surface, and locals fear it could soon contaminate the drinking water source for 32,000 people. “It would destroy the city,” said Susan Vessels, president of the Marietta City Council. “Once the damage is done, it cannot be undone.”
Residents and local officials were for years “completely unaware” of their place at the heart of an interstate marketplace for toxic waste, Ms. Vessels said. They’ve come to realize, she said, that their corner of Ohio has become a major destination for fracking brine.
It’s not a surprise that residents would be thunderstruck by that kind of news, especially in the era when corporate consolidation has liquified local news in places a lot richer than Appalachian Ohio.
