Gulf Coast Waste Disposal Authority (GCA) was created by an act of the Texas Legislature in 1969.  The Authority was modeled in part on the Ruhrverband (Ruhr Valley Authority) in Germany.  Before the Clean Water Act,  GCA was created due to the widespread concern over the increasingly poor water quality in the Houston Ship Channel and Galveston Bay.

Originally intended as a wide-ranging regulatory agency, similar to a local version of the federal regulatory authorities, it was also empowered to acquire or build and operate wastewater treatment plants and other waste management facilities.  The GCA Board of Directors was also granted the ability to issue tax-exempt bonds for local governments and for industry if those bonds were going to be used to construct waste management operations.

Original Board Members 1970

Signing of contract for Washburn Tunnnel 1973

The first idea:  that GCA would be a regulatory agency, simply didn’t happen.  One reason for this was purely practical, and the other reason was common sense.  GCA was awarded start-up funding by the Texas Legislature with the idea that a local district would be created and a tax levied within that district for the support of Authority activities.  The referendum for tax support failed.  Without independent funding, acting as a regulator was not possible.  Also, the Board and Staff took a hard look at what needed to be done to accomplish the goal of cleaning up the water in Galveston Bay.  They decided that it would be a conflict of interest to regulate those who were already discharging and/or treating wastewater if GCA intended to operate waste management facilities directly.  It would also have been a duplication of effort in that local, state and federal regulatory agencies were in place or being formed. 

Gulf Coast Authority decided to take the active role of issuing bonds to help industry  and others improve their own waste management and  taking on the direct handling of waste through the relatively new concept of “regional waste management.”  Regional management simply means building a single facility to handle wastewater or solid waste from several sources to one location.  Previous practice was for each entity producing waste to build and operate its own waste management facility. With more than 40 years of experience in operating large regional facilities for both municipal and industrial waste, GCA has demonstrated that regional management does work. 

Aerial Photo of the Bayport Facility, 1970

A single large plant results in economy of scale, in concentration of expertise in a very specialized technical staff, in operators who understand that their chief responsibility is making sure that the treatment system is working, in supporting a technically superior laboratory, in reliable waste treatment and in efficient treatment costs.  To this day, GCA remains a major proponent of regional solutions for waste management problems.

Elsewhere on this website is information on the various waste management operations under the GCA logo.  Please take a few minutes to review the services they provide.  Information is also available on the bond financing services offered by the Authority.