Separate stories in Sunday’s Chronicle about two towns located more than 200 miles apart sum up why it’s important for Texas’ political leaders to stop putting job creation above the health of the people they say will benefit from it.

Nick Powell wrote about San Leon in Galveston County, where people are concerned about the impact of an $800 million anhydrous ammonia plant being built in nearby Texas City. The plant operated by Gulf Coast Ammonia LLC is expected to add 2.2 trillion gallons of industrial wastewater to what is already one of Texas’ most polluted bodies of water, Galveston Bay.

That worries San Leon residents like Roy Lee Cannon, who expressed his fears to Powell while standing on the deck of his shrimp boat. “I don’t see how they can say nothing’s going to be affected or there will be little effect on the environmental situation for the oysters, fish, shrimp, etc., because they have no way of knowing that,” Cannon said.

Kenneth Teague, a recently retired ecologist for the Environmental Protection Agency, told Powell that ammonia is highly toxic to aquatic life.

The Texas Commission of Environmental Quality has asked Gulf Coast Ammonia to specify how it will prevent leaks from its pipelines. Even with that information, the TCEQ should be reluctant to grant the company’s request for a wastewater permit. Anhydrous ammonia, typically used to manufacture fertilizer, can be volatile if handled incorrectly. Its fumes can be suffocating, and if it gets hot it can explode.

That apparently doesn’t bother Texas City officials, who want to give the plant that will employ 25 to 50 full-time workers a 10-year tax abatement.

An environmental danger also confronts the fewer than 200 residents of Pawnee, northwest of Beeville in Bee County, where an Arizona-based waste management company, Republic Services, wants to build a 156-acre landfill that would rise more than 170 feet into the air. Rye Druzin wrote that people in Pawnee are worried about both noxious dust blowing from the landfill and air pollution caused by an expected 50 trucks a day hauling oil and gas drilling waste to the facility.

Unfortunately, odds are Pawnee residents will lose this fight. The Railroad Commission of Texas, which oversees the oil and gas industry, has already approved five new permits for oilfield landfills this year. “It’s nearly impossible to stop such a project,” said Neil Carman, clean air program director for the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club. “The best they can do is delay.”

Carman’s pessimism is understandable in a state that too often asks the public to choose jobs over the environment. More than 200 companies employing more than 100,000 people have operations related to drilling in the Eagle Ford Shale oil field, which is near Pawnee.

People in Pawnee and San Leon are supposed to ignore potential environmental dangers from a drilling waste dump or an anhydrous ammonia plant and just be happy that they can put food on the table.

Bigger towns like Houston aren’t treated much better. Sadly, too many politicians who were elected to act in the best interest of Texans have decided that a good paycheck is better than a good checkup, and that jobs are more important than clean air or water.

Changing that attitude has to begin at the top. State leaders need to recognize that Texas has too many good attributes to prostitute it before corporate entities that covet its natural resources and abundant workforce.

Texans shouldn’t be paying for jobs with their lives. This state’s fragile environment shouldn’t be run over roughshod in the name of economic development.

It would be nice to see a line drawn in the sand from Austin to Pawnee to San Leon to send a clear message that good health is not for sale in Texas. If you want to do business here, you must follow the rules to keep the environment clean and the public safe.

That’s a message not only for all the businesses that expect the state to bow down in gratitude when offered the possibility of new jobs. It’s a message for all the political leaders and bureaucrats who do bow down and expect the public to smile with gratitude.