Biden administration promises focus on environmental justice
When President Joe Biden made environmental protection a key element of his campaign, he promised to overhaul the federal office that investigates complaints from people in minority communities who believe they have been unfairly harmed by industrial pollution or waste disposal.
Although the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that disadvantaged communities in America are disproportionately affected by pollution, hundreds of complaints sent to its civil rights office since the mid-1990s have only once resulted in a formal finding of discrimination.
The situation has provoked criticism from the U. S. Civil Rights Commission, the EPA’s own Office of Inspector General and citizens who have filed complaints that sometimes languished for years — or decades.
Under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, states, cities and other entities that receive federal funds are prohibited from discriminating because of race, color or national
origin. That means citizens bearing the brunt of industrial pollution can bring a complaint if federal money is tied to the project.
In Uniontown, Alabama — a mainly Black town of 2,200 — residents complained to the EPA in 2013 about the Alabama Department of Environmental Management’s oversight of a huge landfill containing 4 million tons of coal ash that residents blame for respiratory, kidney and other ailments. Five years later, the EPA dismissed the complaint,
saying residents hadn’t proven the landfill caused their health problems.
The U. S. Civil Rights Commission called the dismissal of the Uniontown complaint “another distressing step in the wrong direction” by the EPA office.
The outcome was typical. In three decades of fielding complaints, EPA’s civil rights office has almost never found pollution was adversely affecting human health. And without such a finding, the agency won’t even consider whether illegal discrimination occurred.
Marianne EnglemanLado, who was recently appointed by the Biden administration to the EPA’s office of general counsel, had helped Uniontown residents with their case. She maintains the way the EPA evaluates such complaints makes it nearly impossible to prevail because proving with scientific certainty that pollution is causing disease is a nearly insurmountable obstacle.
Ben Eaton, a Perry County Commissioner involved in the Uniontown complaint, said attorneys warned that discrimination claims usually go nowhere, but residents felt their evidence — including photos and videos — was compelling. “What’s the use of having these agencies,” he said, “if they’re not going to do the job?”
Residents of a predominantly Black and Latino community in Oakland, California were similarly disappointed with results of their civil rights complaint over air pollution from ships and truck traffic at the busy Port of Oakland.
Dear Mr. Wolcott: You really need to be more careful. I have the impression that you think of yourself as a fairly conservative fellow, yet you keep hiring real journalists like Natalie Hanson and publishing actual facts that interfere with the conservative narrative.
Now Rob Berry has been telling us ever since he blew into town that all our homeless population are “criminal transients” who only come here because we are too generous to them — but then (Feb. 25) you publish the reality that 62% have lived in Butte County more than 10 years and 44% have been here more than 20 years! Don’t you see how that messes up the story line?
Meanwhile Mayor Andrew Coolidge and councilor Sean Morgan claim that the whole problem of unhoused people is one of mental illness and addiction and it should be up to county behavioral health to solve the problem. And then you go and confound that by publishing the fact that only 22% of our unhoused have a serious mental health issue and only 12% have substance abuse disorder!
If you aren’t careful, people might get the idea that the real problem is lack of affordable housing and then what would happen to the building industry plans for building more sprawling Mcmansions?
Surely you know that modern conservatism — especially in the era of Trump — has no room for inconvenient facts and, if you persist in publishing such things you may be in real danger in losing your conservative card!