Practice ruled to be discriminatory, but Conseil d’État says it does not have power to force change in policy
France’s highest administrative court has recognised discriminatory police identity checks based on racial profiling exist in France and are not isolated cases, but said it could not change political policy on the issue.
In a class action against the French state, six French and international organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Justice Initiative had asked for French authorities to be found at fault for failing to prevent the widespread use of racial profiling.
Sewage collecting in crudely dug trenches. Failing septic tanks that send waste bubbling into backyards. These are some of the common sights across Alabama’s Black Belt, a strip of 24 continuous counties blessed with deep fertile soil but long plagued by inadequate wastewater infrastructure and the commensurate parasitic disease.
It’s a problem, advocates say, that the state has the resources to address.
The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, opened a civil rights probe last week into the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and its implementation of a federal program designed to boost water infrastructure in communities across the country. The decision comes after advocates filed a complaint in March alleging that, for years, the state has hindered Black residents in rural areas from obtaining federal funds to update their wastewater systems.
It’s a region where children play on sewage-laden soil and an overwhelming stench envelops some neighborhoods for weeks on end.
“It’s really disgraceful and painful that people endure this, especially when we have the opportunity to fix it,” said Aaron Colangelo, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defence Council who has been working on the issue.
The March complaint was filed under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin under any program that receives federal funding. At issue is the state’s distribution of money from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, a federal program that provides financial assistance for states to carry out water infrastructure projects.
In urban areas, that usually means funding updates to municipal wastewater treatment plants or controlling sources of toxic pollution. But in Alabama’s sparsely populated Black Belt, where a disproportionate number of residents are Black and live in poverty, it entails providing financial support for people without access to a centralized sewer system to build onsite septic tanks. The Black Belt gets its name from its soil, a dark earthen clay that drains water very slowly, making it difficult to set up septic systems. Many of the ones that do exist are antiquated and in dire need of repairs — at least 50 percent in one rural Alabama county, according to a U.N. report from 2011.
In theory, federal dollars from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund should help. But in their March complaint, attorneys at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Southern Poverty Law Center alleged that state regulators designed a system that makes it impossible for rural residents to access this crucial financial assistance.
One of the ways that the Alabama Department of Environmental Management does this, the complaint states, is by only allowing public bodies to receive funding, ruling out rural homeowners and community groups (in contrast, other southern states like North Carolina and Arkansas give high priority to onsite sanitation systems).
“The result is stark: Alabama has distributed more than one and a half billion dollars in Clean Water State Revolving Fund money since the program’s inception in 1987, but it has never awarded any money” to support individual households’ onsite sanitation needs, the complaint read.
A lack of wastewater infrastructure can have severe public health consequences. One study from 2017 found that one-third of residents in Alabama’s Lowndes County are dealing with hookworm, an intestinal parasite that can cause anemia and stunt children’s mental development.
The direness of the wastewater situation across the Black Belt has been well documented for more than a decade. In 2017, a U.N. poverty official toured the region and remarked that he’d never seen anything like it in the First World. A 2021 civil rights probe by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services into the conditions in Lowndes County concluded in May with the state agreeing to identify homes with inadequate sanitation systems and updating them.
Colangelo, the lawyer at the Natural Resources Defence Council, called that settlement “remarkable,” but added that it will only solve the problem for one of the Black Belt’s counties. The EPA’s probe this week will hopefully address the issue statewide, he said, requiring regulators to accept individual household bids for onsite sanitation funding and to conduct outreach to communities that are not aware that the financial assistance exists.
Earlier this summer, the EPA dropped a high-profile civil rights complaint in Louisiana’s primary industrial corridor, where more than 100 industrial plants dump toxic pollution into the air of predominantly Black neighborhoods. While that decision prompted advocates to consider whether the agency would fail to follow through with other Title VI complaints, Colangelo told Grist that he does not expect a similar situation in Alabama.
“It’s on EPA to see it through, but we’re confident that they will,” he said.
The Alabama Department of Environmental Management has 30 days after the EPA’s announcement to respond to its probe in writing. After that, the federal agency could choose to bring all parties to the negotiating table to work out an agreement or conduct an investigation of its own.
The proceeedings in the main hall at the Conservative conference opened this morning with a speech from a member praising the party’s record on gay rights. Steve Barclay, the health secretary, is speaking now, and he will be announcing plans to ban trans women from female hospital wards. The Daily Telegraph has splashed on the story.
On a visit this morning Suella Braverman, the home secretary, said she backed the idea. She said:
Trans women have no place in women’s wards or indeed any safe space relating to biological women.
And the health secretary is absolutely right to clarify and make it clear that biological men should not have treatments in the same wards and in the same safe spaces as biological women.
In its report, it also said that although this was partly because of the pandemic, government decisions taken before Covid were a more important factor. It said:
Only during and in the immediate aftermath of the two world wars have government revenues grown by as much as they have in the period since 2019. To some extent, this ought not to be a surprise: the Covid-19 pandemic represented the most significant economic dislocation since the second world war. But while the response to the pandemic and its after-effects does explain some of the tax rises announced in recent years, it is far from the only – or even the most significant – explanation. Instead, tax rises have largely been the consequence of a desire for higher government spending on things that pre-date the pandemic (such as manifesto promises to expand the NHS workforce and hire more police officers, and a September 2019 declaration to be ‘turning the page on austerity’).
I disagree with that analysis. One of the biggest reasons that we’ve had to see taxes go up is because our debt interest payments have gone up as a result of the energy shock. That has an enormous pressure on the public purse.
The other thing I disagree with the IFS on – normally I don’t disagree with them, I do this time – is their suggestion this is a permanent rise in the level of taxation. I don’t believe it has to be. If we are prepared to take difficult decisions about the way we spent taxpayers’ money, to reform the deliver of public services, to reform the welfare state, there’s a chance to bring taxes down. But there aren’t any short cuts.
The final episode of Mississippi Goddam shares new revelations that cast doubt on the official story that Billey Joe Johnson Jr. accidentally killed himself.
Our reporting brought up questions that the original investigation never looked into. Host Al Letson and reporter Jonathan Jones go back to Mississippi to interview the key people in the investigation, including Johnson’s ex-girlfriend – the first recorded interview she’s ever done with a media outlet. The team also shares its findings with lead investigator Joel Wallace and the medical examiner who looked into the case.
Finally, after three years of reporting, we share what we’ve learned with Johnson’s family and talk to them about the inadequacy of the investigation and reasons to reopen the case.
This episode was originally broadcast in December 2021.
Black communities around Mississippi have long raised concerns about suspicious deaths of young Black men, especially when law enforcement is involved.
Curley Clark, vice president of the Mississippi NAACP at the time of Reveal’s reporting, called Billey Joe Johnson Jr.’s case an example of “Mississippi justice.”
“It means that they still feel like the South should have won the Civil War,” Clark said. “And also the laws for the state of Mississippi are slanted in that direction.”
Before Johnson died during a traffic stop with a White sheriff’s deputy, friends say police had pulled him over dozens of times. And some members of the community raised concerns that police had been racially profiling Black people.
Reveal investigates Johnson’s interactions with law enforcement and one officer in particular.
This episode was originally broadcast in November 2021.
Billey Joe Johnson Jr. and Hannah Hollinghead met in their freshman year of high school. Hollinghead says Johnson was her first love, and in many ways, it was a typical teen romance. Friends say they would argue, break up, then get back together again. Some people were far from accepting of their interracial relationship.
On Dec. 8, 2008, they were both dating other people. According to Hollinghead and her mother, Johnson made an unexpected stop at her house, moments before he died of a gunshot wound during a traffic stop on the edge of town.
But it appears that investigators failed to corroborate statements or interview Johnson’s friends and family to get a better idea of what was going on in his life on the day he died. Reveal exposes deep flaws in the investigation and interviews the people closest to Johnson, who were never questioned during the initial investigation.
This episode was originally broadcast in November 2021.
Special Agent Joel Wallace of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation was called in to investigate the death of Billey Joe Johnson Jr. He worked alongside two investigators from the George County district attorney’s office.
Wallace said that arrangement didn’t happen very often. And he now questions why they were assigned. “If you’ve got me investigating the case, then I’m an independent investigator,” he said. “But why would I need the district attorney investigator to oversee me investigating a case?”
The Johnson family was initially relieved because Wallace had experience investigating suspicious deaths. As a Black detective, he had dealt with racist backlash to his work.
Reveal host Al Letson and reporter Jonathan Jones visit Wallace, now retired, to talk about what happened with the investigation. When Wallace finds out what Reveal has uncovered, he begins to wonder whether the case should be reopened.
This episode was originally broadcast in November 2021.
Three black men jailed under joint enterprise law, which is often based on ‘dubious evidence’ of gang membership, says Liberty
The human rights campaign group Liberty has backed three black men who are contesting their murder convictions on the grounds of institutional racism by Greater Manchester police and the criminal justice system.
Liberty has made its own submission to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to support the application made in May by the three men, Durrell Goodall, Reano Walters and Nathaniel “Jay” Williams, who are serving life sentences.
One year after the water system in Jackson, Mississippi, failed during heavy flooding — precipitating one of the highest-profile municipal public health crises in recent U.S. history — officials are telling residents that their water is safe to drink. But these claims have failed to restore Jacksonians’ trust in the system: Last week, two local advocacy organizations filed an emergency petition with the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, requesting interim relief from persistently poor water quality and a greater degree of public involvement in plans to update the infrastructure.
The petition follows a press conference in mid-June, during which Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba announced a new initiative to distribute water filters to customers of the city’s beleaguered water system.
The federal government had been generous in providing critical funding to repair the system, he said, “but none of this will make any difference if we don’t restore the confidence within our residents,” many of whom were still buying bottled water. Providing filters, particularly to vulnerable people like pregnant women and families with young children, might help convince residents to use their taps again, he reasoned.
The speech landed him in federal court a week later, where a judge expressed concern that his comments contradicted the progress that had been made since the court had appointed a third-party manager, Ted Henifin, to oversee the city’s water system after its treatment plants failed last August.
“There is no health risk drinking the water that I’m aware of,” Henifin told the court on June 21. “We really need to be careful with messaging about the water.”
These assurances seem to contradict the experiences of many Jackson residents. In court testimony and interviews with Grist, residents described chronic odors and discoloration in their tap water, which has persisted even after the water manager’s remarks in June. In the petition filed last week, local groups also claimed that officials have failed to adequately account for numerous sources of lead and bacteria that could be contaminating the city’s water supply.
“Due to inadequate corrosion control, the downplay of historical lead contamination risk, failure to identify the locations of lead service lines, and the continued delay in rehabilitating microbial treatment processes, Jacksonians have no confidence in [Henifin’s] sweeping statements that Jackson’s tap water is safe for all,” the petition read. (The EPA has not yet responded publicly to the petition; when approached to comment for this story, Lumumba’s office referred Grist to Henifin, who did not respond to requests for comment.)
Jackson made national headlines last August after torrential rain caused the pumps at its main water treatment facility to fail, forcing local officials to distribute bottled water to the city’s 180,000 people. But the problem long predates that high-profile event. Jackson’s residents have endured years of low-pressure taps and rolling notices recommending that they boil their water before use. In March 2020, the EPA issued an emergency order warning that the water system could contain elevated levels of bacteria such as E. coli. Four years before that, state officials identified elevated lead levels in the drinking water.
The problem has its roots in decades of disinvestment and discriminatory neglect. After Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which cemented the integration of schools and public spaces, white residents began to leave town. Between 1980 and today, the population of white residents dropped from 52 percent to 15 percent. Today, Jackson is more than 80 percent Black and 1 in 4 people live in poverty, according to data from the U.S. Census.
The eroded tax base has made it difficult for city officials to perform much-needed repairs on the city’s water system, parts of which are more than a century old. Donald Cohen, executive director of the nonprofit research group In the Public Interest, told Grist that many poor cities around the country struggle to upgrade their water systems, because residents cannot afford high utility rates, and the tax base is insufficient to supplement that revenue.
In Jackson, matters are made worse by a growing antagonism between Republican Governor Tate Reeves and Lumumba, the Democratic mayor. Prior to becoming governor, Reeves used his power as state treasurer to block efforts to update the capital city’s infrastructure. As governor, he has routinely rejected legislation that would raise money for water-system improvements. (The governor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
“There’s a political component to what’s going on in Jackson,” said Cohen. “It’s a red war on a blue city, and it’s a white war on a Black city. Both of those things are true.”
After Jackson’s pumps failed last August, a federal court appointed Henifin, an engineer by training, to oversee the city’s water system. Lumumba has called Henifin “instrumental” in lending his expertise to repair the water system, and advocates that Grist spoke to said they had felt hopeful that matters would improve when he entered the picture. However, they quickly felt boxed out of the process and frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of transparency.
“There is a sense of you’re giving all this power to one person without including people who are from here in this process,” said Brooke Floyd, co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly at the People’s Advocacy Institute, one of the organizations involved in the petition. During a public meeting in March, Henifin said that the court had given him “really really broad authority, probably more than I would have given myself.” Earlier this month, Henifin was also put in charge of the city’s sewer system, which has at least 215 leaks that pour wastewater into the streets of some neighborhoods.
In their letter to the EPA, the petitioners allege that Henifin has repeatedly failed to meaningfully engage the community, which has resulted in decisions that are against the wishes of Jacksonians, such as taking steps towards privatizing the water system. Earlier this year, he incorporated JXN Water, Inc., the body formed to overhaul the city’s water system, effectively shielding it from public disclosure laws. Research has shown that private water systems have, on average, better water quality than public utilities, but they tend to be more costly to customers and more opaque, both factors that could harm officials’ efforts to restore trust in the Jackson community.
The O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant on August 31, 2022, in Jackson, Mississippi. Brad Vest via Getty Images
A section of the petition addresses Henifin’s statements to the court in June about the water being safe to drink. Floyd told Grist that the same week that Henifin made those claims, the water in her tap was discolored and “stuff was floating in it.” Her family has had to rely on huge water jugs that they buy from Office Depot — a luxury, she added, that many households can’t afford.
In a declaration submitted to the EPA alongside the petition last week, Jackson resident Danyelle Holmes said that every few months, there comes a week when her tap water runs brown and smells like eggs. During a court hearing in July, another resident said that when she leaves town, her and her son’s eczema improves. Shemeka Cavett, who’s lived in Jackson all her life, told Grist that all summer long, she’s filled two garbage bags a week with emptied water bottles. Sometimes, she said, her tap water is the color of tea. When she washes her face with it, she breaks out.
“I still don’t trust it after boiling it,” she said. “If the water is a different color, you can’t get that out.”
The poor water quality could be stemming from multiple sources, the petitioners wrote. Old hookups and bad plumbing in the city’s water distribution network could be leaching lead into some neighborhoods’ tap water, but a lack of access to sampling data has kept residents in the dark about the degree of their potential exposure. As of Henifin’s last quarterly report, the city’s main water treatment plants still did not have optimal corrosion control equipment, an important safeguard against lead contamination.
Last month, JXN Water Inc. reported two water quality violations at that facility to the state. In 2020, the EPA issued an emergency order stating that Jackson’s water system had failed to meet federal filtration and disinfection standards, elevating the risk of bacteria such as E. Coli and Giardia in local taps. In his latest report, Henifin has said that work on the local filtration system is ongoing, but that no completion date could be established.
A lack of access to clean water disrupts almost every aspect of life, said Makani Themba, a local activist. When the water quality is low, people are scared to shower or wash their hands often. One recent study connected boil water alerts in Jackson to higher rates of unexcused absences in schools. Pregnant people and children are particularly vulnerable to the lead exposure, while the elderly and immunocompromised are at a greater risk for microbial contamination. The advocates’ petition suggests that in light of these risks, residents with compromised water be given bottled water or temporary relocation funds.
“Water is life,” Themba told Grist. “That’s really why it was important to file this emergency petition to seek some relief while the residents of Jackson are going through all this.”
Federal relief is on the horizon, but it won’t be nearly enough to meet residents’ needs. In June, President Biden announced that Jackson will be receiving $115 million to improve its water system. The funds are part of a wider $600 million package approved by Congress in the latest federal budget. The money will be used for a range of improvements including fixing leaks in the pipes and ensuring adequate pumping to keep a safe level of pressure in taps. The distribution of funds will be overseen by the EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act. But Mayor Lumumba has estimated that it would take approximately $2 billion to completely overhaul the city’s water system.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan visited Jackson in November 2021 on his “Journey to Justice tour,” a survey of communities across the South dealing with issues of environmental justice, a term that refers to the disproportionate levels of pollution experienced by low income people and communities of color. Floyd recalls meeting Regan during the tour, and said that his visit was an opportunity for places like Jackson to have a platform to hold regulators accountable. But now, she added, the question is whether they will get the job done.
Is the federal government’s action “just going to be performative, or is environmental justice really going to be served?” she wondered aloud. “It’s on the community and the people to really make sure that they follow through.”
An Indigenous man seeking to access the aged pension three years earlier due to racial disadvantage has lost his federal court case.
Uncle Dennis, a 66-year-old Queensland-born Wakka Wakka man who has requested that his surname be withheld, lodged a claim to receive the pension but it was rejected because he had not reached the pension age, now 67. He argued that if retiring Indigenous men were expected to live for three years fewer than non-Indigenous men, then their pension age should be 64.
Pastor Philip Schmitter waited more than 20 years for the Environmental Protection Agency to do its job. In 1992, he’d filed a civil rights complaint to halt the construction of a power station that would spew toxic lead into the air of his predominantly Black community in Flint, Michigan. Decades passed without a response, so he joined four other groups around the country in a lawsuit to compel the agency to address their concerns.
The case hinged on the EPA’s duty to enforce Title VI, a provision of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI allows federal agencies to take action against state policies that discriminate by disproportionately harming groups protected by the Act — the discriminatory policy being, in this case, Michigan’s permitting of a plant that would pollute Black neighborhoods. After the EPA lost the suit in 2020, agency officials finally began timely investigations of civil rights complaints and made some of the EPA’s first-ever findings of discrimination.
That progress, however, could be short-lived.
This week, the EPA abruptly terminated three of its highest-profile open civil rights complaints. The move deals a major blow not only to the majority-Black communities that filed them but also to the EPA’s own authority to enforce Title VI in places with some of the nation’s worst air quality. The cases originated in the region widely known as “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile industrial corridor in southeast Louisiana, and were voluntarily closed after the state’s Republican attorney general sued the federal government for alleged abuses of power during the complaint negotiations.
Grist obtained copies of two draft agreements from the now-defunct negotiations, which reveal efforts by EPA officials to institute profound changes to Louisiana’s permitting process, which has historically concentrated chemical plants near Black communities. One of the most substantial terms of the resolution would have required state regulators to assess whether a community is already exposed to disproportionately high levels of pollution before permitting new plants there. With the cases closed, the prospect of those changes has all but vanished.
“This is basically the EPA not using the full power of its environmental laws,” said Adam Kron, a senior attorney at Earthjustice who worked on the case. He described Title VI as one of the clearest ways to advance environmental justice, a goal that Biden EPA has repeatedly called a priority. “It’s disappointing to see EPA acquiesce to what seems like a lawsuit that really doesn’t have much grounding to it.”
The Title VI statute states that no person should, on the basis of race, color, or national origin, be subject to discrimination under any program that receives federal funding. The provision is wide-reaching, covering hundreds of thousands of programs across the country and governing decisions as diverse as where a road can go or who can get treatment at a hospital. But in the environmental space, it’s been largely underutilized, with the EPA routinely failing to respond to dozens of cases within the 180-day period required by the law.
The 2020 federal court ruling on Schmitter’s case gave communities in Louisiana’s St. James and St. John the Baptist parishes hope that Title VI could finally help limit pollution in their backyards. Together, their complaints alleged a number of negligent actions by state regulators, including a failure to curb cancer-causing emissions that violate federal safety standards and to consider pre-existing pollution when permitting new industrial plants. A formal resolution of their cases would have likely addressed these concerns.
The draftagreements that Grist obtained include sweeping measures to change the way the state of Louisiana approves new industrial facilities, like folding community involvement into critical moments of the decision-making process and requiring officials to prove, both before and after plants begin operating, that their emissions will not disproportionately harm people of color. In Louisiana, majority-Black communities are exposed to at least 7 times the emissions, on average, as predominantly White communities in industrial areas.
“We were hoping to get systemic change,” said Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, who worked on the complaints. “For decades, people have been fighting against individual polluters and individual facilities, but when the decision-making process itself is flawed, you need something that seeks to improve it.”
Louisiana officials did not respond to a request for comment.
An aerial view of Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ in October, 2013. Giles Clarke/Getty Images
Despite progress with the agreements, testimony in Louisiana’s legal filings suggests that, at some point during the negotiation process, things between state and federal officials began to sour. Then, in late May, state attorney general Jeff Landry sued the EPA.
The case hinged on the EPA’s ability to pursue actions based on “disparate impacts,” or the idea that a policy or agency decision can disproportionately harm a specific group of people, regardless of whether or not that harm is intentional. These standards have always been unpopular with some state officials who view them as evidence of federal agencies meddling in matters beyond their authority. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is sympathetic to these concerns, ruling in numerouslandmark cases over the past few years to vastly restrict the powers of federal regulators.
But multiple lawyers that Grist interviewed argued that Louisiana’s legal arguments would have ultimately been unlikely to undermine Title VI, raising the question of why the EPA appears to have preemptively conceded on the matter.
“It was unripe — there was no action by the EPA that Louisiana could challenge,” said Kron. “So it seems like a strange lawsuit for [the federal government] to take as a serious enough threat to just undo this whole process that’s been going on for over a year.”
Environmental advocates and residents in Louisiana also decried the decision to close the complaints.
“I often feel like our communities are left to fight on our own,” said Joy Banner, an activist and long-time resident of the region. “It’s disappointing when we have organizations at the federal level who aren’t willing to step in to fight along with us for our basic human right to survive.”
EPA spokesperson Khanya Brann told Grist that the agency remains “fully committed” to improving the environmental conditions in the communities that filed the complaints.
“Community participation has been critical to identifying both problems and solutions, and we look forward to our continued partnership with the residents in both parishes as we continue our joint efforts to improve public health and the environment,” she said.
The EPA wrote in its letters announcing the closure of the complaints that it would address residents’ concerns through other means, like its pending litigation against one of the region’s most infamous chemical plants and its proposed rules for tightening standards for certain types of facilities operating in the region. But residents told Grist that those measures do not cover the totality of their concerns, and that a major benefit of the Title VI process is its speedy timeline: While court cases can drag on and emissions standards can take years to implement, a resolution of the complaints may have granted communities much faster relief from toxic emissions.
Claire Glenn, a criminal defense attorney with a background in civil rights law, compared EPA’s use of Title VI to other federal agencies’ more robust implementation of the law. The Department of Transportation, for example, requires regulators to consider whether a project will disproportionately impact a group of people before it’s ever constructed. However, she added, deciding where a transit line goes is often less controversial than approving a multi-billion dollar company’s new industrial complex.
“I think the reason EPA’s Title VI program is so hamstrung is because it is so directly butting up against corporate interests,” she said.
Advocates told Grist that they are exploring other options to advance residents’ concerns, and called the EPA’s actions this week a setback but not a roadblock. Residents said that they are determined not to give up.
“We come from a long line of people who fought,” said Banner. “This is just one little hill that we have to overcome — but ultimately I see us heading to the mountain, and victory is the mountain.”
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
From book bans to uproar over critical race theory, American classrooms have been on the front lines of the culture war. And there’s one state that’s leading the charge.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has championed several laws affecting education, from prohibitions on classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity to blocks on funding for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at state colleges. He’s also targeted one the state’s most liberal and academically rigorous institutions: New College of Florida.
In January, DeSantis’ chief of staff told National Review, “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.” The comment sparked widespread controversy because Hillsdale College is a private Christian school in Michigan, and New College is the state’s public honors college.
That same month, DeSantis appointed multiple new trustees to the board, who began seizing control of New College almost immediately. In their first meeting, trustees ousted the college’s president and legal counsel and selected a new board chair, a DeSantis appointee. And they set in motion a plan to terminate the school’s diversity officer.
Since then, a pitched battle has been playing out, with DeSantis and his appointees on one side and students and faculty on the other. In this episode of Reveal, we partner with freelance reporter and filmmaker Sam Greenspan, who is a graduate of New College, to examine the changes taking place there. Greenspan follows journalists at the Catalyst, the student newspaper, as they cover the rapid-fire changes that are throwing the future of the college into uncertainty.
To close the show, host Al Letson interviews Democratic Florida Rep. Angie Nixon about her opposition to many of the governor’s recent policies and the effects she thinks they’ll have on students and educators in the state.
When Dulce Ortiz wants to enjoy the beauty of Lake Michigan, walk in a green space, or see and touch the water, she has to leave her neighborhood, even though the second-largest of the Great Lakes is in her backyard.
Ortiz lives in Waukegan, Illinois, a suburb about an hour north of Chicago that has a lurid history of toxic waste. With a population of only 88,000, the city has five Superfund sites, many of them found along the Lake Michigan shoreline.
And that’s not even counting the large pools of toxic materials leftover from decades of burning coal in Waukegan. Deep pits of hazardous sludge sit along the shores of Lake Michigan, the watershed for roughly 12 million people.
Ortiz, co-chair of the local environmental justice organization Clean Power Lake County, calls these coal waste sites a “ticking time bomb” vulnerable to future spills, with the potential to harm millions.
Waukegan’s coal-fired power plant, which closed last year, sits a little over a mile from an elementary school, a public park, and single-family housing intermixed with local taquerias and bakeries. The city is majority Latino according to U.S. Census data.
Now, a permanent solution to coal industry debris could soon be a reality.
When coal is burned for fuel, it produces a waste product known as coal ash. This burnt byproduct is stored in large, manmade landfills commonly called ponds or pits. The material is toxic and contains at least 17 heavy metals and radioactive materials, such as mercury, cadmium, and arsenic, which cause cancer and birth defects, as well as heart and lung diseases.
In May, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, proposed new regulations to stop a loophole that has allowed historic coal ash ponds to go unmonitored for years. The new ruling would force energy companies and other owners of the coal ash ponds to clean up inactive sites.
Coal ash has an infamous toxic history. The 2008 Kingston, Tennesse, coal ash spill — where over 5 million cubic yards were spilled into surrounding waterways and caused the death of cleanup workers years after the event — is regarded as one of the nation’s worst industrial disasters.
The regulation of coal ash at the federal level is fairly new. In 2015, the EPA issued the first national minimum standards for new and operating coal ash ponds, leaving out hundreds of legacy sites that haven’t received coal ash since before 2015.
The recently announced EPA rules change comes on the heels of litigation from the nonprofit environmental justice organization Earthjustice. Lisa Evans, senior counsel there, told Grist that the newly proposed ruling goes a long way to prevent future disasters, calling current regulations on legacy coal ash ponds “irrational, dangerous, and reckless.”
“The EPA made a lot of compromises in the 2015 rule and came out with the weakest rule it could have created,” said Evans.
Coal ash ponds are notorious for leaking into surrounding bodies of water and soil. According to a report last year, roughly 90 percent of coal plants have tainted the surrounding groundwater.
That same report also found that approximately 70 percent of decommissioned power plants with accompanying coal ash ponds are found in low-income communities or majority-nonwhite census tracts.
Dulce Ortiz has been trying to get rid of toxic coal ash ponds in Waukegan, Illinois, for years.
Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Ortiz said that in addition to fear of toxic materials slowly seeping into Lake Michigan, she worries climate change is speeding up the chance for future disasters.
In a report published last year, the Midwest environmental advocacy nonprofit Environmental Law and Policy Center found that Lake Michigan has 12 toxic waste sites that are particularly at risk of spilling and harming nearby communities, thanks to lake erosion and increased storms fueled by climate change.
Waukegan was identified as one of the sites, alongside other coal ash ponds in Indiana and Wisconsin.
“The longer we leave (coal ash ponds) there unaddressed, something catastrophic is going to happen,” Ortiz said.
The Waukegan Generating Station no longer operates its coal-fired power stations, but its waste remains. Midwest Generation, a subsidiary of national energy company NRG Energy, owns the power plant.
Two coal ash ponds at the plant are in the process of being cleaned up. According to Midwest Generation, one pond will be capped and covered, a process where the pond is filled with soil and sediment and covered with plastic, and remains in place. The other pond will have its materials excavated and moved to a permitted disposal landfill.
Both ponds are currently regulated by the EPA and the cleanup process is on hold as the company awaits state permitting approval.
A third site at the Waukegan plant is a historic coal ash waste site that has not received coal ash since 1977, according to Midwest Generation. This would classify the site as a legacy coal ash site and its cleanup would likely be regulated under the new EPA proposal.
In a statement, Midwest Generation said it is still reviewing the EPA’s proposal and “will continue to be committed to compliance with applicable laws and will comply with any final rules related to legacy (coal) ash areas.”
The decommissioning of coal-fired power is part of an overarching Illinois initiative to be coal-free by 2045. Illinois was the first state in the Midwest to legislate the phase-out of coal-fired power plants and focus on renewable energy and environmental justice with the 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act.
Alongside proper environmental cleanup and regulation, Ortiz said the issue of environmental justice is key to the future of Waukegan.
The still-standing coal plant in Waukegan is a “symbol of pain and suffering” for Ortiz. She said it’s a reminder that Waukegan residents, specifically Black and Latino, have been sacrificed in the name of industry profit.
She said when visiting other, affluent and majority-white suburbs in the region, the communities along Lake Michigan have full use of the natural resource and aren’t exposed to the dangers of legacy coal pollution.
“Why can’t we have that as well? Why can’t our children have an easily accessible lakefront?” Ortiz said.
Coal may not be synonymous with the Midwest, but the region has an abundance of coal ash ponds.
According to data from Earthjustice, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio are among the top five states with regulated and unregulated coal ash ponds. Additionally, there are 88 coal ash dump sites within two miles of at least one of the Great Lakes, the water source for an estimated 30 million people.
Following the curve of Lake Michigan, a city in northwest Indiana echoes Waukegan’s past, and the residents hope new regulations could chart a future without polluting industries in their backyard.
Michigan City, Indiana, is located roughly 100 miles from Waukegan and is home to 32,000 residents, a third of them Black.
Indiana has the largest number of operational coal plants in the country and 100 coal ash sites. According to Earthjustice estimates, half of these sites are currently unregulated.
Ashley Williams is the executive director of Just Transition Northwest Indiana, a nonprofit environmental justice organization based out of Michigan City.
She said the contamination is a “silent crisis” with roughly 2 million tons of toxic coal ash sitting near Lake Michigan. Michigan City’s coal-fired power plant sits in the shadow of nearby playgrounds, homes, and public beaches.
A cooling tower for a coal-powered power plant sits close to playgrounds in Michigan City, Indiana.
Just Transition Northwest Indiana
The Michigan City Generating Station, owned by the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, or NIPSCO, is still in operation. The coal plant has five ash ponds that are regulated under current federal rulings.
Like Waukegan, the NIPSCO site includes one currently unregulated man-made coal ash fill, which contains sediment, sand, and coal ash, and is used to buffer the coal plant from Lake Michigan’s waters.
The infrastructure that stops this material from spilling into Lake Michigan is aging and at risk of a “catastrophic release,” according to an engineering study authorized by Earthjustice.
According to Energy News Network, the seawall site contains roughly two million cubic yards of coal ash and areas of the pond go as deep as 40 feet in the ground. A NIPSCO spokesperson disputed the estimated amount of coal ash on the historic site, which the news site said is based on NIPSCO documents. In a statement to Grist, NIPSCO said there is an estimated 109,000 tons of leftover coal material outside of the ponds.
This seawall location would likely be regulated under the new EPA proposal.
In a statement, NIPSCO said it will “continue to monitor the progression of EPA’s latest proposal for regulations related to coal ash management and how this might apply to the work we’re already doing to comply with current regulations.”
Williams said the region’s history of industrial pollution is buried everywhere.
The nearby town of Pines, Michigan has been in a longstanding cleanup and legal battle dating back to the 1970s. For decades, NIPSCO dumped coal ash waste in the town’s landfill, used it to build roads, and gave it to residents to fill their yards and homes.
“It’s been a long road getting to this point,” she said.
The NIPSCO coal-fired power plant will close as early as 2026. Williams said she wants to ensure the site doesn’t get developed and turned into another site of environmental injustice.
She said Just Transition Northwest Indiana advocates for a statewide shift in energy production and wants both youth and current industry workers to be at the forefront of planning the future of the region.
“We’re trying to reclaim our power from polluters,” she said. “What’s happening in Michigan City is the beginning of what a just national transition could be.”
Jeremiah Ho, Colonizing Queerness, University of Colorado Law Review (forthcoming 2023). Abstract below. This Article investigates how and why the cultural script of inequality persists for queer identities despite major legal advancements such as marriage, anti-discrimination, and employment protections. By…
As the United States tries to meet its climate goals and address environmental justice issues, cutting greenhouse gases alone might not help communities of color dealing with air pollution.
In some cases, it might even hurt them, according to a new study from the University of California San Diego.
The study, published in the century-old scientific journal PNAS, reveals how, if the U.S. tries to cut greenhouse gases based on income or other factors instead of race, communities of color could suffer more from air pollution.
Air pollution and greenhouse gases have historically been separated into different categories, despite the fact that both are the end products of burning fossil fuels. But recent efforts, most notably by the Biden administration through the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, have reclassified carbon dioxide as an air pollutant.
“The U.S. government says they see climate policy as an opportunity to advance equity,” said Pascal Polonik, lead author on the paper and a graduate student at the University of California San Diego. “So one of the questions to me then became, well, what happens if we reduce greenhouse gases? Are we also going to improve [air quality] equity?”
The study focused on a subset of particle pollution, called PM 2.5, that can be found at the end of tailpipes as well as in wildfire smoke. The type of pollution that researchers focused on is particularly harmful because of its small size. The 2.5 refers to particles that are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, tiny enough to bypass the body’s defenses and enter the bloodstream.
Meanwhile, The Biden Administration introduced several key programs in the past few years to try to advance equity while fighting climate change. The most effective is an EPA initiative to cut power plant pollution by 2040. The move will give overburdened communities relief from excessive emissions.
“Income is not a good proxy, alone, for race,” said Polonik.
Researchers modeled a variety of scenarios, and found that cutting pollution based on the lowest cost scenario or randomly cutting pollution across the U.S. wouldn’t solve poor air quality in overburdened communities. In the scenario where the U.S. would use the cheapest option to slash emissions, air quality disparities would go up for Asian, Black, and Hispanic communities.
Additionally, researchers found that pollution from power plants and transportation are particularly important in perpetuating air quality inequity. When these types of pollution are targeted, it can reduce imbalances.
“Some of the major causes of climate change and local pollution that affects people’s health, such as asthma and other respiratory diseases, are primarily coming from the burning of fossil fuels,” said Michael Méndez, an assistant professor of urban planning and public policy at the University of California Irvine.
Méndez said as the U.S. continues to try to find ways to decarbonize quickly, the only way to address equity issues is to use targeted policy to reach people most affected by an issue.
“When you don’t have targeted policies to the most burdened communities — those experiencing the disproportionate amount of multiple, cumulative forms of pollution — then you have an ineffective policy,” he said.
On Thursday June 1, 2023, at 6:15pm ET, the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center are jointly hosting a side event during the 2nd session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. The…
By: Gabrielle Thomas1 and Denisse Córdova Montes In 1808, the U.S. abolished the transatlantic slave trade, but today, the semiotics of the slave ship continues through forced movements and separations of migrants and refugees. Slave codes sustained through immigration laws…
Council of Europe finds ‘shocking’ levels of bullying in education system and threats to legal status and rights
There is “troublingly persistent” levels of discrimination against Gypsy, Roma and Travellers (GRT) in the UK, an expert group from Europe’s leading human rights body has found.
The Council of Europe committee said the GRT community suffer “shocking” amounts of bullying in the education system, prejudiced reporting in the media and threats to their legal status and rights, including as a result of recent legislative changes.
The UN Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the Context of Law Enforcement ended a 12-day visit to the United States of America on May 5, 2023, calling on the U.S. Government to boost efforts to promote…
On April 6, 2023, at 12:00pm EST, join the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) for a webinar on race and international law. International law has historically perpetuated racist practices by providing the legal architecture for slavery and the slave…
The Supreme Court is poised to overturn race-based affirmative action. But preferences based on socioeconomic disadvantage—which are both politically popular and legally sound—could produce similarly high levels of diversity.
San Francisco Bay Area regulators have banned the future sale of gas-powered heating appliances, such as furnaces and water heaters, to protect the region’s air quality.
Starting in 2027, The Bay Area Air Quality Management District will require homeowners to replace any broken gas-powered heating units with heat pumps, devices that use an advanced form of technology similar to refrigerators and air conditioners to cool and heat a home at the same time. Regulators will also work with local governments in the area to ensure that permits for houses require the installation of electric heating appliances.
District officials estimated that this move could prevent smog-forming air pollutants and avert 15,000 asthma attacks and 85 premature deaths in the region due to better air quality. The measure will also contribute to cutting the state’s climate emissions, as home heating currently comprises 11% of the state’s fossil fuel emissions.
In homes that are heated by fossil fuel furnaces and water heaters, numerous air pollutants from those appliances can seep out in the air inside and outside of the home. Many times, these gases don’t even have to be present in high volumes to do long-term damage to people’s health. Low levels of nitrogen oxides –– one of the air pollutants targeted in the rule –– can irritate asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lead to respiratory infections in children, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
A Bay Area Clean Air Coalition analysis ofnational data showed that in California, people of color are exposed to 32% more indoor air pollution from appliances than their white counterparts. The review demonstrates that phasing out fossil fuels in the home can have positive impacts that go beyond reducing carbon emissions. The standard could also help bring cooling to households, almost half of which don’t have air conditioning – while temperatures in the state are rising.
California is also helping to make heat pumps financially feasible for homeowners. While the upfront costs of installing a heat pump can top $10,000, subsidies available from the state of California, the federal government, and the Bay Area can help offset these costs to help people who might not otherwise be able to afford upgrading their gas appliances.
Additionally, different types of subsidies can be combined to cover the costs of heat pumps. Heat pumps also have long-term financial benefits which outweigh those of other traditional heating systems, such as the combined heating and cooling impact as well as the comparative cost of electricity versus gas which can result in savings.
It is still unclear if the standard will be implemented in a way that hurts or helps low-income residents since high utility bills are already impacting Bay Area residents. Regulators will need to create specific guidelines on the program to ensure that this program does not burden low-income residents.
“Bay Area policymakers must ensure that the transition away from fossil fuel appliances is part of the solution for more affordable, climate-resilient housing, and not part of the problem,” said Megan Leary, community engagement and policy manager at Emerald Cities San Francisco Bay Area.
John Cookson says only those whose ancestors gained from slavery should be responsible for reparations
The initiative by the Trevelyan family to pay reparations is very laudable and welcome (British slave owners’ family makes public apology in Grenada, 27 February). They directly benefited from slavery, so this is appropriate. I have serious reservations about reparations being paid by me. The government paying reparations means that my taxes would be used. My ancestors gained nothing from slavery. They worked in the mills and factories of Lancashire, particularly in Salford and Manchester, in the most appalling conditions, and were housed in insanitary, dangerous and unhealthy accommodation with a record of disease and deprivation among the worst in Europe. Anyone who doubts this should read Engel’s 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England.
If reparations are to be paid, a tax on the aristocrats and fat cats whose ancestors profited from slavery would be the only just solution. John Cookson Bournemouth, Dorset
On Thursday March 16, 2023, from 3:00 – 4:30 PM EST, Cornell Law School, Global Strategic Litigation Council for Refugee Rights, and the Refugee Solidarity Network, will present a virtual panel on Decolonizing Refugee law. Register here. The legal protection…
A civil rights complaint filed with the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday accuses the state of Alabama of mismanaging funds that should have gone to fix long-standing sewage issues for predominantly Black communities in both urban and rural pockets of the state.
The complaint alleges the Alabama Department of Environmental Management purposefully set up rules that stopped any applicant trying to get funds from Alabama’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund. Historically, Black Alabamans have comprised the majority of people who are forced to live with raw sewage and without proper plumbing.
The rules that blocked access included: a cumbersome points system, a refusal to consider financial need, a limited amount of loan forgiveness, and a lack of alternative financing options. In contrast, neighboring states like Florida and Georgia offer low interest loan options and Virginia has a fund which offers grants to residents to replace their septic systems.
One of the factors in the lack of viable sewage systems is the soil, which is composed of clay and drains water very slowly, which makes it difficult to build and maintain sewage systems. In poorer communities, septic systems are expensive to obtain and many homeowners have “straight pipes,” pipes that flush waste directly from the home through a PVC pipe to an area nearby, sometimes just a few yards from the home. In an area of the country where conditions are already difficult to achieve basic sanitary conditions, climate change will almost certainly make it worse.
Septic systems in this part of the country must contend with many factors, including the soil and the high water table, which makes them prone to damage. “[Septic systems] are failing as well and people just can’t afford to fix them,” said Flowers.
Residents are also dealing with the threats to their health due to sewage exposure, like hookworm, which one 2017 study found was present in one-third of residents in Lowndes County in Alabama’s Black Belt. Fixing the issue would address issues of disparities in health and sanitation, as well as eliminate a problem that has plagued Alabamans for decades.
“People that are on the lower end of the economic spectrum tend to be people of color and if we could get this resolved I think that it will not only solve the problem for communities of color but it will also solve the problems for all homeowners that are living with onsite septic systems,” said Flowers.
After assuming office in early 2021, President Joe Biden announced the Justice40 initiative, which promised that 40 percent of federal investments in infrastructure, clean energy, and other climate-related programs would be directed toward disadvantaged communities. The program is an effort to counteract the legacy of past policies that have unevenly distributed the country’s environmental burdens, with communities of color historically faring the worst in terms of underinvestment and pollution exposure.
In order to implement Biden’s vision for equitable federal spending, the government first needed to decide which communities would officially be considered “disadvantaged.” The Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, or CEJST, that debuted last year is an attempt to use reams of socioeconomic and environmental data to pinpoint neighborhoods facing the greatest burdens.
But the beta version of the tool, which was developed by the White House Council on Environmental Quality in an open-source process, quickly proved controversial. Despite evidence that race is the strongest and most consistent predictor of environmental burdens, the tool did not explicitly consider racial demographics as a factor that could tip a community into the “disadvantaged” category. While the White House said it made the decision to avoid legal challenges, environmental justice advocates were incensed, fearing that without considering race the tool would fail to identify disadvantaged communities of color that should be prioritized for Justice40 funds.
A Grist analysis last year found that many of these fears didn’t come to pass. By analyzing criteria such as proximity to traffic, linguistic isolation, and proximity to hazardous waste sites — factors which are all strongly correlated with race — the tool was able to account for race by proxy. As a result, the race-neutral screening tool still prioritized communities of color. The higher a census tract’s non-white population, the more likely that it would be flagged as disadvantaged.
Still, roughly 9,000 census tracts where the majority of residents are non-white were not considered disadvantaged by the tool. While some of these, like parts of the California Bay Area, are high-income areas with little pollution exposure, others, like parts of San Bernardino County, the Eastwick neighborhood in Philadelphia, and the Woodlawn neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, are arguably exactly the sorts of communities the tool was intended to identify.
As a result, the White House received an avalanche of comments critiquing the prototype. More than 2,300 people wrote in, and the vast majority demanded that the tool explicitly consider race in order to include more communities of color. After taking these comments into consideration, the White House quietly released an updated version of the tool in late November.
Here’s how the tool now works. It first computes a slew of socioeconomic and environmental statistics for every census tract in the country. These metrics include a tract’s income and whether it is near legacy pollution sites, close to heavy traffic, and has a high projected flood or fire risk, among others. If a tract meets one each of the tool’s socioeconomic and environmental burden thresholds, it is considered disadvantaged. Based on the suggestions of several researchers and advocates, the new version also now automatically considers more than 750 federally recognized tribal tracts disadvantaged, refines its income formula, and adds nine new criteria for judging whether a neighborhood is disadvantaged, including whether it is flood- or wildfire -prone, lacks green space, and is near abandoned mines. Additionally, if a tract is surrounded by disadvantaged communities and is at or above the 50 percent threshold for low income, then it is also automatically considered disadvantaged, even if it fails to meet the environmental thresholds.
The changes led to an addition of roughly 4,400 census tracts to the ranks of the disadvantaged. As a result, 37 percent of the country’s nearly 74,000 tracts are now considered disadvantaged by the tool — up from 32 percent in the initial version. Those tracts are home to about 109 million Americans.
The White House “was really responsive to community feedback,” said Justin Schott, a project manager at the Energy Equity Project at the University of Michigan, a group researching ways to improve clean energy access for communities of color. “I was impressed by the breadth of new datasets that they took on.”
Like in the beta version, the “disadvantaged” designation in the revised tool remains highly correlated with race: The larger the share of people of color in a tract, the more likely it is to be flagged. A recent E&E News analysis also found that the tool identified more than three-fourths of all U.S. tracts where Black and Hispanic residents make up a majority as disadvantaged.
But a Grist analysis has found that the addition of new data and methodological changes did not dramatically alter the tool’s effectiveness at capturing communities of color shouldering environmental burdens. In fact, some advocates argue that the tool’s focus on communities of color has actually been diluted by the addition of many rural, majority-white tracts.
Of the roughly 4,400 disadvantaged tracts added in the new version, just 37 percent of the population are people of color. Conversely, the roughly 650 tracts that lost their status as disadvantaged had a population that’s 57 percent non-white. In total, about 800 tracts that are majority non-white were added as disadvantaged. At the same time, the number of tracts with a population that is 90 percent or more white increased by nearly 1,000.
Grist / Jessie Blaeser
“The changes they made, and I think inadvertently, in my opinion, ended up making the program less focused on people of color than it originally was,” said Bob Dean, CEO of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a Chicago-based nonprofit that has been assessing the tool over the last year.
A spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality did not respond to specific questions, but said that the new version of the tool “adds new datasets to better reflect the burdens that communities face in response to feedback from Tribal Nations, the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, environmental justice stakeholders, and others.” While the tool does not include race explicitly, it reflects “on-the-ground burdens and realities that disadvantaged communities face,” she said.
There are a few reasons why the new version appears biased toward less diverse tracts. Some of the newly added criteria for inclusion — such as risk of flooding, homes without a kitchen or indoor plumbing — appear to prioritize whiter communities. For example, of the more than 4,400 tracts newly included as disadvantaged, about 500 were selected because people who live in these tracts had inadequate access to transportation. However, only 27 percent of the people in these tracts are non-white — considerably lower than the average non-white population in disadvantaged tracts in both versions of the tool.
Dean said it was likely the transportation access criteria was causing the tool to pick up a number of rural tracts where public transit is scarce. “You end up with people traveling a very long way to get to work and being dependent on cars and having to maintain a car for work because there is no transit alternative,” he said. “And those places are majority white.”
In order to assess the difference between the old and new versions of the tool, Manuel Salgado, a research analyst at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a community advocacy group based in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, analyzed the racial makeup of the disadvantaged tracts. He found that the percentage of Latino, Black, and Asian residents in disadvantaged tracts decreased in the new version, but the percentage of white residents increased. The proportion of non-Hispanic/Latino white population increased by more than 4.5 percentage points in the new tool, while the proportion of Black and Latino populations decreased by 1.8 and 2.8 percentage points respectively.
Grist / Jessie Blaeser
“The new additions as far as people are concerned were so predominantly white, it dilutes the impact that the tool has in general on communities of color,” said Salgado. “There’s potential here, but on its own, I don’t necessarily view it as a positive change.”
Overall, the tool now considers many more rural communities disadvantaged. In a webinar announcing the new version of the tool in November, Sharmila Murthy, the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s senior counsel said that nearly a third of rural communities were now considered disadvantaged — compared to just 23 percent in the earlier version. The inclusion of many more rural communities was likely driving the demographic changes in the new version, Salgado said.
During the comment period, environmental justice groups advocated that the White House use redlining data in order to pull in more diverse communities. In the 1930s, the federal government created color-coded maps that designated certain neighborhoods as risky areas to invest in. These redlining maps resulted in historic underinvestment in communities of color. Environmental advocates hoped that including redlining data would be a closer proxy to race — but that didn’t bear out. In effect, the redlining criteria only pulled in an additional 21 tracts with a population of roughly 75,000, according to an analysis by the Center for Neighborhood Technology.
That’s because of the tool’s methodology and how the data is used. CEJST requires that each criteria be considered alongside a socioeconomic variable. In this case, the redlining threshold is only met when a tract has both experienced historic underinvestment and is at or above the 65th percentile of a low-income measure. More than 1,100 redlined tracts weren’t included because they failed to meet that income threshold.
That’s the case in the East Bronx in New York, where one tract has a population that is 99 percent non-white, including a nearly 80 percent Black population, was redlined, has a large share of the population suffering from asthma, is exposed to high levels of particulate matter from diesel exhaust, and is close to a leaky underground storage tanks. But it’s not considered disadvantaged by the tool because its income score is 64 percent — just below the 65 percent threshold. Salgado advocated for lowering the income threshold for formerly redlined tracts. Decreasing the threshold to 50 percent would bring in an additional 254 tracts, he found.
Environmental justice experts Grist spoke to argued that the tool would identify more qualified communities of color if it took a more cumulative approach. Currently, for example, the tool doesn’t distinguish between tracts that meet multiple environmental thresholds and those that meet just one. Analyses by Salgado and researchers at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, a conservation group, also found that tracts that are facing multiple environmental burdens are also more likely to have larger Black populations.
When they looked at the racial breakdown of disadvantaged tracts, those that meet three or more of the tool’s thresholds contain two-thirds of the Black disadvantaged-tract population and more than half of the Latino disadvantaged-tract population. Conversely, tracts where only one or two thresholds are met have larger white populations. Given this, a cumulative impact approach might pull in more Black and Latino tracts if it relaxed the income threshold in cases where multiple environmental burden thresholds are met.
“The cumulative impact component would allow [the tool] to better capture those communities of color who are currently not captured and also really look at the magnitude of disadvantage,” said Sacoby Wilson, a professor at the University of Maryland who helped the state of Maryland develop its own environmental justice screening tool.
Murthy, the White House counsel, said that the tool will continue to be refined and that they are “eager to be improving the methodology to better reflect cumulative impacts in future versions of the tool.” The White House is currently working with an advisory council and a study committee to implement these changes. A guidance document released by the White House last month also noted that while a methodology to assess cumulative burdens is being built, “agencies have discretion to prioritize communities in a way that approximates this goal.”
“We anticipate that future versions of the tool will be able to identify communities that are disproportionately bearing these cumulative impacts,” Murthy said.
