Green Redlining

How rules against "environmental racism" hurt poor minorities most of all.How rules against "environmental racism" hurt poor minorities most of all.

Henry Payne from the October 1998 issue

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In an interview with National Journal, the EPA's Browner insisted that "if people who live in the community feel like they are part of the decision-making process that affects their community, a lot of issues that may otherwise be raised [by civil rights claims] can be spoken to in advance." But Wise finds such platitudes disingenuous. "We have partnered with [the Romeville] community. Our permits are sound," he says. "What else do we have to do to get a plant approved?"

Chris Foreman, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution and author of a forthcoming book on environmental justice, laments the administration's racial politicization of the permitting process. "Environmental justice is not fundamentally racial," Foreman says. "But Title VI invites race-based claims." He says accusations of environmental racism are "dubious, but politically compelling. No one wants to be called a racist." In its zeal to apply Title VI civil rights law to industrial emissions, Foreman contends, the administration has obscured the real health problem that threatens communities like Romeville: poverty.

Shintech's jobs, starting at $12 an hour plus benefits, pay far and above the $6-an-hour jobs (with no benefits) that many St. James Parish residents now work in the sugar cane fields. Cherie Fernandez, a pro-Shintech African American who works for $24 an hour in another chemical facility across the Mississippi from Romeville, says more manufacturing jobs like Shintech's are needed, especially as St. James's population of welfare dependents go looking for work under new federal welfare laws (18 percent of the county's blacks are unemployed). Barrow, the LDEQ's brownfields expert, says the EPA doesn't understand that the "environment is the totality of [minority] surroundings. Industries like Shintech mean the streets are paved. They mean community centers for the kids. It's laughable to say these communities are better off without them."

State and local governments across the nation have felt Louisiana's pain. Despite the national economic boom, black unemployment remains over 9 percent, and local governments are scrambling to attract industries to state enterprise zones and brownfields. In addition to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, local organizations and business groups throughout the country have lined up to condemn the EPA's environmental redlining policy. The list includes 17 states, the Environmental Council of the States (a group representing each state's top environmental official), the National Association of Counties, the National Association of Black County Officials, 14 attorneys general, the Western Governors' Association (including Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, head of the Democratic National Committee), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Black Chamber of Commerce.

Addressing the Black Chamber of Commerce's annual meeting, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donahue said: "I'm trying to think of a policy that would be more effective in driving away entrepreneurs and jobs from economically disadvantaged areas--and I can't do it."

Such fears were sown in cities like Lansing, Michigan, where General Motors will soon consolidate two huge facilities employing 7,000 people into a single final-assembly plant. City officials are lobbying the company to build the new facility in one of the majority-black city's many brownfield sites. But as long as the EPA rule is in effect, says Michigan environmental chief Harding, "G.M. will not build in Lansing. They'll buy farmland somewhere instead. The loser won't be the company; the losers will be the workers and cities." Says Steve Serkaian, media relations director for Lansing Mayor David Hollister: "What does this have to do with civil rights? If these plants don't build in these communities, [residents] will suffer from malnutrition, not pollution."

Michigan officials have been in the forefront of the Clinton administration's critics, not only because of their concern for environmental redlining's effect on proposed facilities but because of the effect on existing facilities. The EPA's Sector Facility Indexing Project (available at es.epa.gov/oeca/sfi/) lists plants around which the agency has literally drawn targets. The demographics within a three-mile radius of every plant in five major industries (automobile assembly, pulp manufacturing, petroleum refining, iron and steel production, and the primary smelting and refining of aluminum, copper, lead, and zinc) are just a keystroke away.

Contrary to the EPA's claim, a Scripps Howard News Service study of facilities listed on the agency's Web site in 13 industrial states did not find a disproportionate number in minority areas. Louisiana, for example, is 31 percent black, but only 18 percent of its industrial plants are located in black areas. The study did, however, find dozens of facilities in minority areas that could be vulnerable to activist suits under EPA's Title VI rule if and when they seek to expand or renew their permits. Eleven of the most vulnerable of these plants are in the auto industry--six of them in Michigan.

Fifty-seven percent of the population living within five miles of Ford's truck assembly plant in Dearborn, for example, is minority, as compared to 16 percent of the state's population. As a result, when Ford sought to update its paint operations this year, local activists threatened it with an environmental racism complaint, delaying the company's permit for four months. In the highly competitive auto marketplace, which measures new model development in months, Ford is concerned that the EPA's policy could create a nightmare of red-tape delays. "It seems like the EPA is setting up an almost endless adversarial process," Ford executive Tim O'Brien told The Detroit News.

Though the EPA ignored local officials when it drafted the Title VI policy, the administration cannot ignore their concerns now. Big city Democratic mayors are a key power base in the Democratic Party, and EPA chief Browner has reassured them in meetings around the country that she will work with them to draft a policy that meets their concerns. But Browner insists that a Title VI disparate impact standard must play a role in the permitting process, an approach that many state environmental officials simply find unworkable.

In a letter to Browner demanding that her agency withdraw its environmental redlining rule, California EPA's lawyers suggest that the U.S. EPA "cannot lawfully issue a policy" extending Title VI civil rights law to pollution without congressional action. Under current law, continues the California letter, neither state nor federal agencies have the authority to "to deny permits based on the racial makeup of the area surrounding the facility." Furthermore, the "California Supreme Court has determined that hazardous waste laws do not preempt local land use authority."

California EPA concludes that, without congressional action, the administration's unilateral reinterpretation of Title VI law would give the EPA "unfettered discretion to apply statistical data in any way it chooses, create risk assessments without peer reviewed standards, determine that all discharges create measurable disparate impacts by their very existence and treat people differently based on racial or ethnic grounds." Environmental officials in others states support California's legal analysis.

No matter what form the administration's environmental justice policy finally takes, the underlying question is whether environmental racism exists at all. What is perhaps most disturbing about the administration's crusade is that it has for years ignored evidence--much of it from the EPA itself--that minorities are not disproportionately affected by industrial waste. As with the issues of secondhand smoke and global warming, the administration's policy is driven not by facts but by ideology.

The administration and its allies cite a handful of studies conducted by activist groups indicating systematic discrimination in the siting of industrial facilities. Most influential of these was a 1987 study by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, which found hazardous waste facilities were more likely to be located in zip codes populated by minorities, and a 1992 National Law Journal study that claimed to show tougher enforcement of environmental laws in white areas than in black areas. However, subsequent independent academic studies by researchers at New York University, Washington University, the University of Chicago, and elsewhere have all contradicted the notion that race and pollution are related.

In a comprehensive survey of studies examining the surrounding demographics of plant sites, Washington University's Huebner concluded this year that "the evidence relied on by environmental justice advocates is flawed....In particular, the dynamics of the housing market prove a plausible alternative explanation for the disparities observed in the current location of industrial facilities. Recent evidence indicates that minority and poor populations tend to locate near industrial facilities after the facilities are located, possibly due to lower property values."