Activists Get Access, Future Meetings From EPA Open Door Pledge

Activists have been taking the Biden administration up on its offer to come to Washington to bring their personal experience of communities long burdened with air, water, and chemical pollution.

The welcome mat went out in the first days of President Joe Biden’s administration. Biden promised as a candidate to root out racism in the way agencies enforce laws and implement policies.

He also vowed to hold corporate polluters responsible for the health effects of disproportionate amounts of pollution in Black, Latino, and Native American communities.

While making big changes at federal agencies has always been a slow process, there’s one simple offer being made across the government, from the Justice Department to the Environmental Protection Agency: Communities can bring their first-hand experiences and demands directly, in some cases to top agency officials.

While results aren’t expected overnight, the welcome mat is something new for many environmental justice advocates, who in some cases have been promised quarterly meetings with access to high-level agency officials.

Take the March meeting at the EPA, when roughly 40 activists met at the agency’s headquarters. Arriving from California, Chicago, and New Jersey, many were young activists whose work was coordinated by an umbrella group, Moving Forward Network (MFN).

At first, EPA Administrator Michael Regan had only a few minutes to meet, though they were able to talk with several of his top lieutenants. But Regan later returned to listen for nearly an hour.

The advocates left with an EPA promise of quarterly meetings with the senior air office team. They hope those meetings also will offer opportunities to tout their community-based expertise and data collection, which they argue deserve serious consideration in agency policy and regulatory development.

Brenda Huerta Soto, co-founder of the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, highlighted growing pollution in California’s Inland Empire, sometimes called America’s shopping cart due to the amount of agricultural and other goods moved through the region east of Los Angeles. “We have an airport, rail yards, trucks, and more than 4,000 warehouses in the region,” with more than a half million trucks passing through communities each day, she said.

Activists who gathered outside EPA headquarters echoed those concerns and said the agency should do more about pollution sources. Among them was Robin Lewis, climate equity director for Interfaith Power and Light, which coordinates faith communities in backing environmental and climate action particularly for disadvantaged communities.

“We know who they are are,” Lewis told fellow protesters on April 4, referring to underserved communities. “And so does the EPA.”

“We need the EPA to focus on helping Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities who live in sacrifice zones, areas most impacted by cumulative impacts of pollution and other environmental harm,” Lewis said.

Consumer-Driven Warehouse Boom

Inland distribution centers for Coca-Cola, Target, and others push goods east from Southern California ports, and Amazon warehouses have bloomed to meet soaring consumer demands for near-instant deliveries. The communities want EPA action to drive down truck emissions and other pollution. They’re also pushing for higher wages and better workplace conditions that could benefit from action by other agencies.

Efforts to have local officials declare a moratorium on such warehouses have had little impact, and construction of highways and other roads to bypass local communities has been slow, Soto said. Communities have been calling for “truck roads” to divert traffic away from schools, homes, parks, and hospitals, she said, noting that some warehouses are located less than a mile from schools.

Soto was among the 40 or so activists at the mid-March meeting demanding the EPA reconsider its December heavy-duty truck rule. More than 20 years in the making, it strengthened truck engine emissions limits. Environmental groups, however, saw it as a missed opportunity to move the nation swiftly toward zero-emission vehicles. The rule, they said, instead created loopholes for vehicle manufacturers and punted progress on electric trucks to future rulemakings.

They also urged the EPA to pick up the pace on other regulations to curb pollution from locomotives and rail yards and marine engines, and to clamp down on freight facilities, which create “hotspots” of pollution in warehouse rail yards and port areas. Another demand: more aggressive EPA enforcement under the Civil Rights Act, including efforts to ensure those receiving federal dollars comply with provisions barring discrimination.

Weeks after the meeting, Soto said she and other advocates welcomed the pledge to keep the groups regularly updated by agency officials. But that concession won’t by itself guarantee action, she said.

“It was important for us to have the meeting and hold them accountable,” Soto said. “But one of the most important things for us is seeing the results.”

Environmental Justice Focus

The meeting between environmental justice communities and the agency is just one example of the ways the Biden administration has been seeking to elevate the voices of long-ignored communities that have borne the brunt of pollution from nearby power plants, chemical producers, and highways routed through their neighborhoods.

Biden has rolled out policies to make good on his “all of government” pledge to address environmental and racial inequities, including an executive order earlier this month directing agencies to “proactively engage” with underserved communities. His order also directs the executive branch’s regulatory gatekeeper within the Office of Management and Budget to open its door to groups who may not have “historically requested” meetings on ongoing rulemakings, particularly disadvantaged communities.

Agencies also are to “clarify opportunities " for those and other groups that may lack expertise in filing petitions to agencies to have them speed up, amend, or repeal rules.

Striking Down Silos

The way the US spreads labor, environmental, and public health protections across multiple agencies makes it a challenge for disadvantaged communities to get the ear of regulators. The MFN group, for example, spent roughly two years working to meet with the EPA.

“It is definitely a challenge—and for that reason, one of our primary strategies is for workers to organize in their workplaces and build collective power to push for better working conditions and pressure the company directly,” said Zhenya Polozova, policy coordinator with Warehouse Workers for Justice who also attended the March meeting at EPA. Those demands can include increasing company purchases of zero-emissions vehicles but also pressure for higher wages and benefits, she said.

The advocates also urged EPA leadership to work with sister agencies to “collaborate with one another and not work in silos,” said Polozova, whose group advocates for communities and workers affected by pollution from CenterPoint, North America’s largest inland port, located 40 miles southwest of Chicago in Joliet and Elwood, Ill. A planned expansion would add between 10,000 to 15,000 truck trips each day, she said, a trend advocates call “industrial sprawl.”

While the impact of meeting directly with top agency officials is hard to measure, advocates say such interactions play to their strengths, as they have a story to tell, especially when federal officials come to the communities to see the challenges for themselves.

“When you bring these leaders into the community to actually see what’s going on and to see what the direct impact is, I think that does have a correlation and does start to turn people’s heads” to see firsthand the need for either stronger regulations or enforcement, said Asada Rashidi, environmental justice organizer for the New Jersey-based South Ward Environmental Alliance.

Meetings can also be a two-way street, said Rashidi, who was among the advocates who met with the EPA last month. Beyond pushing for swifter federation action, advocates also can offer valuable data adding to evidence the agency needs to act, she said, including precise counts of truck traffic. Those counts included an August truck count in a neighborhood near the Newark airport that tallied in just one day more than 3,000 buses, tractor-trailers, garbage trucks, and car carriers.

Relaying that data, along with an invitation for EPA officials to tour the community, provided room for optimism, she said. “They can start to make the connections and see why it’s really important to get these things done.”