THE WEEKLY DIG

Dirty Justice
New bill targets racist, elitist smokestacks

by Paul McMorrow
Issue 9.11
Wed, March 14, 2007

In Massachusetts, racial and economic divides run deep. But being poor and non-white in Boston won’t just get you shot, bused to Southie or redistricted into electoral oblivion. It’ll also give you a wicked hospital bill.

“The health disparities are staggering,” argues state Senator Jarrett Barrios, who’s now pushing a bill that would slow, if not staunch, the flow of pollutants into poor minority neighborhoods. “It’s a justice issue. People have the right to clean air, clean water and clean soil. It’s unnecessary to shorten people’s lives just because they’re poor.”

How wide is the health gap? A 2005 Northeastern University report, co-authored by Daniel Faber and Eric Krieg, found that 16 of Massachusetts’s 20 most polluted communities were minority communities; 17 of the 20 were lower-income communities. The study also found that the cumulative exposure to pollutants in minority communities was 20 times that of white communities.

The Commonwealth’s first attempt to deal with these environmental justice (EJ) disparities was put into place in late 2002 by Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift’s environmental secretary, Robert Durand. Durand’s EJ directive established so-called “environmental justice communities” based on racial and economic parameters, and mandated more extensive environmental reviews and community outreach for developments in those communities. It was thrown in the trash just months after it was signed, when Mitt Romney took office.

“Romney gutted the program,” Barrios claims. “He never enforced the policy.”

Because Romney wasn’t enforcing Durand’s EJ directive, the legislature—led by state Senator Dianne Wilkerson and Barrios—tried to codify the directive as a law. They failed twice, most memorably last summer, when Wilkerson mounted an unsuccessful filibuster against an expedited construction permitting bill.

“We were unable to get our colleagues to care about an issue that just talked about poor and minority residents,” Barrios says. “So we changed the language dramatically.”

This time around, Barrios’s EJ bill tosses out all mentions of residents’ race and economic status—the language that Durand had built his EJ policy on. Instead, it directs the state’s Department of Public Health to rank the prevalence of pollution-related health factors, like asthma, early mortality, lead levels and coronary disease, in Massachusetts communities. Under the legislation, large pollution-heavy developments in the state’s most vulnerable communities would be subject to a health review similar to the environmental review that all projects normally submit to. A potential polluter—say, a new power plant—would have to detail the impact its pollution would make on a vulnerable community’s health, and propose specific steps it would take to mitigate these health impacts.

“We’re going to give the tools to communities already overburdened by pollution to resist dirty development,” Barrios explains.

“It’s a noticeably different bill than in the past,” says Eloise Lawrence, a staff attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation. “The notion of protected zones is certainly within the tradition of environmental zoning—it acknowledges that there are resources you want to protect. Nobody would suggest that you plunk a power plant down in Newton Hills or in wetlands. We’re adding health to that discussion of, ‘Is this development appropriate for this place?’ ”

As legislators and advocates debate theoretical protections for hypothetical asthmatic kids, the 37-ton elephant in the room is a diesel-burning power plant that developers want to plop down across the street from Chelsea’s Burke Elementary School. (Faber and Krieg’s report ranks Chelsea as the third-most polluted community in the state.) Barrios says that the health data will be a useful tool for state regulators to sink excessively harmful projects altogether, and environmental advocates hope that’s just what will happen.

Gene Benson, staff attorney for Alternatives for Community and Environment, notes that Durand’s 2002 EJ directive exempted power plants, so even if the Patrick administration wanted to dust it off, it still couldn’t be used to block the Chelsea plant. Barrios’s bill would mandate that the plant’s developers directly offset the pollutants their plant would emit, or not build their plant at all.

“You have to ask how you’re going to mitigate the health impact,” Benson says. “If you can’t figure that out, maybe you should be building a different type of plant, or maybe the plant shouldn’t be there at all. It’s not a barrier to do things that are clean, but if you’re going to add pollution and have a significant health impact, it’s right to take a look at it.”

“Don’t just talk about putting 37 tons of particulate matter into the air,” Barrios adds. “Talk about what the 37 tons of particulate matter will do to the lungs of children who go to school there, who already have two times the asthma rates of other children. There’s a trend towards making it easier to site projects in this state, but we can’t have the economic backbone of the Commonwealth built on the lungs of poor people.”