![]() In the month before negotiations ended, LDEQ and EPA staff closed in on an agreement. With Louisiana’s attorney general now suing the EPA, environmental justice experts and advocates fear that the breakdown could mark the beginning of a major attack on a core aspect of the Civil Rights Act. WWNO/WRKF’s reporting reveals for the first time the fullest details of the draft agreement and offers a window into how negotiations between the two agencies unraveled. “After all of that fighting, they just abandoned us.” ![]() John the Baptist Parish resident and cofounder of the Descendants Project, in the weeks after. ![]() “We’d been out here fighting so hard for so long, it felt good to have someone shouldering the burden with us, and it felt good to not be gaslit,” said Joy Banner, a St. The decision blindsided the River Parish residents who took part in the complaints. The EPA abruptly closed the case and ended discussions with the LDEQ, stopping its investigation without coming to a resolution or releasing its findings. ![]() Article contentīut, in late June, it all came to a grinding halt. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. While the EPA’s civil rights investigation could have led to a consent decree that forced LDEQ to change, this voluntary agreement offered a path to reform without punishment. Documents and emails newly uncovered by WWNO and WRKF show that staff from the two agencies spent months negotiating a 43-page agreement that would have fundamentally changed Louisiana’s air pollution permitting program so that state regulators would have no longer allowed toxic emissions to disproportionately impact certain communities. The EPA’s findings brought LDEQ to the negotiating table. “We dared to hope,” said Jordan, who filed one of the complaints that led to EPA’s civil rights investigation. Ultimately, they found signs that it has.Īfter pledging to clean up Cancer Alley - the nickname for the heavily industrialized, 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans - the EPA issued a letter in October 2022 detailing preliminary evidence of racial discrimination and noncompliance by the state.Īdvocates like Lisa Jordan, who leads the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, and the clients she represents were cautiously optimistic. So when the country’s top environmental regulator opened a high-profile civil rights investigation into Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality last year, it felt like a watershed moment.įor the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency stepped in to exercise its oversight and evaluate whether LDEQ has granted permits for companies to build and pollute in a way that has caused disproportionate harm to Black communities. NEW ORLEANS (AP) - As industrial plants have overtaken historic Black communities and burdened neighborhoods with toxic air pollution, environmental advocates and residents of Louisiana’s chemical corridor have spent decades calling for change. Photo by Gerald Herbert / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Article content It ultimately fell apart without an agreement. The EPA and the Louisiana environmental agency spent months negotiating an agreement that would have fundamentally changed the state's air pollution permitting program. Environmental advocates and residents of the Louisiana chemical corridor known as Cancer Alley have spent decades calling for change in the way industrial activity is regulated there. Join the conversation The Marathon Petroleum Refinery is visible in Reserve, La., Thursday, Dec.
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