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Tag: environmental justice

  • Judge halts construction of massive warehouse project after scores of homes demolished

    Judge halts construction of massive warehouse project after scores of homes demolished

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    A Southern California developer must halt construction of a controversial industrial park in San Bernardino County that has displaced scores of homes, after a judge found flaws in the project’s environmental impact report.

    County supervisors in late 2022 green-lighted an industrial real estate firm’s proposal to remove 117 homes and ranches in rural Bloomington to make way for more than 2 million square feet of warehouse space. Several environmental and community groups sued the county soon after, alleging that the approval of the Bloomington Business Park violated numerous regulations set out in state environmental and housing laws.

    Nearly two years later, and after more than 100 homes have already been leveled, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Donald Alvarez ruled last week that the county’s review of the project did not conform with the state law intended to inform decision-makers and the public about the potential environmental harms of proposed developments. He said construction of the warehouse project must stop while the county redoes the report in a manner that complies with the law.

    A San Bernardino County spokesperson declined to comment on the ruling because it is the subject of active litigation. The developer, Orange County-based Howard Industrial Partners, said it would appeal portions of the ruling and predicted that delays to the overall project would be short-lived.

    The 213-acre industrial park came with trade-offs familiar to communities in California’s Inland Empire that are being asked to shoulder the sprawling distribution centers integral to the storage, packaging and delivery of America’s online shopping orders.

    The environmental impact report found that the development would have “significant and unavoidable” impacts on air quality. But it also would bring jobs to the majority Latino community of 23,000 residents, and the developer pledged to provide millions of dollars in infrastructure improvements.

    And because the warehouse project would be about 50 feet from Zimmerman Elementary, the developer agreed to pay $44.5 million to the Colton Joint Unified School District in a land swap that would usher in a state-of-the-art school nearby.

    For Bloomington residents and community advocates who have been fighting the explosive growth of the warehouse industry in the Inland Empire, the court’s decision is being viewed as a victory.

    Ana Gonzalez, executive director of the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said her organization has challenged a couple of warehouse approvals annually for the past five years. The lawsuits typically end in settlements that award the community extra protections, such as air filters and HVAC systems for nearby homes. She said she’s never before seen construction stopped in its tracks.

    “To see the way this one turned out just gives us hope, and it ignites that resilience that our community needed to keep fighting,” Gonzalez said.

    Still, she said, the timing is bittersweet.

    “I don’t know at this point if we could ever get the homes that were there back,” Gonzalez said. “To see the community being wiped out in Bloomington is really heartbreaking.”

    The ruling raises broader questions about the rigor of San Bernardino County’s process for approving warehouse projects, which have become a mainstay of the county’s economy. While proponents say the developments bring much needed jobs to the region, many residents living in their shadows lament the pollution, traffic and neighborhood disruption.

    In Bloomington’s case, the project in question fractured the community. Some people who sold their homes to make way for the industrial park say they got a good price and were happy to move on, while many of the neighbors left behind see a future with 24-hour truck traffic and a hollowing out of the community’s rural culture.

    Alondra Mateo, a community organizer for another plaintiff in the suit, the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, said the many residents who have spoken out in public hearings, raising concerns about the environmental impacts of the Bloomington Business Park, were told that the county was adhering to the required environmental review process.

    “For the court to take a look at all the evidence and then agree with us,” Mateo said, “is such a big, powerful win to our community that has honestly been gaslit for so long.”

    Candice Youngblood, an attorney with the nonprofit environmental law group Earthjustice, which represented the plaintiffs, called the county’s environmental report “deficient.” She said the court’s findings are “a testament to the fact that this document reflects cutting corners at the expense of the community and in the interest of industry.”

    In a nearly 100-page ruling, Alvarez determined that the county had violated the California Environmental Quality Act by not analyzing renewable energy options that might be available or appropriate for the project, and not adequately analyzing construction noise impacts.

    Alvarez found the county failed to analyze a reasonable range of alternatives to the project; and failed to sufficiently analyze how air emissions would impact public health. Despite finding the project would have unavoidable impacts on air quality, the county determined using zero-emission trucks would be an economically infeasible form of mitigation — a finding that Alvarez deemed “not supported by substantial evidence.”

    But he ruled against the plaintiffs on several issues, rejecting their arguments that the county failed to analyze the project’s traffic impacts; failed to adequately analyze environmental justice issues; improperly analyzed operational noise impacts; and abused its discretion by failing to translate key portions of the report into Spanish.

    Youngblood, with Earthjustice, said the ruling forces the county to restart the environmental review process, including providing community members with new opportunities to weigh in on the project’s impacts.

    Mike Tunney, Howard Industrial Partners’ vice president for development, said the company was “pleased” by the court’s ruling upholding portions of the environmental report. He said the ruling would result in “minor revisions” to the report, which the county would “quickly address.”

    “We are committed to making the necessary adjustments to address the issues identified by the Court,” Tunney said in a statement. “We will simultaneously pursue an appeal of portions of the Court’s ruling that threaten a $30 million major flood control project which is already under construction to prevent ongoing flooding that has negatively impacted the community for decades.”

    This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.

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    Rebecca Plevin

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  • On this MLK Day, why the fight for environmental justice is the fight that matters

    On this MLK Day, why the fight for environmental justice is the fight that matters

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    Ben Jealous, the first Black executive director of the Sierra Club, couldn’t make it to a recent news conference in South L.A., held in the shadow of the monument to Martin Luther King Jr. at Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area.

    But if he had, I suspect he would’ve told the same story he told me.

    “You know the great actor Louis Gossett Jr.?” he asked. “My last year at the NAACP, at the 2013 Image Awards, he said to me, ‘You know, Ben, I’ve been in this racial justice movement my whole life, but you know, sometimes, brother, I feel like we’re fighting over who’s in first class. What we should be doing is looking out the window, because the plane has fallen like 20,000 feet in the last two minutes.’”

    Jealous recalled being confused.

    “He said, ‘The planet is dying. It doesn’t matter who’s in first class on a dead planet.’ And that phrase, it’s stuck with me for the last decade, and I just keep coming back to it.”

    This, Jealous explained, is why he decided that his venerable environmental organization would be among the first to support an upstart AM talk radio station in Los Angeles in its campaign to elevate climate change and environmental justice as priorities for people of color.

    Other backers of the $2-million campaign include the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Metro, CalTrans, the California Endowment and the California Community Foundation.

    But really, it’s the vision of Tavis Smiley, the longtime radio host and founder of KBLA 1580, that could help bring the voices of Black and Latino Americans, who are harmed most often by the climate crisis, more fully into policy discussions about how to solve it.

    At that news conference Jealous couldn’t attend, Smiley went so far as to connect the fight MLK waged for racial equality to the current fight for the future health of the planet.

    “Climate is king,” Smiley declared with a grin. “You see what I did there?”

    While amusing, I can understand why some people might see this as a stretch. After all, Martin Luther King Jr. Day has always been a holiday dominated by discussions of fairness and freedom, and the barriers to both. Barriers of systemic racism that have left Black people on the worst rungs of the socioeconomic ladder and, as such, with little energy to deal with existential crises, because there are so many immediate ones, like housing discrimination and police brutality.

    But like Gossett Jr., I’m starting to get the sinking feeling that just fighting all of these immediate racial justice fights is ultimately a little like — to extend a bad analogy even further — rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

    Sure, it’s important to fight the good fight against efforts to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs, for example, and against banning books on Black history in public schools. But it’s reasonable to wonder what good winning those fights will do if we fail to mitigate the upheaval of a rapidly changing climate that can deliver misery to all of humankind.

    We’ve all seen the troubling surge of extreme weather and the way it has crippled or, in some cases, decimated entire communities. Just this month, climate scientists with the European Union announced that 2023 was officially Earth’s hottest year on record, and, as my Times colleague Hayley Smith reported, this year is likely to be even hotter.

    “Our cities, our roads, our monuments, our farms — in practice, all human activities — never had to cope with a climate this warm,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, told reporters. “There were simply no cities, no books, agriculture or domesticated animals on this planet last time the temperature was so high.”

    On top of that, there are man-made environmental disasters, from the tainted drinking water in Flint, Mich., and right here in Compton to the poorly maintained levees that allowed massive flooding in the Monterey County town of Pajaro.

    As Mayor Karen Bass put it at the news conference: “We know that low-income neighborhoods of color are disproportionately harmed by air and toxic pollution. A few years ago, the leading cause of death of Black babies was asthma that was directly related to freeways and air pollution. So when we say disproportionately impacted, that’s not just rhetoric.”

    And yet, politicians rarely bring up climate change or environmental justice as a true priority when they are talking to people of color.

    Take, for example, the speech President Biden gave earlier this month at Mother Emanuel AME Church, billed as an attempt to repair his relationship with Black voters amid flagging poll numbers. He spent 35 lackluster minutes at the pulpit of the historic church in Charleston, S.C.

    Priority topics included Donald Trump, the Civil War, white supremacy, the Jan. 6 insurrection, high-speed internet access, prescription drug prices, housing and student loan debt. Finally, Biden got around to some vague and uninspiring statement about how his administration is “producing clean energy” so people can “finally breathe clean air without leaving home.”

    He talked about spending a childhood surrounded by air-polluting oil refineries in Claymont, Del.

    “I grew up with asthma, and most of us did, because of the prevailing winds,” Biden said. “We’d go — my mom would drive us to school in the morning … there would be an oil slick on the wiper. Because, guess what? It’s all the fence-line communities who get hurt.”

    Surely, the president can do better than this with his messaging.

    Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to cut $2.9 billion from California’s climate programs to help close a massive budget deficit. Notably on the chopping block are several zero-emission vehicle programs, including delayed funding for the Clean Cars 4 All program that helps low-income residents.

    Getting people of color to care about such things, and demand more from Biden or Newsom, is sure to be a challenge. Many people can’t afford to think about problems beyond next week, much less next year or in the next several decades.

    But it’s not impossible. Because with every passing year, every extreme weather event that devastates an already vulnerable community of color and every generation that becomes more aware of the pollution that is ruining their quality of life, it becomes clearer that environmental justice is racial justice.

    “Poll after poll shows upward of three-quarters of us consider ourselves to be environmentalists,” Jealous said of Black people. “What we’ve been doing wrong as a movement is failing to meet people where they are.”

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    Erika D. Smith

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