Joseph Otis Minott

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) claims to care about environmental justice. It has a plan in place that it claims ensures the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income when it comes to environmental policies and protections. Yet time and again, when facing real-world environmental issues, DEP’s commitment to environmental justice comes up short. It’s time the Wolf administration gets serious about environmental justice not just on paper, but in practice.

As one of the state’s oldest environmental nonprofits, Clean Air Council has a long history of working with DEP. In these interactions, we have found the Department unwilling to commit to applying its own, already very weak Environmental Justice Public Participation Policy. DEP has repeatedly made clear to us that its EJ policy is only a guideline that can be simply ignored.

So when DEP announced it was updating its environmental justice policy, we were encouraged but skeptical. Indeed, many environmental justice communities and their advocates have little trust that a revised policy will be taken any more seriously by DEP leadership. What we need are concrete environmental justice regulations that must be enforced by either DEP or, failing that, the courts.

There are many examples of DEP’s unwillingness to follow its own environmental justice commitments, but the small town of Renovo north of State College offers a recent and particularly troubling case study. Renovo is a prime example of DEP both forgetting, then ignoring its environmental justice obligations. The town has fallen on hard times since the railroad industry left. What remains is a legacy of polluted soil and groundwater. In 2015, Bechtel proposed to build a power plant in the center of the town that would spew literally millions of tons of air pollution per year. In 2017, DEP was having internal conversations about whether to follow its EJ Policy for the earlier version of the Renovo power plant air permit application. Yet in its review of the later version of the permit application, in 2020, it somehow still concluded that “[t]he location of the project is in Clinton County, which does not contain any areas designated as Environmental Justice areas.”

On behalf of Clean Air Council and partners of ours, I wrote to Secretary McDonnell in the spring of last year to bring this error to his attention. Rather than reaching out to residents of Renovo and starting a meaningful public engagement campaign in the borough, McDonnell wrote that “DEP is committed to ensuring that EJ communities have the opportunity for meaningful input to the process,” and that in 2016, “developers presented an overview of the project,” and “an overwhelming number of residents in attendance expressed support for the project.”

That attendees of a developer presentation that painted a dirty fossil fuel plant in the rosiest of lights would express support for the project should not come as a surprise to anyone. In the more than six years that the power plant proposal has been floated in the community, never once has DEP talked directly to residents about the pollution that they would be exposed to and breathe. DEP created and distributed locally a fact sheet on the air pollution permitting for the project which somehow failed to mention any of the types and amounts of air pollution that DEP was about to permit.

According to StateImpact Pennsylvania, the state plans to issue a new policy this year that would position DEP as a better resource for environmental justice communities. The public wants that, too. Surveys have shown that Americans consider environmental justice to be a pressing issue in our communities. DEP has launched a process to gather public input to strengthen its EJ Policy, but the Department must then treat that document as more than mere suggestions to be forgotten or outright ignored.

The Wolf administration’s framing of its environmental justice work and DEP’s process to improve its environmental justice policy sure sound great on paper. But given that DEP didn’t even bother to follow its existing policy in a low-income Pennsylvania community, we will need more than rhetoric and words on paper going forward. To earn the public’s trust, DEP must start taking meaningful actions to address this issue and the many other environmental injustices that exist across Pennsylvania.

Joseph Otis Minott, Esq., is executive director and chief counsel of Clean Air Council.

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Originally Appeared Here