We all know that some communities deal with more pollution than others—and that some have an easier time getting their voices heard than others. Here in the Long Island Sound region, New York and Connecticut recognize this via state law.
In enacting the 2022 Environmental Justice Siting Law, the New York State Legislature recognized that “minority and economically distressed communities bear a greater environmental health burden due to the cumulative pollution exposure” from the siting of multiple polluting facilities. The Legislature declared it the state’s responsibility to establish requirements when siting such facilities.
With that intent in mind, Save the Sound submitted comments last month to the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation regarding proposed amendments to State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) regulations implementing the EJ Siting Law. SEQRA requires that local, regional, and state governments consider the environmental impact of certain projects, including wastewater treatment plants, power plants, landfills, or recycling centers.
We offered multiple recommendations for how DEC can best follow the legislature’s mandate to reduce the cumulative burden Disadvantaged Communities bear. “Disadvantaged Community” is a NY State designation based on a variety of social, economic, and environmental factors, including environmental burden, pollution exposures, and climate change risk. Reducing these burdens necessarily means not adding new ones. In requiring SEQRA analyses to consider whether an action “may cause or increase a disproportionate pollution burden on a disadvantaged community,” the final regulations should begin from the presumption that any additional burden in a Disadvantaged Community is “a disproportionate pollution burden.”
That’s why we also recommend DEC remove the proposed tiered Disadvantaged Community Assessment Tool. Creating “more comparatively burdened” and “less comparatively burdened” distinctions could unintentionally create the impression that projects in certain communities warrant less scrutiny than others.
All Disadvantaged Communities deserve full protection. All should be assumed to be already bearing a disproportionate burden, and a full Environmental Impact Statement should be required of any project proposing a polluting facility in a Disadvantaged Community, including mitigation measures to avoid adding to that burden.