San Gabriel Valley Tribune: Local Democrats wield ‘environmental justice’ to fight Republican bills
LOS ANGELES >> Democratic Party members of the House Natural Resources Committee came to the L.A. River on Wednesday to talk about blocking Republican bills that would limit the federal Clean Air and Clean Water acts of the 1970s.
Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz, the highest-ranking Democrat on the committee, said he wanted to galvanize support for the acts and the National Environmental Policy Act by asking Latinos, blacks and Asians to speak up for a cleaner environment.
"We need a very large and diverse constituency to both defend those laws, and improve on them," he said, during a meeting at the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens in Cypress Park that included four members of the 44-member committee plus three other local Democrats.
Grijalva wants to change the face of the traditional environmental movement from affluent whites to a rainbow coalition. He began by building on President Barack Obama's designation of the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument in October.
Andrew Yip, program director of Bike San Gabriel Valley, said the national monument idea started with then-Rep. Hilda Solis, and then carried by Rep. Judy Chu, D-Pasadena before being signed into law by Obama on Oct. 10, 2014.
"Obama designated the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument as an act of social justice," Yip reminded the panel.
Longtime L.A. environmental activist, Robert Garcia, founding director and counsel of The City Project, prodded the Obama administration to abide by former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's decree to withhold federal funds for warehouses in downtown unless a study was prepared examining the impact on people of color and low-income residents.
Several studies found Latinos and blacks carry a disproportionate share of the environmental burden in Southern California because they live closer to freeways spewing air pollution and to chemical plants emitting cancer-causing toxins, Garcia said.
"They proportionately live in the most impacted communities and share the most disproportionate burden of toxic pollution and a disproportionate lack of green space," he told the committee members.
Angela Johnson Meszaros, counsel for Physicians for Social Responsibility in Los Angeles, said African-American children are 200 percent more likely to have asthma than Latinos, and 500 percent more likely than Asian children.
"The violence of air pollution in communities of color is real," she said.
Reversing land-use and transportation decisions that add more pollution to poorer neighborhoods is part of the fight for environmental justice, a concept incorporated into California law by Solis in 1999 when she was a state senator. The law calls for "fair treatment of people of all races, cultures and incomes with respect to development, adoption and implementation of environmental laws, regulations and policies."
Closure of the Exide battery-recycling plant in Vernon, after state agencies found toxic compounds in nearby neighborhoods and numerous violations, is an example of environmental justice, said Solis, now Los Angeles County supervisor, who said people must "hold agencies responsible for enforcement" of environmental laws.
Rep. Grace Napolitano, D-El Monte, said Republican members of Congress are trying to dismantle protections for low-income minorities. "In Washington, my colleagues want to get rid of the EPA," she said.
Meszaros said the people in South L.A. and the southeast Los Angeles County communities of Bell, Vernon and Cudahy want more protection. "I say, fight to ensure the EPA is funded and the EPA is courageous," she said.