A community-led study funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that life expectancies are eight years shorter in South Park than the Seattle average. The same study also found that children who live in the area have the highest rates of asthma hospitalization in the city. Advocates knew an anti-racist approach would have to be at the core of their solution to this issue because the root of their problems persist from discriminatory policies like redlining.
It’s why this legislative session they are pushing to advance a bill that prioritizes places and people who experience an unfair share of environmental harms. The Cumulative Risk Burden (CURB) Pollution Act joins a growing movement of environmental justice policies nationwide that go beyond procedural norms and into authoritative action. It does this by creating an enforcement mechanism for a health risk threshold that aggregates stressors from air, water, and waste pollution.
When a company named Bridge Industrial brought forth a proposal to build a mega-warehouse complex there, residents filed public comments and signed petitions against the additional source of pollution. But last year, the City of Tacoma approved land use permits for 2.5 million square feet of warehouses—comparable to 43 football fields. “That was a big push for me to do this [bill] this year,” said state Rep. Sharlett Mena, who lives in Tacoma.
She had an idea for legislation to make sure the voices of her neighbors and constituents mattered in future permitting processes. “It was sort of serendipitous that we both really wanted to work on this and lay the groundwork,” Mena said. “But it’s not by chance that communities of color are often in these areas. An area is developed as an industrial zone, and there’s historical redlining … and who can afford to live there? People that have been historically disenfranchised.”
She and the coalition drafted a bill that would prescribe a stronger permitting process in communities that already have a disproportionate amount of pollution. They took notes from states like New Jersey and New York that have environmental justice laws on the books with cumulative impact assessments. The bill also builds on Washington state’s three-year-old Healthy Environment for All (HEAL) Act, which aims to address environmental justice by incorporating health and equity considerations into decision-making processes. The CURB Act fills a gap in the HEAL Act, as South Tacoma had recently experienced with industrial permitting.
Read more at Prism.