Testimony/Q&A - Environmental Justice Amendment Act of 2023 - 3/18/2024.
My testimony draws from public health economic analysis to understand the potential impact of the environmental health justice bill, which has major deficiencies. I would first like to provide the context for my testimony. When DC Council debated and approved the Comprehensive Plan in 2021, it should have required the mayor to submit an environmental impact assessment, as is the law. For nearly 20 years, the Executive has proceeded with acute gentrification and urbanization that have harmed communities, particularly Black communities and low-income communities. The last environmental impact assessment in 2006 spanned over 300 pages. Southwest has uniquely become a constant construction zone wherein we are paying the costs for gentrification and displacement policies with our health and erosion of neighborhood livability. For more than a decade, we have asked for something to be done about the cumulative adverse impacts of industrialization and redevelopment. In the preceding  decade, the District did exactly what it wanted to do with intense redevelopment and ignored the bigger picture of environmental racism and community and ANC6D concerns. This bill does not at all address the adverse impacts of redevelopment. As I wrote to you several months ago, DOEE has data substantiating that nearby construction is a major source of elevated blood lead levels in children. The District cannot both pursue its gentrification utopia and make environmental justice achievable.

Council routinely does not hold the Executive accountable for what the law says. Much of what this bill advances would have been captured in environmental impact assessment that I mentioned earlier. Much of what this bill advances already covers many existing laws particularly on point-source mitigation, but DOEE has poorly implemented District laws, seeking, in effect, deregulation and for polluters to regulate themselves. In Mr. Allen’s ward, buildings have been constructed on highly contaminated land near vulnerable communities without any DOEE mandate for mitigating harm. For more than 3 years, the government has not satisfied my FOIA request on District monitoring of the Audi Field voluntary clean-up plan. DOEE has not produced a final report on compliance and monitoring. My major point here is that this bill will absolutely not work based on the current underperformance of DOEE.

Several revisions are needed for this bill. 1) The bill allows the Executive to use ward-level comparison. That language should be eliminated to ensure environmental equity across the District.  2) The bill should call for the removal of current sources of environmental injustices rather than give the Executive  any more latitude, which it has abused 3) The District’s completed environmental assessments should be instructive. In the Department of Health Office of Health Equity CHAS report, they claimed that the communities’ current vulnerabilities would mean that construction of Audi Field would have a negligible impact on communities. In other words, the community already had too many vulnerabilities. This bill would make little difference in how the District conducts environmental impact assessments and, therefore, have little impact on turning a corner on environmental injustices. The bill needs more to convey an understanding and to affect the public health economy around environmental health.