Thirteen years and counting: anatomy of an EPA civil rights investigation
SANTA FE, New Mexico — On June 26, 2014, Deborah Reade got a certified letter from the Environmental Protection Agency that was nearly a decade in the making.
“During the course of the EPA’s investigation,” the letter read, “it was determined that additional information is needed to clarify this allegation.”
Reade was incredulous.
Her original complaint to the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights, in 2002, seemed like a lifetime ago. Back then, she was research director for a group called Citizens for Alternatives to Radioactive Dumping. She’d alerted the agency to a potential pattern of discrimination against Spanish-speaking residents by the New Mexico Environment Department.
Her complaint focused on Triassic Park, a proposed commercial hazardous-waste disposal site, and a public participation process she said made it hard for poor and Spanish-speaking residents to voice concerns. The project was permitted by the state in 2002. Three years later, the EPA agreed to investigate Reade’s claims.
Related: Key findings from New Mexico
Then: silence, for nine years. Reade moved on, disillusioned with the process. Now, the EPA was pulling her back in.
“When I got this [2014 letter], I kind of groaned, ‘Really?’ ” Reade said during an interview in her Santa Fe home. “I was like, ‘Oh no. I don’t even remember how to do any of this,’ you know?”
By all accounts, Reade should have been free of the matter years ago.
EPA regulations dictate the timeline the Office of Civil Rights must follow when investigating complaints of discrimination allegedly committed by recipients of EPA funding. Within five days of delivery, the EPA must acknowledge receipt of the complaint and within 20 days decide if an investigation will occur. The investigation itself should take no more than 180 days, barring special circumstances.
The office’s director, Velveta Golightly-Howell, declined to comment on the Triassic Park investigation. She said, however, that “cases do age. That is just the nature of civil rights programs.”
Related: 'You're powerless'
A Center for Public Integrity review of 265 complaints filed from 1996 to 2013 shows that the EPA has failed to adhere to its own timelines: On average, the office took 350 days to decide whether to accept a complaint and allowed cases to stretch 624 days from start to finish. A consultant’s report, which examined cases from 1993 to 2010, found that the agency accepted or rejected just 6 percent within the allotted time period. Half took a year or more to be adjudicated.
Reade’s case — and the nearly decade-long investigation — is an extreme, but not unique, example of the agency missing its mark.
The EPA’s online docket, last updated in March, lists 17 cases accepted for investigation that are still awaiting disposition. The earliest was filed in 1994, the most recent in 2013.
In July, Citizens for Alternatives to Radioactive Dumping and four other groups signed on to a lawsuit asking a court to force the EPA to act on their civil rights cases, some of which have been pending since 1994. The lawsuit, filed by the environmental law firm Earthjustice, calls the delays “unlawful” and “unreasonable,” and asks that the EPA be compelled to issue preliminary findings in the cases and impose remedies when warranted.
Environmental justice advocates say such delays send a message to state regulators and residents that complaints are not important and make it hard for EPA to reconstruct events many years after the fact. People are left to set their own standards about what discrimination looks like.
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“They don’t care that this inequality is rampant and that’s the message,” Reade said. “You’re powerless.”
A ‘good, safe spot’
Triassic Park exists only on paper.
The hazardous waste facility, first permitted by the state in 2002 and now up for renewal, was never built. If it had been, it would be located on 480 barren acres nearly indistinguishable from any stretch along U.S. Highway 380 in southeastern New Mexico.
Pass a few cows grazing along the roadside and you’ll eventually find mile marker 196, 36 miles from Tatum and 43 miles from Roswell. The ground in this area is pockmarked with grass, tall weeds and errant debris — a beer can here, a broken comb there — likely thrown from the window of a passing car. Walking stick cactuses dot the landscape and tumbleweeds skip across the road. A small mesa rises in the distance, but for the most part, this part of Chaves County is flat and desolate, with only the occasional rumble of a semi-truck to break the silence.
Related: 'State regulations don’t protect politically powerless people'
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Environmental Justice, Denied. A look at the environmental problems that disproportionately affect communities of color. . Click here to read more stories in this investigation.
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Copyright 2015 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
