The North River Sewage Treatment Plant and Race Relations in Nc

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HOW WE-ACT ORGANIZED AND MOBILIZED

THE WEST HARLEM COMMUNITY

AND CHANGED NEW YORK CITY POLITICS AND POWER

Peggy Shepard began her career as a journalist at the Indianapolis News.[25] She moved to New York in 1971 to start a publishing career and in 1979 assumed one of her first of several positions with the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal.[26] Ms. Shepard sat in on the initial community board meetings held by then Mayor Lindsay[27] and was extremely troubled by how the city had come in with what she perceived as “no warning and taken the ground from under West Harlem’s feet.”[28]

In 1988, Ms. Shepard decided to form a community movement against the plant in the hopes that it would draw media and general public attention to West Harlem’s plight. It’s mission was an organized campaign for the city to fix the plant so that it was: (1) up to environmental standards (2) so that the citizens of West Harlem were able to participate in the future planning decisions concerning the plant, and (3) for West Harlem residents to be able to affect public policy concerning the plant by reframing the building of the plant as both an environmental issue and an issue of racial justice.[29] WE-ACT’s strategy of nonviolent protesting to gain the attention of the general public and the media was pulled directly from the techniques of the leaders of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.[30]

For example, in 1988, Ms. Shepard and six other WE-ACT members, calling themselves “The Sewage Seven”, including future mayor David Dinkins, donned gas masks and held up traffic on the West Side Highway near the plant to demonstrate how the noxious fumes were affecting the air quality of the West Harlem residents.[31]

Another prong of WE-ACT’s attack to gain support with the media and public was to gain legitimacy. To do that, WE-ACT decided to commission scientific studies by local scientists and publicize the results to demonstrate that the claims made by the citizens of West Harlem were, in fact, grounded in real evidentiary proof.[32] The first study that WE-ACT commissioned was done by the late environmental scientist Barry Commoner, at the time affiliated with Queens College, who began to study the effect between air quality surrounding the plant and the health effects of the West Harlem residents.[33] Dr. Commoner had testified against the building of the plant and been concerned about the environmental effects of the plant on the city since as early as 1984.[34]

In 1987, Dr. Commoner concluded that the plant was violating New York State air quality laws and that the hydrogen sulfide gas was emitting toxic odors over the land of West Harlem. The city disagreed with him. Joe Miller, chief engineer for the DEP stated that Dr. Commoner’s findings were flawed, stating that although the plant did emit hydrogen sulfide gas, it did not reach the land.[35] Although the DEP disagreed with Dr. Commoner’s findings, this was a shift in the city’s position from it’s original position in 1987 when West Harlem first brought their concerns to the city, when Harvey Schultz, Commissioner of the DEP said that the plant said that hydrogen sulfide gas was not emitted from the plant at all.[36] The city stated that they hoped the problems would vanish completely once the plant was operating at full capacity in 1991.[37]

THE LAWSUIT

After continued negotiations with the city and state and a few more nonviolent protests, WE-ACT decided to sue the city. It was the first suit where a group of citizens sued to fight a city over damage caused by odors to their property and their health.[38] WE-ACT hired the NRDC, a large environmentalist group with an even larger budget, as their attorneys. The official plaintiffs in the lawsuit were WE-ACT, the Hamilton Day Care Center, situated very close to the plant, and seven individual West Harlem residents. The defendants were the Department of Environmental Protection and the City of New York. [39] The plaintiffs sought an injunction, declaring that the foul odors emanating from the plant constituted a public and private nuisance.[40] They further sought an enforceable role in the control and management of the plant.[41] The State Department of Environmental Conservation, who regulates the DEP, granted the plaintiffs limited control by stepping in and promising to oversee corrective measures.[42] In addition, the plaintiffs sought monetary compensation for damages to their health, quality of life, and devaluation of their property which they claimed was a direct result from the continuous exposure to the noxious odors emanating from the plant since its opening in 1986.[43]

On May 5, 1993 the city’s motion for summary judgment was denied as well as the city’s request for a dismissal of the entire action. [44] On December 5, 1993, the parties’ reached a settlement.[45] The city agreed to pay WE-ACT $1.1 million dollars in restitution and use $55 million dollars in capital funds to correct the design defects in the North River Sewage Treatment Plant.[46] It also created a West Harlem Environmental Benefit Fund, administered by a steering committee of West Harlem representatives, to promote and publicize issues of environmental justice.[47] This was the first fund of its kind.[48]

WE-ACT’S NATIONAL PRESENCE

The lawsuit and subsequent victory against the city made WE-ACT a power player in the growing environmental justice movement, and it’s original leader, Peggy Shepard, a spokesperson for grassroots environmental justice. After witnessing West Harlem’s struggle against the plant, President Clinton commissioned the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) to do a national study on how air pollutants affected minority communities. [49] The report concluded that people of color and the poor “experienced higher than average exposure to selected air pollutants and hazardous waste facilities…”[50]

President Clinton, however, was not satisfied with the findings of the EPA, which he thought did not do enough for the environmental justice movement. In 1994, he issued Executive Order 12898, which ordered all federal, state, and municipal agencies to make environmental justice a paramount concern when interpreting and passing legislation.[51] Peggy Shepard was asked to testify at Senate Committee hearings in support of the Executive Order and continues to testify to educate various other Senate sub-committees.[52]

Further, WE-ACT has the ability now to commission important researchers and universities to prepare scientific studies so that the environmental