Planning magazine — October 1991

Blue-Collar Groups Are Saying, ' Not in Our Backyard'

Our neighborhoods are not dumping grounds, say the newest environmental activists.

By Jim Schwab

A year ago this month, an upstart coalition of Cleveland neighborhood organizations won a remarkable victory over North America's third largest waste-handling firm. Laidlaw Environmental Services, a subsidiary of a Canadian firm, decided to shut down an accident-prone hazardous waste treatment plant in the Broadway neighborhood on the city's southeast side rather than continue to fight a lawsuit filed in 1989 by the coalition of neighborhood groups.

During its two-year struggle against the plant, the group lined up support from the governor, the attorney general, the mayor, and its city councilman.

In the view of many groups fighting similar battles around the country, David had finally slain Goliath. Opponents of toxic waste incinerators in Lenoir, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Arkansas; and Chicago were inspired to continue their own hard-fought efforts to shut down unsafe facilities. In Kansas City, Kansas, a landfill near the Missouri River was stopped by a local protest. In Louisiana and Texas, grassroots activists are challenging the practices of the petrochemical industry. In Hawaii, native islanders are trying to head off the construction of a geothermal plant in a volcanic rainforest, while moderate-income homeowners are up in arms about a spaceport proposed for the south coast of the island of Hawaii.

For planners, the implications are clear. The list of players involved in major land-use decisions has grown to include neighborhood activists, especially when those decisions concern siting environmentally questionable projects. It is no longer enough, if it ever was, to look for the least objectionable site. Instead, particularly for waste-management projects, a more comprehensive review process is needed — one that seeks creative alternatives such as massive recycling programs.

The Cleveland story

The Cleveland incinerator had a troubled history. In 1983, concerned about the quality of waste treatment at the plant, the city’s air pollution control division signed an agreement with its owner at the time, a local firm called AlchemTron, to build a new incinerator to handle certain chemical wastes. Plans for the incinerator were included in the firm's 1984 permit renewal application to the Ohio Hazardous Waste Facilities Board.

Three years later, around the time that the plant was sold to GSX Chemical Services, a South Carolina firm, its safety record began coming under attack. Highly visible mishaps, such as a July 1989 fire that injured 16 workers, heightened suspicions that GSX was running an unsafe facility. Those suspicions continued after GSX was sold to Laidlaw in February 1990.

The Laidlaw plant is located in a mixed residential and industrial area, where single-family, largely Slavic, neighborhoods are often sandwiched between small foundries and large steel mills. Garden Valley Estates, a public housing project with a largely black population, is just a few blocks away. In early 1989, various neighborhood groups, including Citizens to Bring
Broadway Back and Southeast Clevelanders Together, formed the GSX Coalition to represent the entire area in the battle with the owners.

The coalition was a shoestring operation run by volunteer staff. Although organizers attempted to involve blacks from the area and won the support of state senator Michael White, a black who is now Cleveland's mayor, the leaders of the coalition tended to be white ethnics from the Broadway area.

Sharon Fields, a long time neighborhood resident and settlement house worker, notes that the anger mounted with every new accident because "people who grew up here had suffered years of abuse from steel mill smokestacks." The area has long been among Cleveland's worst in air quality. Fields and Robert Castro, chairman of Citizens to Bring Broadway Back and executive director of the coalition, helped keep the issue before the news media. Another group, Families Interested in a Toxic-Free Environment (FITE), from the affluent suburb of Shaker Heights, to the east (downwind) of the incinerator, added its own crucial research.

It took several years, however, before residents learned enough about the facility to become upset. Castro notes that no complaints were voiced at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency permit hearings in 1988, and the agency granted the federal permit. Castro, who then owned a hardware store near the GSX site, says he became aware of the plant's problems through his customers. Curious, he visited the plant manager, who gave him a 98-page siting report concerning the facility.

Alarmed by what he read, Castro took the report to key neighborhood people and to Marjorie Grevatt, executive director of Cleveland's Center for Cooperative Action. Particularly galling to this developing coterie of opponents was that the plant's owners had apparently misled regulators about the incinerator's distance from nearby houses. In its 1984 application. State regulations prohibit hazardous waste treatment facilities within 2,000 feet of a residential structure. The incinerator application said no houses were within 2,300 feet. In fact, a number of houses are closer. In addition, the plant's location required trucks carrying hazardous waste to travel through residential neighborhoods.

Once the battle lines were drawn, the issue leaped into the headlines. GSX's state permit had expired, and its application for renewal and expansion was coming up for review by the Hazardous Waste Facility Board. In January 1989, the coalition staged informational meetings that attracted up to 500 people. Residents had already enlisted Legal Aid Society attorney Joseph Meissner to take their case against the company.

Eventually, the coalition won backing from both local and state officials. Gov. Richard F. Celeste visited the area, promising his support for a shutdown, and Attorney General Anthony J. Celebrezze joined the litigation against the plant.

Meanwhile, the accidents continued. In July 1990, five months after Laidlaw bought the plant, two fires broke out in the same week. Laidlaw faced court-ordered shutdowns and increasing fines. The clamor grew, and, by October, Laidlaw shut the plant down. The hazardous waste board permit decision, delayed by nearly two years of discovery proceedings, became moot.

Laidlaw officials did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article, and attorney Louis E. Tosi, who represented the firm in court and before the state hazardous waste board, dismisses the coalition as "not a factor at all from a lawyer's standpoint." It's clear, though, that citizen opposition played a role. Meanwhile, the coalition has virtually dissolved. Citizens to Bring Broadway Back is in financial trouble. FITE is still intact, but with a smaller core that chooses its issues carefully.

"Groups around Broadway are very territorial," Castro notes. "They came together because we had a common enemy." It was, notes Grevatt, "always an unstable, fragile coalition. The wonder of it all is that it came together just long enough to achieve its objective. And then it fell apart."

The big picture

If the anti-GSX coalition was the supernova of blue-collar environmental activism, Lois Gibbs is one of this growing movement's enduring stars. Gibbs, who in the late 1970s organized her Love Canal neighbors in Niagara Falls, New York, later founded the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, a national resource network based in Arlington, Virginia. In her view, neighborhood activism is on the rise — with the help of organizers from groups like hers and others, including Greenpeace, the Boston-based National Toxics Campaign, Work on Waste USA, and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

These groups have arisen in part to fill a void left by such mainstream environmental groups as the Sierra Club. The mainstream groups played a remarkably small role in the Cleveland coalition. In fact, many blue-collar activists hesitate to describe themselves as "environmentalists," whom they tend to perceive as suburbanites who are uninterested in nitty-gritty issues like an inner-city incinerator.

Gibbs notes, though, that many of the groups from working-class and minority neighborhoods eventually progress from "backyard issues" to a broader perspective. Groups opposed to toxic waste incinerators begin to examine alternatives, such as industrial waste minimization, that would obviate the need for expanded hazardous waste treatment. Those opposed to municipal landfills or waste-to-energy incinerators become advocates of intensive recycling and changes in consumer product packaging.

That broader perspective may include multicultural cooperation. That's the case in the Chicago area, where the prospect of a waste-to-energy incinerator in Robbins, an impoverished, predominantly black suburb south of the city, spurred the development of an active biracial coalition. The membership of the South Cook County Environmental Action Coalition includes both Robbins residents and white residents of the Beverly and Morgan Park neighborhoods of Chicago. Other suburban members of the coalition are lobbying local officials not to sign disposal contracts with the developer of the Robbins incinerator, the Reading Energy Company of Philadelphia. Robbins Mayor Irene Brodie is an aggressive advocate of the incinerator.

Like the Clevelanders, the SCCEAC organizers, led by chair Mary Martin, have spent hours every day calling supporters to attend state or municipal hearings on garbage contracts or air quality permits. They, too, took advantage of an election year to persuade Illinois Attorney General Neil Hartigan, then running for governor, to appeal to the U.S. EPA for a review of the Robbins plant's Illinois EPA permit, issued in June 1990.

As it turned out, that appeal was rejected this August, allowing construction to begin. In addition, the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association voted this spring to back the Robbins incinerator and to negotiate a garbage delivery contract with Reading, which will sell the power it generates to Commonwealth Edison. But the company will still have to persuade individual suburbs to participate in the agreement.

In the meantime, the coalition is lobbying hard against participation — and in favor of alternatives such as community recycling programs.

Getting tough

Sometimes neighborhood groups resort to hardball tactics. In Robbins, for instance, incinerator opponents have packed village board hearings on the waste topic. At one hearing, citizens hooted derisively and shouted impromptu corrections during the testimony of Reading Energy president Thomas Cassel. The Robbins groups say such tactics are necessary because many suburban trustees are hostile or indifferent to their cause.

Even southern gentility is showing a harder edge. Four years ago, when the Louisiana Environmental Action Network first issued scathing report cards on state legislators, flunking two-thirds of them, some members feared the tactic would alienate politicians. But executive director Marylee Orr says the group persisted in tackling such issues as deep-well injection of hazardous wastes, toxic waste landfills, and air pollution from the petrochemical industry. Now, says Willie Fontenot, director of the Louisiana Justice Department's Citizen Access Unit, politicians are anxious for "good grades."

Also in Louisiana, a Baton Rouge labor union, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Local 4-620, is cosponsoring a joint project with the National Toxics Campaign, the nation's first such labor-environmental combination. The black community, meanwhile, has spawned the Gulf Coast Tenants Organization, which has become a national model for environmental organizing in minority communities.

In Kansas, aggressive political lobbying succeeded in derailing a proposal by Browning Ferris Industries to open a landfill on the site of a historic Missouri River town. The landfill would have intruded on the ruins of Quindaro, which for five years in the 1850s served as a transit point for escaping slaves. Black activists convinced state officials that in addition to desecrating a historic site, the landfill, which would be upstream of the city's main water intake, would pose a danger to the local water supply.

In Hawaii, the tactic was a $25,000 "bill" sent to state officials by a multicultural group opposing a spaceport in the Ka'u area on the southern coast of the island of Hawaii. The group said the bill was for "consulting" costs incurred in monitoring the project's environmental impact assessment process and in seeking information through the Freedom of Information Act. The spaceport, in a low-income sugar plantation area, would occupy land that the state had promised to parcel out to native Hawaiians as "homelands."

What's next

In part, all these groups are confrontational because they are political newcomers. But it's also because they have philosophical objections to traditional modes of environmental regulation. Knowing that their communities are often the last viable siting option for noxious environmental uses, notes Marjorie Moore, of the Community Environmental Health Center at New York's Hunter College, these activists believe they must force society to make basic decisions about producing and disposing of environmentally hazardous products.

In defining such issues, the new grassroots environmentalists have the support of such academic experts as UCLA professor Robert Gottlieb, whose graduate planning students aided an inner-city coalition opposing the LANCER incinerator project. (See "AICP Awards," March 1989.)

Barry Commoner, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College in New York, sounded a virtual battle cry for the movement with his 1989 book, Making Peace with the Planet, a stinging criticism of current "end-of-pipe" methods of pollution control. He argued for focusing on prevention instead.

That approach implies greater social control over technology, and suggests a broader arena for local activists. Many of the battles over individual facilities are, in fact, elements in a much larger struggle over the direction of U.S. environmental policy. At that level, the blue-collar environmental movement has moved far away from NIMBY — "not in my backyard" — to its preferred slogan, NOPE — "not on planet Earth."

Jim Schwab is a senior research associate for APA.