EPA sued over state toxic waste dump sites
Critics say agency ignored toxic location concerns.
Lewis Griswold and Mark Grossi
The Fresno Bee
07/05/2011
Environmentalists are suing the federal Environmental Protection Agency for looking the other way when Kettleman City activists and others filed Civil Rights Act complaints that all toxic waste dumps in California are next to poor Latino towns.
The agency ignored the complaints filed in the mid-1990s even though it is supposed to respond within six months, activists said.
"We haven't been responded to," said Maricela Mares-Alatorre of Kettleman City and a leader of People for Clean Air and Water. "It's wrong to be ignored like that. There needs to be some kind of action."
The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Fresno, seeks a court order requiring the agency to answer the complaints.
The EPA said in a statement Tuesday that it cannot comment on pending litigation and is working with the U.S. Department of Justice on the case.
"The EPA should have taken some action on the complaint that was filed 15 years ago," said Brent Newell, a lawyer for the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment in San Francisco that filed the lawsuit. "There has been a pattern of discrimination for a long time."
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of groups in Kettleman City in Kings County and Buttonwillow in Kern County, which are near toxic waste dumps.
Only three landfills in California take toxic waste and all are near poor, Latino communities, Newell said. The EPA has the power to correct bias in the siting of new toxic waste dumps by withholding millions of federal dollars from state cleanup projects, he said.
In Kettleman City, 11 birth defects were recorded from 2000 to March 2010 and three of the babies died, causing suspicion to fall on the nearby Kettleman Hills toxic waste landfill operated by Waste Management.
