Plant Siting Raises Issue of Environmental Justice

Creative, clean and high-tech, it seemed like the sort of entrepreneurial enterprise tailor-made for a California economy in dire need of fresh capital and pollution-free industry.

A Los Angeles lawyer with a scientific bent figured out a cheap way to recycle chemicals vital to the manufacture of computer circuitry. With a ready market in Silicon Valley and a state government determined to keep businesses in California, his firm last year became the first to benefit from the state Environmental Protection Agency’s new streamlined approval process designed to avoid the multiyear delays that caused many companies to go elsewhere.

A gala groundbreaking was planned. The governor was invited. Officials here viewed the firm, called Pure-Etch, as the cornerstone of an industrial revival after a dismal decade that saw the loss of nearly 10,000 jobs in Salinas and neighboring Watsonville.

There was only one hitch.

No one, it seemed, had asked the neighbors, an enclave of Latino farm workers and their families, how they felt about living next to a plant that would store thousands of pounds of hazardous chemicals. The state’s fast-track review, which found no threat to human health or safety, never mentioned that there would be people living a few hundred feet away, and who might be concerned about a possible chemical fire or spill.

Overnight, Pure-Etch was caught up in a prickly dispute involving charges of environmental racism with the Administration of Gov. Pete Wilson on one side and a group of prominent Democrats, including U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and state Sens. Art Torres of Los Angeles and Tom Hayden of Santa Monica, on the other.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also weighed in, under orders from the White House to pay special attention to the environmental justice movement and its claims that minority communities, lacking political influence, are overburdened with industrial hazards.

Active on a number of fronts in California, the movement has sought to curtail air pollution from oil refineries bordering low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles and opposed the expansion of one of the nation’s largest toxic dumps outside a Latino community in Kern County. Elsewhere, activists have fought to keep prisons, freeways and gas pipelines out of minority communities.

In Salinas, the hometown of John Steinbeck, who immortalized the plight of migrant farm workers in his novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” the whole issue has become something of an embarrassment. On the eve of municipal festivities celebrating the author’s life and work, officials are having to defend a county ordinance that allows heavy industry to locate next to migrant farm workers but nowhere near the homes of others.

“This law goes back many years to a time when migrant labor camps were seen as temporary, seasonal quarters,” said Salinas City Councilwoman Anna Caballero. “No one anticipated that they would evolve into permanent communities.”

Meanwhile, Michael Silver, the Los Angeles lawyer who founded Pure-Etch, insists his plant is no threat to anyone and says the only reason it has become a litmus test for environmental justice is because a competitor who doesn’t want him in business “played the racial card where it didn’t belong.”

The federal EPA has not dismissed Silver’s claim. It says, however, that locating a chemical plant next to a migrant camp is worrisome, regardless of who raised the issue.

The controversy illustrates a dilemma faced by a number of California cities that are trying to recharge their industrial batteries without jeopardizing the health and safety of poor, non-white residents who live in industrial zones because they can’t afford anything better.

A recent study by the state EPA, the agency that tentatively approved the Pure-Etch plant, concluded that “people of color live in areas that receive a disproportionate share of pollutant releases from manufacturing facilities.”

UC Berkeley researcher William Pease, who directed the study, said there also is the fear that industrial accidents at many of these facilities could expose nearby neighborhoods to fires or toxic clouds. That is the issue in Salinas.

“The situation in Salinas is a clear case of institutional racism,” said Luke Cole, a lawyer with California Rural Legal Assistance, one of several advocacy groups working to block Pure-Etch. “You have a company trying to take advantage of an outrageous zoning law that says you can put certain people in a heavy industrial neighborhood, regardless of the dangers.”

Until now, the battle over environmental justice in California has tended to focus on landfills, incinerators, refineries and sewage treatment plants--the class of noxious nuisances known as “LULUs,” or locally unpopular land uses.

Los Angeles was the scene of one of the movement’s early victories, when a citywide coalition of activists persuaded then-Mayor Tom Bradley in 1987 to kill plans for a giant waste-to-energy incinerator that was to be located in a black neighborhood.

The Salinas controversy, however, opens a new front in the campaign for environmental justice. The dispute focuses on a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant that would neither pollute the air nor foul the water, but instead would recycle chemical waste, producing what is called etchant for the circuit-board industry as well as nutrients used in raising poultry and growing rice.

While the Pure-Etch plant would store about 14,000 pounds of ammonia and 20,000 gallons of hydrochloric acid, the state EPA’s Department of Toxic Substance Control tentatively concluded that an accident would lead to a spill of no more than five seconds--not long enough to threaten anyone’s health. Under pressure from federal officials to review its findings, the department is expected to issue a new opinion within the next few weeks.

Lobbying the state EPA on behalf of Pure-Etch, the California Trade and Commerce Agency has made it clear that the Wilson Administration regards the battle over the facility as an important one. “Businesses like Pure-Etch are part of the continuum of high-tech industry,” said Loren Kaye, the state’s undersecretary for trade and commerce. “It is integral to the manufacturing of everything from desktop computers to anything else that uses electronic circuitry.

“More important, it’s the kind of clean industry we need more of.”

That is particularly true in Salinas, say officials who are struggling with a 16% unemployment rate and a countywide housing crisis that finds a growing number of the estimated 15,000 to 20,000 migrants living on the streets or in caves.

The city already has committed more than $6 million to low-income housing--an amount equal to 15% of its general fund--and will use some of that money to rehabilitate the migrant quarters that honeycomb the city’s industrial neighborhoods, said Councilwoman Caballero.

“We realize we have a real dilemma here,” she said. “We need to take advantage of all our existing housing stock. We desperately need clean, new industry, and we have to consider the health and safety of our residents.

“One need is hitting smack up against another.”

Caballero and other officials bristle at some of the racial rhetoric that has been flung at them over the Pure-Etch matter. She points out that she is the granddaughter of Mexican emigres, that the city is 55% Latino and that Latinos make up a majority of the City Council that voted for Pure-Etch.

“I resent being called a racist,” she said. “That phrase they are throwing around, ‘environmental racism,’ is very simplistic, and it makes it all the more difficult to deal with a very complex set of problems.”

Ironically, opponents of Pure-Etch don’t condemn the company as much as what they say it represents.

Cole of the legal assistance group said Pure-Etch “in and of itself probably isn’t such a bad thing.”

“But the situation,” he said, “is symptomatic of a number of others around California. It’s the same old story. It’s trust the technology. Only the people being asked to trust technology are poor people and people of color. They are the ones being declared expendable.”

Whatever the risk posed by Pure-Etch’s chemical inventory, it pales in comparison to what local residents already face. The tiny community of farm workers housed in an old motor court in east Salinas is surrounded by a small ocean of hazardous chemicals stored in a vast clutter of sheds, tanks and silos.

But that’s just the point, argues Cole. “These people have enough to worry about as it is.”

At the behest of Boxer, Hayden, Torres and other politicians sought out by Rural Legal Assistance and other groups, the EPA has intervened and urged state regulators to take a second look at Pure-Etch. Federal environmental officials have made it clear they don’t think much of the state’s initial review.

“There’s pretty strong evidence that the state did not consider all of the information it should have,” said Michael Feeley, the federal official in charge of monitoring the Pure-Etch permitting process. Feeley also expressed skepticism about the state’s claim that a toxic release from Pure-Etch would be limited to five seconds. “That does appear to be a questionable assertion,” he said.

Still, Feeley conceded that Pure-Etch does not present a clear-cut case of racial discrimination.

“The question is: Was there an intent to discriminate?” Feeley said. “Was this location chosen because the people who lived there wouldn’t have the power to block it? Or was it chosen because it was an obvious place to locate this kind of facility?”

Silver, the man behind Pure-Etch, contends that the brouhaha was stirred up by a competitor, Phibrotech, the only current provider of industrial etchant to circuit-board manufacturers in California.

He maintains that Phibrotech retained the Toxics Assessment Group, a Davis consulting firm that often represents environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club. Saying it was representing a nonprofit environmental organization, California Communities Against Toxics, the Toxics Assessment Group has been a leader in the battle to keep Pure-Etch out of east Salinas.

Jim Harnish, whose title is “principal” of the group, acknowledged that his firm had “shared some information and communications” regarding Pure-Etch with an attorney working for the competition. Harnish also said his firm had “received some financial help” for its work on the Pure-Etch matter, but he would not say if the money came from Phibrotech or its lawyer.

Silver argues that “if (Harnish’s firm) had been upfront about who they were representing, they would have gotten nowhere with this hot-button campaign over environmental racism.”

He insists there was no discriminatory intent in choosing the east Salinas site.

“There are other chemical companies all around; the site has access to a rail line,” Silver explained. “It’s less than an hour away from our biggest customers. It’s zoned industrial. Where else do you go if you’re an industry?”