New Activism Targets Waste Site : A Coalition Unites Latinos and Blacks in the Athens District of South L.A.

Nearly everyone who lives next to the hazardous waste transfer station owned by Statewide Environmental Services Inc. in south Los Angeles is African American or Latino. That’s typical of Los Angeles County, where minorities are three times more likely than whites to live within half a mile of a hazardous waste treatment or dumping center, according to a recent Occidental College study.

That disparity might reflect a lack of political power in minority areas. But those who live in south Los Angeles’ Athens district, location of the Statewide site, are doing something about it. They have declared war on the plant, and are fighting to get it out of town as passionately as suburbanites going after a strip mall.

“We want this environmental injustice out of here,” said Deborah Milligan, a vice president of the Community Coalition for Change, a group founded this year by neighborhood residents who want to dump the waste storage and transfer site.

Milligan was among more than 100 residents rallied by the Community Coalition to testify at a county Planning Commission hearing on Statewide’s practices in May. The group has also united 17 block clubs and brought together longtime African American residents and Latino newcomers in its move to dispose of the waste handler.

Norman Wilford, a 48-year neighborhood resident and coalition vice president, said neighbors in Athens--which is 54% black and 43% Latino, according to the 1990 U.S. census--are more united than ever.

“There was never a connection before between the different block clubs or groups,” he said. “There was never a cohesive force like this.”

The object of the residents’ ire is a plant surrounded by an eight-foot-high concrete block wall that gathers hazardous waste from 4,000 clients countywide before moving it to landfills, recyclers or incinerators. About 300 55-gallon drums are processed each day.

Families with children live next to the plant, and many of them complain of noise and fumes. “We can’t sleep at night because of the noise and it smells bad every day. We get headaches and nausea, and I’m afraid it’s very dangerous for my children,” said Martha Hernandez, who lives with her husband and two preschool-age daughters in a trailer about 10 feet from the plant’s wall.

The outcry in Athens, a chunk of unincorporated territory between Watts and Compton, echoes a nationwide “environmental justice” movement built on the contention that minority communities house an unjustly large share of industrial polluters.

Rahman Shabazz, president of the coalition, said that a lack of civic involvement in the past may have prompted the siting of waste facilities in places like Athens.

“Where people are reluctant to get involved, even if they are properly notified, something [like the Statewide plant] can go through with nobody saying anything,” he said.

That was the case in 1988, when--with few comments from residents--the County Board of Supervisors approved a change in zoning that allowed more intense industrial use of the site now housing the Statewide plant.

Shabazz said few residents knew what was being done at the plant on 126th Street east of the Harbor Freeway, since it is walled. But last year, the state Department of Toxic Substance Control sent letters to 550 residents who live within a quarter-mile of the facility, saying it was reviewing the company’s application for a permanent operating permit that would replace the interim permit it now uses.

The letter led an outraged Shabazz and others to found the coalition and pressure Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke to ask the county Planning Commission to determine whether the facility has become a public nuisance.

The commission’s review could lead to revocation of the company’s local operating permit, which would derail its effort to get a permanent state permit.

That would be an impressive show of strength by an often-neglected community, but it might fall short of a victory for “environmental justice.”

A multi-agency county task force that inspected the facility late last year found “a number of minor violations” of the company’s county operating permit, but said the plant posed no “immediate health or safety threat to the public.”

Hazardous wastes endanger public health mainly by contaminating soil or ground water. Paul Papanek, a county toxicologist and physician who has visited the Athens site, said that air pollution in Los Angeles County is more dangerous than any risks posed by living next to the plant “by a factor of 100 to 10,000.”

“As many as 1,000 to 2,000 people die each year because of smog in L.A. County. It’s very hard to establish that even one person a decade will die in L.A. County due to exposures from living near a hazardous waste site,” Papanek said.

For protesting residents, the actual safety of the plant may be beside the point. Suburban residents have never needed a proven public health risk to prompt them to fight unwanted businesses. In Westlake Village, for instance, a campaign is under way to recall two councilmen who voted to approve the building of a Price Costco discount store.

“In other areas there’s a greater sense of taking ownership of one’s community, of being in control--that’s what we’re developing,” said Shabazz, who studied community organizing in graduate school.

Shabazz said the waste transfer station is in some ways “a blessing in disguise” since it created a new vehicle for activism in Athens. The coalition, for instance, was able to quickly mobilize residents to testify against proposed cuts to its county park and library last month.

County officials are trying to broker a compromise that would move the plant to another site, according to Charles Moore, a county land-use lawyer. Statewide President Matthew Stewart said he would be willing to move if the county finds a site and can secure the necessary permits.

While that would please the people of Athens, Stewart said he is doubtful it will happen soon.

“I’m willing to move and work with the county, but no matter where we go it’s not likely we’ll find people welcoming our kind of business,” he said.

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Toxic Site

Residents of the Athens area of south Los Angeles want a hazardous waste storage and treatment facility out of their neighborhood. They say that fumes and noise from the plant endanger their health an lower their property values.