Environmental Justice Is Put to the Test
In February 1994, President Clinton issued an executive order requiring every agency to “make achieving environmental justice part of its mission.” Though the order doesn’t define environmental justice, it instructs the agencies to identify the effects of their actions on “minority and low-income groups.”
If there’s ever a case that appears to address the good intentions of this order, surely it is that of Shintech and its desires in the great state of Louisiana. Shintech is the U.S. subsidiary of the Japanese chemical giant Shin-Etsu and is the world’s leading producing of polyvinyl chlorides.
About 18 months ago, Shintech investigated as a possible site for a new chemical plant a 3,700-acre sugar cane plantation along the Mississippi River in St. James Parish, near Convent, La. The parish is in the heart of “cancer alley,” which already harbors 11 chemical plants that emit 24 million pounds of toxins a year. The parish is also home to the IMC-Agrico fertilizer plant, which until its operations were curtailed in 1994 held the distinction of being the most toxic plant in America, discharging 174 million pounds of poisons into the Mississippi every year. For more than a decade, St. James Parish has ranked as one of the most toxic counties in America.
After an initial approach to the office of Mike Foster, a millionaire businessman and the Republican governor of Louisiana, Shintech was offered an amazing trove of inducements to build its plant near Convent. Most alluring was the $120 million in property tax relief and tax credits, which works out as a cost to the state of about $750,000 for each of the proposed 165 permanent jobs.
Shintech soon decided that the parish was the best location for its $700-million investment--the second-largest chemical plant in the world--and began applying for construction and environmental permits. On Nov. 12, 1996, while several permits were pending, Shintech gave $5,000 to Foster’s reelection campaign.
The area surrounding the Shintech site is 87% African American; less than 50% of the children graduate from high school, more than 60% of the residents are unemployed and the average per capita income is $7,200. The cancer rate in St. James is among the highest in Louisiana, a state that ranks fifth in the nation in cancer deaths.
The prospect of this desperately poor area becoming home to another chemical plant stirred local opposition, led by Patricia Melancon and the St. James Citizens for Jobs and the Environment. Melancon went to Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic, which agreed to take on the case.
Foster reacted harshly to the intervention by the law clinic, which has asked the Clinton administration to halt the plant on environmental justice grounds. In May, Foster appeared before the New Orleans Business Council, where he assailed the clinic as “a bunch of modern day vigilantes who are just making up reasons to run businesses out of the state.” The council is a coterie of 58 of the state’s most influential corporate executives and some of Tulane University’s biggest donors.
Foster told the business leaders that unless the “bunch at the Tulane law clinic is gotten under control,” the executives should reconsider their financial support for the university. Tulane and the law clinic have stood firm. That has angered Foster and Shintech, which wanted to begin construction last November. Foster has threatened to undermine Tulane’s tax breaks to force the clinic to back off. “These are a bunch of big fat professors drawing big fat paychecks to run people out of Louisiana,” Foster said in July.
This threat to Tulane’s tax exempt status shows the depth of Foster’s commitment to Shintech. Tulane employs nearly 7,000 people, one of the largest work forces in the state. Shintech promises 165 jobs, and according to a memo from Foster’s Office of Economic Development, these will go to people outside the local community.
“The governor keeps talking about jobs,” Melancon says. “But there are 11 chemicals plants near Convent right now. If these industrial plants are so great, why does our community still have 62% unemployment? It’s about profits and greed, not jobs and justice.”
The Clinton administration can deny Shintech its air permit by ruling that it would violate Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act, a measure recently and successfully invoked by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stop construction of a uranium enrichment plant near Homer, La.
The Shintech case is on the desk of EPA administrator Carol Browner and is no doubt a preoccupation of Al Gore, who has visited the state recently on fund-raising missions. If the Clinton administration’s executive order of 1994 is to have meaning, then surely the government will keep Shintech out of cancer alley.
