The New NIMBYs Are Taking Back Their Back Yards--and Their Air
Off the 710 freeway in South Gate, a billboard flashes “Power Station Entertainment Centers,” an unintended reference to the power plant that had been slated to go in next door. Residents sent a different message when they voted March 6 to reject the plant, which would have been the first built in Los Angeles in 20 years.
The guardians of the state’s power supply have blamed not-in-my-back-yard attitudes for California’s tattered electricity-delivery system.
But South Gate’s voters aren’t your usual NIMBYs. The March 6 vote, which the power plant’s builder announced it would respect, represents a victory for the new NIMBYs, whose back yard is already the most polluted corner of crowded Southeast Los Angeles County.
The original NIMBYs generally were affluent white homeowners who organized to oppose the homeless shelter around the corner or the halfway house across the street. More recently, canny politicians and lobbyists on the left and right have discovered the tactic. Jan Smutny-Jones, executive director of a statewide trade group of power generators, said after the South Gate vote, “The NIMBY problem is serious if we don’t figure out how to get through that.”
This analysis doesn’t account for workng-class attitudes toward urban pollution, which have changed radically in recent years. Once smokestacks and truck traffic powered economic growth in cities such as South Gate, Commerce and Huntington Park. Now, residents gather at places like South Gate High School off Firestone Boulevard, legacy of the tire plant that closed 20 years ago, to plot against a power plant whose backers promised union jobs and millions in annual tax revenue.
The new NIMBYism has many causes: studies linking childhood asthma to soot; riders’ campaigns against diesel buses; the growth of environmental-justice groups such as Oakland-based Communities for a Better Environment, which spearheaded the South Gate campaign; the impact of Latino voters empowered by anti-immigrant politics; the publicity brought by more than 20 years of state and federal air-quality management. But the essence of the attitude that upended the South Gate plant is a new vision of how people, pollution and politics intersect.
Take particulate matter, the microscopic byproducts of our combustible economy that sting the eyes and lodge in the lungs. The Environmental Protection Agency identified diesel particulates as a carcinogen in 1983, and the federal Clean Air Act of 1990 set emission targets for a variety of airborne chemicals and pollutants, including oxides of nitrogen (NOx), particulate matter, ozone and carbon monoxide. The law has pushed cities such as Los Angeles to reduce their reliance on diesel buses, but its measurement of “ambient” air left leeway for states to skirt its provisions.
Working people now make the connection between the symptoms that haunt their families and the plating plant down the block. At a community meeting in December, South Gate resident Jesus Carrera sat between his son, who has asthma, and his elderly father. “I think these problems are caused by pollution,” Carrera said about his son.
Medical conditions are often complex, involving access to care, diet and decent housing, as research demonstrating the spread of asthma in poor communities has shown. But invoked as a strategy for grass-roots organizing and judicial action, these personal connections have surprising power.
The South Gate plant, set to create fewer than 25 new jobs, won the backing of the County Federation of Labor and state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier), whose husband was hired to do public relations work for the new plant six months after Escutia’s endorsement. The company behind the plant spent an estimated $150,000 on a South Gate Christmas parade float, a Cinco de Mayo festival and a mail campaign that, in the week before the vote, sent candles to city residents to warn of the costs of opposing new power plants.
In addition, the South Coast Air Quality Management Board gave its approval for the new power plant, noting, in Executive Director Barry Wallerstein’s words, “the present electricity crisis in California and the advancement of control technology resulting in ultra-low NOx emissions.” The commission estimated that the proposed plant would emit 56 tons of NOx, 17 tons of carbon monoxide, 24 tons of volatile organic compounds and 287 tons of particulate matter each year.
These figures proved more persuasive than the combined heft of local labor groups, politicians and industry. “They need to take [the power plant] somewhere where it won’t harm any person, child or senior citizen,” South Gate Vice Mayor Xochilt Ruvalcaba told The Times.
The failure of the well-heeled backers points to another dynamic state politicians need to consider: informed disbelief about the power crisis. Last week, Smutny-Jones of the power plant trade group cautioned, “If people want electricity at reasonable prices, we are going to have to build power plants or modernize older plants.” Yet, many South Gate residents were unmoved by the rhetoric of the energy crisis, with its blackout scares and ruinous economic predictions. One reason is that Stage 3 alert bells sound less loudly in the ears of low-income consumers whose utility bills take a disproportionate bite out of their paychecks. Working people also blame deregulation, not environmental rules, for the current problems. And the energy-company money backing Gov. Gray Davis and other politicians has not escaped voters’ notice.
The new NIMBYs are savvy to the political process, and the South Gate vote could embolden poor communities across the state to oppose fast-track power plants. If so, state politicians will have to find another way out of the crisis pushed on them by careless deregulation, rampant energy speculation and the hardball tactics of overextended utilities. The fresh wind blowing down Firestone Boulevard might bring new ideas into the state’s power debate. *