Eleven years ago Flint, Michigan, fatefully switched its drinking water supply to the Flint River. The consequences are well-documented: significant damage to pipes, a historic outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, system-wide lead contamination. My then-three-year-old son was one of the children who drank that lead-tainted water.
Because lead is only detectable in the blood for two months’ time, we, like many other Flint families, will never know exactly how much lead may have entered our child’s body, or what effects it might have had on his development. That uncertainty is just one of the many ways in which the Flint water crisis continues to reverberate throughout our community.
Another notable, and much-remarked reverberation is the effect the crisis had on trust in governmental institutions. Flint parents will not soon forget the many months our children drank tainted water while officials insisted everything was fine. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for its part, was shamefully slow to act in the face of evidence that the water posed an imminent threat. In some ways, the agency is still on the wrong side of the crisis, as it continues to fight a lawsuit brought by residents.
But EPA has given itself a means of addressing its blind spots, course correcting, and hopefully, minimizing mistakes like the ones we saw in Flint.
The EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) was created in 1993 to provide recommendations to the EPA administrator for addressing pollution and other environmental burdens in our hardest-hit communities. NEJAC’s members are unpaid, performing their work for the council as a public service. And they hail from a wide range of backgrounds: community-based organizations, state and local government, academia, tribal government, and the business and industry sector.
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NEJAC’s open meetings offer the public inlets of influence over the federal government, giving communities the opportunity to lift up their concerns and ensure that they are taken seriously and followed up on. After the revelations about Flint’s water, NEJAC invited one of the city’s leading water activists to speak to the council and, inspired by her testimony and reports from other community advocates, authored a letter calling for prompt EPA action to address “enduring problems” in Flint. (The agency’s follow-up actions are detailed here.) Subsequently, Flint helped to inspire NEJAC’s national recommendations around water infrastructure.
In 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, I began my own service on NEJAC. That year, former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler conducted a review of all advisory committees to EPA and, in his words, “reaffirmed the importance” of NEJAC’s “critical role” in helping the agency “make measurable progress improving the health and welfare of overburdened communities.”
The difference between then and now is striking. Current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has suggested that environmental justice work amounts to discrimination and has been purging EPA of all traces of its environmental justice commitments. Notably, NEJAC has been removed from EPA’s official list of advisory committees, and the fate of the council is unclear. As (presumptive) NEJAC vice-chair, I and other members of the NEJAC leadership team sent a letter to Administrator Zeldin on February 28 asking him to meet with us, as is customary for a new administrator. He has not responded.
Meanwhile, like other marginalized communities, Flint waits to see whether our plight will be taken seriously by this administration. Flint remains under the EPA emergency order issued in January 2016, a reflection of our water system’s lingering issues. While significant strides have been made in getting lead out of our water, residents are awaiting the completion of lead pipe removal, and we still face many challenges in rebuilding the relationship between residents and our water utility. Under the last presidential administration, EPA employees in the environmental justice program offered resources to help facilitate the Flint Water System Advisory Council, which serves as an interface between Flint residents and the city’s water managers. Whether this support will continue, given that some of these agency allies have been placed on administrative leave and are facing termination, is very much an open question.
On February 20 of this year, Administrator Zeldin made a point of visiting Flint. He toured the Flint Water Treatment Plant and pledged that EPA would remain “fully engaged” with the city’s recovery effort. What the administrator did not do, however, is take the time to hear directly from impacted community members about their needs, concerns, and recommendations.
It is a contradiction to claim full engagement and to simultaneously neglect or cut off opportunities for members of our most marginalized communities to lift up their voices to EPA and other federal agencies. With the closing of EPA’s national and regional environmental justice offices, there has never been more need for the spotlight that NEJAC can shine on the environmental struggles of communities like Flint. For over 30 years, across Democratic and Republican administrations, NEJAC has provided EPA decision-makers with invaluable perspective at negligible cost to the American taxpayer. Administrator Zeldin should, like his predecessors, reaffirm its important role.