Wichita City Hall backs out of grant to help residents seek environmental justice | Opinion
It seems like whenever I start to write something positive about Wichita City Hall, City Hall does something to turn optimism into ashes.
This column started out praising the city for seeking a $3 million grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to advance environmental justice in areas of this city beset by pollution and powerlessness for decades.
But that application has now been pulled from the council agenda and won’t be going to a vote.
I was originally planning to praise the city because the grant represents Wichita’s last chance to slip through a door before it slams in their face, as the EPA switches from being the nation’s environmental watchdog to a handmaiden of polluting industries.
President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the EPA is a “Mr. Burns”-style cartoon villain by the name of Lee Zeldin, a former congressman from New York and a climate-change denialist with a lifetime score of 14 percent from the League of Conservation Voters.
His primary qualification for the job is slavish loyalty to Trump and a willingness to gut regulations protecting the American people from polluters.
The online publication “The Hill” asked Camp Trump how he got the job in the first place and their response was that he “helped Republicans flip multiple suburban House districts in New York, resulting in the Republican Party’s majority in the House of Representative (sic).”
The grant at issue in Wichita is part of the EPA’s Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Grants program, funded through the federal Inflation Reduction Act.
It’s a 100 percent grant. The city government doesn’t have to make any matching contribution. The city’s role would be to monitor the spending of the grant to ensure it complies with the rules.
The city was all for going after it and put out a request seeking a community organization to act as its partner, which is required to get the money.
The Climate and Energy Project, based in Hutchinson and active in Wichita, agreed and spent more than 200 labor hours putting the application together, with help from three other community action groups.
Then, with a week to go before the deadline to apply, the city pulled the rug.
CEP received an e-mail from the city’s sustainability coordinator, Ethan Kershaw, stating in part: “The City Manager has decided to not advance our application to the City Council on 11/19, meaning the City of Wichita will be unable to submit as part of an application the Community Change Grants program. “
City Manager Robert Layton said Friday that he was concerned with the city’s role and liability as the agency that would receive the funding, in administering the grant through CEP and the three other community organizations.
Also, he said he’s concerned that the project consists primarily of community engagement and educational activities, the results of which are difficult to measure.
Those are valid concerns, but they should have been addressed earlier than the week before the Nov. 21 deadline to submit the grant. And it might be a little less problematic if this weren’t an opportunity that will never come again.
It might also be less problematic if Wichita’s track record on environmental justice was slightly less horrifying.
The funding would have helped residents of minority neighborhoods in northeast, north-central and Oaklawn neighborhoods inform themselves and advocate for themselves on environmental issues.
For more than a century those areas — historically Black, Hispanic and Asian — have been the city’s dumping ground for just about every kind of noxious industrial project that would never even be considered near wealthier and whiter neighborhoods to the east and west.
Just one example: Two years ago, northeast-area residents discovered they’ve been living over a plume of toxic groundwater polluted with the industrial degreasing solvent trichloroethylene, from a rail yard accident 50 years ago.
The city had known about the pollution since 1994, but didn’t bother to warn the residents. A belated health study last year found elevated rates of liver cancer and low-birthweight babies in the impacted area.
This has to stop happening.
A grant to teach residents of disadvantaged communities to understand and identify environmental problems and how to press government to get them addressed would have been a good start.
Unfortunately, rejecting the grant at this late date sends a message from City Hall to the minority populations of Wichita.
That message is: We don’t care about your health. We don’t care about your opinions. We don’t care about you.
