The specter of environmental racism permeated the Port of Los Angeles’ June 15 public hearing on the Southern California International Gateway, also known as the SCIG project, just two days before Juneteenth was signed into law as a federal holiday.
The disconnect between the port’s plan (only partially discussed in its revised draft environmental impact report) and the new national holiday was staggering. A chorus of community members explicitly condemned the environmental racism involved, while representatives of the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, and the South Coast Air Quality Management District, or AQMD, echoed their criticisms in more muted tones, focused specifically on formal failings in the EIR.
“This project is racist,” said Paola Dela Cruz-Pérez, youth organizer with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. “This project and your deliberate choices to continue bringing it back are oppressive and I’m here to tell you: Not today, oppressors. Not today.”
“We oppose this project for many reasons that have been described by many members of the community today,” said NRDC attorney Julia Jonas-Day. “First and foremost because it will disproportionately impact low income and communities of color already overburdened by pollution, as the revised draft EIR itself makes clear.”
That disproportionate impact was “the one thing you all have been truthful about,” said mark! Lopez, former head of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. “That is literally the definition of environmental racism.
“Mayor Garcetti, this is your environmentally racist project. Gene Seroka, this is your environmentally racist project. Chris Cannon, this is your environmentally racist legacy.”
“SCIG is located in an environmental justice area heavily impacted by neighboring refineries, diesel truck traffic on the Terminal Island Freeway and the intermodal railyard north of SCIG,” said AQMD assistant deputy executive officer Ian MacMillan. “BNSF’s SCIG project will further exacerbate this burden.”
In MacMillan’s prepared remarks, he said, “SCIG project will generate significant localized air quality impacts and exceed the applicable significance thresholds for NO2, PM10, and PM2.5 by 325%, 518% and 47%, respectively.”
Local residents have been opposing the SCIG project in public meetings since it was initially proposed in the early 2000s, voicing similar concerns that have been sharply underscored by recent events.
“The past year-plus of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter uprisings has been the most traumatizing and awakening period of recent American history,” Long Beach resident Elsa Tung said. “This SCIG project, as many, many others have mentioned, will disproportionately harm Black, indigenous communities of color that are already overburdened by pollution, disease and lower life expectancy.”
“We stand with the community, and echo the concerns that SCIG will increase pollution, worsen public health, and exacerbate inequities in already overburdened communities of color,” said NRDC attorney Heather Kryczka. “We urge the port to reject this project.”
“Allowing SCIG to pass is like telling people, ‘If you can’t afford to live in an expensive neighborhood, you deserve to die of cancer, yeah. Terminal asthma? Sure! Cardiovascular disease? Why not!’” exclaimed East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice organizer Tiff Sanchez. “It’s racist. It’s environmental racism.”
“If you support this project, you are supporting the death of our neighbors,” Jessica Prieto, another East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice organizer said.
Carlos Ovalle, vice president of the River Park Coalition, also called it “the embodiment of environmental racism,” going on to say:
In the nearly 50 years since I moved to Long Beach I’ve seen my friends, neighbors and family members suffer the consequences of pollution resulting mostly from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Please end this project. My mother passed away in my arms vomiting blood running from the inside out because of two different types of cancer. Please end this project. My father passed away in my arms desperately gasping for air, asphyxiating slowly like a fish out of water from pulmonary fibrosis. Please end this project. My four younger brothers and myself suffer from leukemia, brain cancer, kidney cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, asthma, endocrinological and neurological disorders. None of this is hereditary. It is due specifically to environmental damage from the pollution due to shipping and transportation.
There was one lone voice who spoke in support of the SCIG, Chris Wilson with Los Angeles County Business Federation.
“Our ports have seen significant measurable increase in trade activity during the pandemic that underscores the crucial need for infrastructure improvements, [specifically, the SCIG],” he argued.
But Ovalle disagreed.
“Please end this project,” Ovalle said. “It exists only to facilitate shipping and commerce that in the end has but one purpose: to create exorbitant profits for the few at the cost of our health and our life.”
Missing and Outdated Data
Both NRDC and AQMD drew attention to outdated data in the revised draft EIR, as did Andrea Hricko, a retired professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine, who has commented at SCIG public meetings since the 2000s. And Jesse Marquez, founder and executive director of Coalition For A Safe Environment, drew attention to absent emissions data about the full work cycle of trucks servicing the SCIG.
“You are using your models and not actually identifying all the sources that we have identified in the past public comment periods over the past seven or eight years,” Marquez said. “For example, your project emissions baselines are underestimated and they did not include the 1,000-plus truck trips a day coming from their point of origin. They are leaving all over Los Angeles County, Orange County and wherever they’re coming from, and those distances and those emissions were not included.”
Additional trips to get fuel and pick up empty chassis are also ignored.
“There are in Wilmington, for example, over 100 container storage yards and many of the storage yards also store chassis,” he noted. “Many of those containers must also be fumigated.”
This adds even more mileage that has never been included in POLA’s models. But overlooked changes drew even more attention.
“We note that changes in the circumstances under which the SCIG project was analyzed in the 2013 Final EIR have occurred, and new information is available and should be analyzed,” AQMD’s MacMillan said.
“The port attempts to correct its earlier CEQA violations by providing an ‘updated’ ambient air quality analysis and cumulative impacts analysis. But both are unreliable and misleading because they rely on out-of-date information and are not supported by common sense,” NRDC’s Jonas-Day said.
“First, the air quality analysis relies on baseline data from 2010, eleven years ago. This is illogical and results in misleading conclusions,” she explained. “Many changes have occurred since 2010 that are relevant to the analysis — from changes in the entities operating at the project site to changes in regulations affecting air quality. For example, the 2010 baseline conditions include significant emissions from the operation of Cal Cartage at the proposed project site, even though Cal Cartage is no longer in operation there.”
Hricko went into this analytic lapse in greater detail.
“In 2019, POLA issued a lease to the Toll Group, which was to employ only one third of the workers Cal Cartage was to have, meaning fewer truck trucks and less emissions,” Hricko said. “I sent emails today to dozens of Port of Los Angeles staff asking if the Toll Group was actually in full operation at the old Cal Cartage site and how many employees it currently has. I got no responses except for one POLA staff person telling me I should file a formal California Public Records Act request to get that information. Without knowing today’s situation, we cannot know if truck counts and initiated action are still correct 10 years later.”
This isn’t the only example of crucial missing data Hricko cited.
“It’s relevant to the port’s honesty to note that in late April, the port suspended one of its monitoring sites,” Hricko stated. “Suspiciously, it was the one that the port admits has the highest emissions at the port. I’ve been stonewalled by port staff asking why it’s suddenly depriving the public of this critical emissions information. What is the port trying to hide from the public, anyway?”
Jonas-Day cited further data problems as well.
“Second, the revised air quality analysis attempts to provide more detailed information about the timeline of ambient air pollution impacts in the surrounding community by using six ‘benchmark years,’”she said. “But this fails a common-sense test because two of the six ‘benchmark years’ for which the agency predicts expected air pollution effects from the SCIG project have already passed. The port should revise its analysis to reflect the project’s current proposed timeline.”
Indeed, a third ‘benchmark year,’ 2023, will surely pass before the project even begins to operate, meaning that half of them are utterly meaningless.
A Broader View
But NRDC’s Kryczka approached the changed circumstances from a broader perspective. “The Revised Draft EIR fails as an informational document because it relies on outdated, inaccurate assumptions, and fails to account for nearly a decade of developments that have occurred since the original EIR was drafted,” she said, going on to cite four broad ways in which “circumstances have changed dramatically since the port considered SCIG in 2013.”
“First, the purpose and need for SCIG has changed as Southern California’s rail capacity has developed over the last decade,” Kryczka noted. “The ports have invested in significant build-out of new on-dock rail facilities, and cargo projections have shifted.”
“Second, new state and local policies promote environmental justice, and call for transitioning our goods movement system to zero-emissions,” she said. “SCIG threatens to undermine these policies, including the 2017 Clean Air Action Plan Update, the mayor’s Green New Deal, and the governor’s recent executive order calling for all drayage trucks in the state to transition to zero emissions.”
Marquez and others have repeatedly stressed POLA’s policy disconnect as well.
“Third, new technologies exist to reduce and eliminate emissions from the trains, trucks, and cargo handling equipment proposed to serve the SCIG facility,” Kryczka pointed out. “The Revised Draft EIR confirms that SCIG will have significant air quality impacts, but fails to consider technology that is now available to mitigate those impacts.”
Fourth, and finally, Kryczka said, “New residential developments have been built at the Century Villages at Cabrillo — including hundreds of new housing units, and plans for future expansions.
If built today, SCIG would directly impact an even greater number of residents, including veterans, families and children.”
Another widely-expressed complaint was the lack of adequate opportunity for public comment. At the beginning of the meeting, Chris Cannon announced that the comment period had been extended three weeks, to July 30, 2021, but AQMD requested an extension of “at least one month, if not more,” due to a month-long delay in receiving modeling files for the EIR from POLA, while community members asked for extensions of 120 days or more, and for the opportunity for an in-person public comment meeting.
“Many of my friends and peers who live in Long Beach and Carson and areas surrounding the prospective project area were not notified,” said Long Beach resident Robert Bagalawis. “In addition, people are disadvantaged at this time from speaking their opinion, because not everyone has Internet access, or has knowledge utilizing room and other platforms.”
For a project with a 50-year projected lifespan, it only seems fair to give those most affected a reasonable chance to be heard. Or perhaps what’s fair is what Carlos Ovalle concluded with: “Please kill this project, before it kills more of us.”