To Members of the Illinois Environmental Regulatory Group:
On Wednesday, August 14, 2013, IERG attended the inaugural meeting of Illinois’ Commission on Environmental Justice. Of the Commission’s 20 members, IERG’s Executive Director, Alec Messina, is the lone business representative. Members may recall this Commission was created by statute two years ago, but had not met until now due to a lack of appointments to it. A list of commission members, as well as a very brief description of the Commission’s charge, can be found here: http://www.appointments.illinois.gov/appointmentsDetail.cfm?id=422.
In short, the Commission has been tasked with reviewing and analyzing the impact and adequacy of current State laws and policies on the issue of “environmental justice and sustainable communities.” The first meeting lasted for less than the two hours allotted, and was devoted to various administrative or process-related issues, introductions of the Commission members, and a discussion of each member’s priorities and goals for the Commission. At this time, the Commission will be meeting quarterly, but the chairwoman left open the possibility that more meetings may be necessary once we determine the goals of the group. Further, all meeting minutes, work product, and commission member contact information will be available on a website maintained by the Illinois EPA for the Commission. That website is available at: http://www.epa.state.il.us/environmental-justice/commission/index.html. Members will certainly be interested in perusing some of the materials linked there under the Resources heading.
Illinois EPA Director Lisa Bonnett offered some introductory comments, including one very important point: while the Agency is currently working to implement its EJ program for permitting transactions, the Agency intends to expand its efforts to other decision-making areas, including rulemaking and enforcement. The forum then opened up for each member to share his or her thoughts about what the commission should be working towards. As you would expect from the makeup of the Commission, which is heavily weighted towards environmental groups and environmental justice activists, these priorities revolved around the following (in member’s own words when possible): to identify the gaps in the State’s authority to address Environmental Justice and dealing with cumulative impact, to generate research and data that will drive policy towards successfully taking into account environmental justice issues, to assist the Agency in moving away from a permit by permit analysis which restricts positive policy development, to better educating our communities to be aware of environmental injustices, to utilize new technologies to clean-up Illinois’ contaminated communities, to create a “green state,” to better understand the challenges municipalities face in dealing with these issues, to take into account environmental justice issues when engaging in planning and transportation issues, and to work with corporate citizens to become better partners to avoid contamination of green areas. Apparently, some of the like-minded Commission members have put together a position paper which contains their list of key principles and goals which it intends to pursue through this Commission. IERG Staff will disseminate that document as soon as it is disseminated to the entire group.
The law requires that the Commission submit a report to the General Assembly every October 1st. Despite the fact that this Commission has met only once, there were enough voices pushing for a report to be submitted in six weeks that the chairwoman will be scheduling another meeting sometime in late September in the hopes of agreeing on something to put in a report. It is unclear what that report will contain, though some members discussed voting on “commission priorities.”
Following the meeting, IERG Staff sat down with IEPA Director Bonnett to discuss the Commission, the Agency’s views on how this Commission will affect the Agency’s new public participation policy, and the concerns IERG still has with this policy. Briefly, the Director echoed some of IERG Staff’s concerns that the focus or goals of some of the commission members may be too broad, and worried that the Agency will not have the opportunity to put in place its public participation program without the Commission first pushing for a number of new environmental justice-related duties. Given the nature of the first meeting, however, and the relative lack of substantive discussion, it was too early to gain an opinion as to the effect the Commission will have on the Agency’s and other state agencies’ EJ policies.
As to the public participation policy, which she spoke about at IERG’s last Quarterly Meeting, the Director expressed an understanding of our concerns and apologized for not having addressed some of the issues raised at the July meeting. Director Bonnett suggested that we should schedule another meeting with her environmental justice team to work through some of these problems, and indicated that she would be willing to share with us which companies are on the Illinois EPA’s list of flagged environmental justice sites. IERG Staff will be transmitting a list of concerns to the Agency shortly in the hopes of furthering those discussions and will inform the Members when such a meeting is scheduled.
Should you have any questions about this email or the Commission in general, please contact Alec Messina at amessina@ierg.org or call 217/522-5512, extension 289.