Louisiana stifles community air monitoring with threat of million-dollar fines, federal lawsuit says
NEW ORLEANS AP On days of heavy waste in Sulphur a southwest Louisiana town surrounded by more than industrial plants Cynthia Cindy Robertson once flew a red flag outside her home so her region knew they faced robustness hazards from high levels of soot and other pollutants But she stopped flying the flag after Louisiana passed a law last May that threatened fines of up to million for sharing information about air quality that did not meet strict standards On Thursday Robertson s group Micah Mission and other Louisiana environmental organizations sued the state in federal court over the law they say restricts their free speech and undermines their ability to promote community soundness in heavily industrialized communities When neighbors appealed where the flags went I d tell them The state of Louisiana says we can t tell y all that stuff Robertson stated While the state has argued the law ensures that accurate evidence is shared with the populace environmental groups like Micah Mission concluded it was intended to censor them with onerous restrictions and violates their free speech rights according to the lawsuit Despite having received Environmental Protection Agency funding to monitor Sulphur s corruption using high quality air monitors for several years Michah Mission stopped posting figures on the group s social media after the law was signed last May Robertson announced While federal law requires publicly disclosed monitoring of major pollutants fence-line communities in Louisiana have long sought information on their exposure to hazardous and likely carcinogenic chemicals like chloroprene and ethylene oxide which were not subject to these same regulations Under the Biden administration the EPA tightened regulations for these pollutants though the Trump administration has committed to rolling them back The Biden administration s EPA also injected funding to promotion community-based air monitoring especially in neighborhoods on the fence-line with industrial plants that emitted pollutants that they were not required to publicly monitor under federal law Specific groups say they lack confidence in the figures the state does provide and embraced the chance to monitor the air themselves with federal funding These programs help detect waste levels in areas of the country not well served by traditional and costly air monitoring systems the lawsuit stated In response to the influx of grassroots air monitoring Louisiana s Legislature passed the Society Air Monitoring Reliability Act or CAMRA which requires that locality groups that monitor pollutants for the purpose of alleging violations or noncompliance of federal law must follow EPA standards including approved equipment that can costs hundreds of thousands of dollars You can t talk about air quality unless you re using the equipment that they want you to use stated David Bookbinder director of law and guidelines at the Environmental Integrity Project which represents the plaintiffs He added there was no need for area groups to purchase such expensive equipment when cheaper system could provide perfectly adequate results to be able to tell your locality your family whether or not the air they re breathing is safe Region groups sharing information based on cheaper air monitoring equipment that did not meet these requirements could face penalties of a day and up to million for intentional violations according to analysis from the Environmental Integrity Project We re a small nonprofit we couldn t afford to pay one day s worth of that Robertson stated And the way the law is written it s so ambiguous you don t really know what you can and can t do There is no known instance in which the state has pursued these penalties but locality groups say the law has a chilling effect on their work The purpose of this was very clear to silence the science preventing people from doing anything with it sharing it in any form revealed Caitlion Hunter director of research and agenda for Rise St James one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit I m not sure how regulating locality air monitoring programs violates their constitutional rights Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill countered in a written message Industry groups are excluded from the law s requirements the lawsuit notes The law presumes that air monitoring information lacks accuracy if disseminated by population air monitoring groups but not by industry participants or the state the complaint states The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency declined to comment citing pending litigation Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press Document for America Statehouse News Initiative Statement for America is a nonprofit national facility plan that places journalists in local newsrooms to document on undercovered issues Source
