The state of Louisiana is trying to obtain records of years of communications between U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials and Louisiana environmental justice groups, as well as journalists covering environmental issues in Louisiana, according to a lawsuit the state filed against the federal agency in December.
According to federal court filings, the December lawsuit — which alleges that the EPA violated federal law by failing to turn over the records sought by the state in a June Freedom of Information Act request — is connected to a separate, ongoing federal lawsuit filed earlier last year by then-Attorney General Jeff Landry.
That suit sought to bring an end to an investigation by the EPA into whether state environmental regulators had violated the federal Civil Rights Act by granting operating permits to petrochemical plants in predominantly Black neighborhoods located in the state’s chemical corridor — the industry-heavy stretch between New Orleans and Baton Rouge often referred to as “Cancer Alley.”
The EPA dropped the Cancer Alley probe about a month after the state filed suit, but Landry, who has since been sworn in as governor, and Liz Murrill, Landry’s successor as attorney general, have continued to pursue the matter, which could have major implications for civil rights investigations across federal agencies.
A Dec. 19 court filing from the state and communications between the Attorney General’s Office and the EPA, included as exhibits in the December suit, indicate that the state was attempting to gather evidence of what it believes were improper contacts between the EPA and third parties, among them the environmental justice groups and journalists, related to the Cancer Alley probe.
Halle Parker, a reporter for public radio station WWNO-FM, was one of the journalists listed in the State of Louisiana’s request for information to the EPA. She said she was surprised when a fellow journalist alerted her earlier this week that she was part of the FOIA request.
“I had never thought about a government agency looking to see what I had found out about them or what information I was seeking about topics in general,” she said. “So it was just kind of eye opening to me. … I knew it was a possibility, but I’ve never had it cross my mind.”
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‘What a pathetic waste of taxpayer’s resources’
In June 2023, the Louisiana’s Office of Attorney General filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all communication regarding the reduction of emissions and air pollution in Cancer Alley between the EPA and environmental groups, including RISE St. James, Concerned Citizens of St. John and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice.
The office also request communications between the agency and journalists who work for several local and national news outlets, including The Times-Picayune, WGNO, WWNO and The Advocate, the Guardian and MSNBC. (Verite News reporter Bobbi-Jeanne Misick was among the journalists named in the request, though it appears the state is most interested in communications she had with the EPA in 2021, when she was working for the Gulf States Newsroom.)
The state also sought internal EPA records about the Cancer Alley investigation, including EPA Administrator Michael Regan’s meeting calendars from his 2021 visit to Cancer Alley as part of his Journey to Justice tour, Regan’s notes from the tour and records related to the agency’s decision to drop the investigation. The request was followed with months of back-and-forth over the scope of the request,and how quickly the requested records could be produced.
The EPA in early December provided some of the requested records, including 360 pages of at least some of its communications with journalists and environmental groups, but did not include the others.
On Dec. 19, the state sued the EPA for an alleged failure to comply with the Freedom of Information Act. In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Lake Charles, the state claimed the EPA took too long to produce the records, withheld them and concealed information that it shouldn’t have in some of the records they shared with the State of Louisiana.
The state included some of the negotiations between the EPA and the state over the records request as exhibits in its FOIA suit. In one of those communications, state Deputy Solicitor General Joseph Scott St. John provided an explanation for the request for emails to and from journalists.
“It has become apparent to the State from highly specific press inquiries that EPA has been prodigiously leaking information to the press, including the details of non-public negotiations,” he wrote to the EPA, without providing specific examples.
St. John’s letter did not explain why the environmental groups were included in the request. But Among the claims made by the state of Louisiana in the broader Civil Rights Act case was that the EPA allowed environmental groups working to reduce emissions in Cancer Alley to have improper influence over the agency’s regulatory actions. The state alleged that amounted to an illegal delegation of regulatory authority to them.
“What a pathetic waste of taxpayer’s resources,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisana Bucket Brigade, one of the environmental groups named in the FOIA request. “They’re going to refuse to acknowledge racism in a state in the Deep South and instead they’re gonna waste their time looking for emails that they believe might be problematic. I mean, it’s just pathetic.”
In a partial judgment in that case handed down this week, federal Judge James Cain said that the delegation claim was moot because the EPA’s investigation was closed. But he added that the EPA could be penalized in the future if it were found to be delegating authority to these groups.
Cain also temporarily stopped the EPA and Department of Justice from engaging in the type of regulatory action, under Title VI of Civil Rights Act, that led to the Cancer Alley investigation.
Title VI prohibits agencies that receive federal funds, such as the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, from discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin. The Cancer Alley investigation relied on a legal standard, called “disparate impact.”
Under that standard, the EPA did not have to prove intentional discrimination on the state’s part, only that the proliferation of petrochemical plants in predominantly Black areas created a discriminatory effect. The state argued that the disparate-impact standard was beyond the scope of Title VI. In an opinion handed down this week, Cain agreed, ordering federal agencies to cease disparate-impact-based regulatory action under Title VI.
The order, a preliminary injunction, was not a final judgment in the lawsuit. It will remain in place pending the outcome of a trial, unless the federal government is able to secure an appeals court order to overturn it.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice said the agency doesn’t have a comment on the lawsuit. The Attorney General’s Office has not responded to questions about its lawsuit on the FOIA request, instead providing a statement that said EPA was violating the constitution and threatening millions in federal funding by trying to enforce the disparate impact rules.
Rolfes said the EPA hasn’t been as much of a burden on petrochemical companies as the attorney general’s office claims. Instead, she said, it’s been business as usual for companies that release toxic chemicals throughout the state.
“I think we should be really clear here, the EPA has not been protecting people in this state at all. There’s been there’s been no protections offered,” she said. “So really, the investigation that the AG’s office should be doing is why don’t we have more federal oversight and more involvement.”
This article first appeared on Verite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Creative Commons Republished from lailluminator.com
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