Environmental Justice Webinar

Center for Social Innovation OEE EJ 08/28/2012 Hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s installment in the Understanding HUD Environmental Reviews webinar series sponsored by HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development or CPD. My name is Mark Allison, and I work for the Center for Social Innovation and I’ll be the moderator for today’s webinar. On behalf of CPD and the Office of Environment and Energy, I would like to thank all of you for joining us. Today’s webinar is Environmental Justice at HUD: Why, What and How. Before we begin, I would like to make some logistical announcements. Today’s webinar will last approximately 90 minutes, and the webinar is being recorded. You can access a PDF of the slides in handout format through the first link on the File Sharing box in case you want to follow along by taking notes next to the slides. The recording and the PowerPoint presentation in full slide format with notes will be posted on HUD’s CPD Environment Page, the link for which you’ll find in the Q&A box in a moment. You can check the training website for updates to this webinar series, including the full recording of today’s webinar and other webinars in this series and for in-person training opportunities. The full series should be available online by October. As an attendee of this webinar, your microphone will be automatically muted. Please listen to the presentation through your phone for best results. The call in information has been sent to you, and it is also listed in your Meeting Room screen under Audio Instructions. Another option is to use your computer speakers. This means that you’ll need to turn on and turn up the speakers on your computer. Due to the large number of attendees, there may be a slight delay in the advancement of the slides. If you experience any other technical difficulties, please let us know by using the Question and Answer Box on your screen. You may also submit content-related questions using that same box. Feel free to submit questions at any point during the webinar. However, we will wait until the end of the webinar to answer as many content-related questions as time allows. Immediately following the webinar, you’ll be directed to a follow-up survey. Participants are strongly encouraged to respond to the evaluation to improve future webinars. During the webinar, we will be asking poll questions, two of which you will see on the bottom of your screen now. Please take a moment to answer these questions as well as the others we will ask throughout the webinar. Today’s webinar will feature Jim Potter as the presenter. Jim Potter is a Community Planner in CPD’s Office of Environment and Energy. Mr. Potter is the lead for implementation of Executive Order 12898, Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations. He serves as staff liaison to the Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice as well as several subcommittees coordinating compliance across the Federal Government. Mr. Potter is a Certified Planner who has a bachelor’s of science in geography and environmental planning, a master’s in city and regional planning, and a graduate certificate in environmental management. He has been serving in this capacity since 2006. And now I’d like to pass this over to Jim to begin the presentation. Jim? Thank you, Mark, and thank you all for joining us today. Now the first basic question that I wanted to answer for you today is why do we worry about environmental justice? What’s the problem and why is EJ so important to HUD? Well, the reason for the most recent resurgence in interest is that there was a reconvening of the Environmental Justice Interagency Working Group in 2010. And I wanted to draw your attention to the quote from Secretary Donovan that I put on the bottom right of the slide. You’re going to see it again because this forms the basic definition that HUD uses for environmental justice. But two things I wanted to point out within that quote toward the bottom. “So that a family’s success is not determined by the zip code they live in.” Two things here – we’re worried about people, and there’s a spatial component to environmental justice. Keep those two things in mind, and we’ll be talking about a lot of different issues – mainly how to deal with environmental justice, the analysis, how you determine whether you’re in an EJ community, whether you have an EJ problem, and what to do about it. 1 Center for Social Innovation OEE EJ 08/28/2012 The learning objectives are pretty basic. We want to find out a little bit about the terminology of environmental justice because some of these definitions are important. They’re also unique to HUD. We want to talk about how this fits into the larger environmental review that you do for projects anyway. We’re going to talk about an analysis approach, and I’m going to show you some case studies that illustrate some of the applications of these ideas. But first I wanted to start with an abbreviated background of environmental justice. Some of you may have a familiarity with this, and we’ve added a couple of milestones recently that I wanted to bring to your attention. We’ve got a couple of new poll questions on the left, and I wanted you to take a moment and just think about those questions. It looks like all of you agree that environmental justice is not a new requirement. I’m very glad to see that. Environmental justice has little measurable effect on projects. Most of you found that to be false, and that’s a good thing also. As you’ll see in a moment, it can have a profound impact on projects, both positive and negative. So let’s get into a little bit about the issues involved and how that can be addressed. Academic studies documenting the injustice have been around for quite a long time now, and also the reasons that we got here, starting in 1994 officially with the Executive Order 12898. The new milestones I wanted to bring to your attention are the Interagency Working Group reconvening in August of 2010 and the new strategy that HUD posted in April of this year. That new strategy has a lot of the material that we’re going to talk about today. It’s a pretty rich document with a lot of the things that we’re going to be using to discuss the application, the analysis, and the mitigation that may be necessary. For those of you by the way that downloaded the webinar handout, there are notes at the bottom within the notes section below the last slide that talk about the specific details of those academic studies. If you’re interested in them or you want to refresh your memory about what they are, take a look at those. There’s some really good information in there. I’ve also got one at the end in the resource slide that’s going to be very interesting to you. It’s a fairly new document in the compendium of environmental justice research, so that’ll be a little teaser for later. Environmental justice at HUD, and this comes from the departmental strategy, are the things that Secretary Donovan talked about in that quote on the first slide – equal access to safe and healthy housing for all Americans; mitigating risks; providing access to affordable, accessible, quality housing; and working to achieve inclusive, sustainable communities free from discrimination. These are ideas that HUD’s been working for many, many years; and they’re just reinforced in this new context. But the three at the bottom of that slide I wanted to talk about in a little bit more detail here, and you’re going to see this reinforced throughout the presentation. Meaningful public participation – decision makers seek out and facilitate involvement from those potentially affected at a time when least expensive or disruptive change can be made. “Least expensive” or “disruptive” – you’re going to see those terms many times throughout here – or at least some reference to those terms many times. Within the environmental review, we often – I’ll say always – talk about doing the environmental review early in a project before decisions are made so that you have the opportunity to make changes. As you do your review, you’re going to find challenges. You’re going to find legacy uses that have left soil contamination. You’re going to find noise. You’re going to find air quality issues. You’re going to find a variety of different things you may not have known about when you started project planning. Environmental review informs your decision about how this project will be developed. And the earlier you do that, the easier it is to make changes that can eliminate or minimize those impacts, making the entire project not only more acceptable to the host community but also cheaper, easier, and better. Disproportionate impact – at HUD that’s an unequal share of the negative consequences in relation to the larger community. In relation to the larger community is important because we’re going to be talking about minority and low-income populations within a larger jurisdiction. Neighborhoods are concentrations of those demographics, and we want to make sure that we’re not disproportionately affecting those groups to benefit others.

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