The Atlantic, Apr. 18, 2014

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

A few weeks ago I wrote skeptically of the jaunty uplifting narrative that sees white supremacy’s inevitable defeat. One reason I was so skeptical was because I’d been reading the reporting of Nikole Hannah-Jones. If you haven’t read her coverage on housing segregation you should. And then you should read her piece from this month’s magazine on the return of segregation in America’s schools:

Schools in the South, once the most segregated in the country, had by the 1970s become the most integrated, typically as a result of federal court orders. But since 2000, judges have released hundreds of school districts, from Mississippi to Virginia, from court-enforced integration, and many of these districts have followed the same path as Tuscaloosa’s—back toward segregation. Black children across the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades. Nationally, the achievement gap between black and white students, which greatly narrowed during the era in which schools grew more integrated, widened as they became less so.

In recent years, a new term, apartheid schools—meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less, schools like Central—has entered the scholarly lexicon. While most of these schools are in the Northeast and Midwest, some 12 percent of black students in the South now attend such schools—a figure likely to rise as court oversight continues to wane. In 1972, due to strong federal enforcement, only about 25 percent of black students in the South attended schools in which at least nine out of 10 students were racial minorities. In districts released from desegregation orders between 1990 and 2011, 53 percent of black students now attend such schools, according to an analysis by ProPublica.

Hannah-Jones profiles the schools in Tuscaloosa where business leaders are alarmed to see their school system becoming more and more black, as white parents choose to send their kids to private (nearly) all-white academies or heavily white schools outside the city. It’s worth noting that the school at the center of Hannah-Jones’ reporting—Central High School—was not a bad school. On the contrary, it was renowned for its football team as well its debate team.

But this did very little to slow the flight of white parents out of the district. (This is beyond the scope of Nikole’s story, but I’d be very interested to hear more about the history of housing policy in the town.) Faced with the prospect of losing all, or most of their white families, Tuscaloosa effectively resegregated its schools.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a political solution here. It’s fairly clear that integration simply isn’t much of a priority to white people, and sometimes not even to black people. And Tuscaloosa is not alone. I suspect if you polled most white people in these towns they would honestly say that racism is awful, and many (if not most) would be sincere. At the same time they would generally be lukewarm to the idea of having to "do something" in order to end white supremacy.

Ending white supremacy isn’t really in the American vocabulary. That is because ending white supremacy does not merely require a passive sense that racism is awful, but an active commitment to undoing its generational effects. Ending white supremacy requires the ability to do math—350 years of murderous plunder are not undone by 50 years of uneasy ceasefire.

A latent commitment to anti-racism just isn’t enough. But that’s what we have right now. With that in mind, there is no reason to believe that a total vanquishing of white supremacy is necessarily in the American future.

"History travels not only forwards, history can travel backwards," President Obama said recently. "Our rights, our freedoms — they are not given. They must be won. They must be nurtured through struggle and discipline and persistence and faith."

Indeed. But for right now, the struggle for integration is largely over.

Think Progress, Apr. 18, 2024

Dirty air is linked to asthma, kidney damage, heart disease, and cancer.

by Carimah Townes

A study produced by the University of Minnesota concluded that race is a determining factor in who is most affected by air pollution. Specifically, non-white people breathe air that is substantially more polluted than the air that white people breathe.

According to Julian Marshall, who led the University’s research, race outweighed income in regards to who is most affected by poor air quality. When low-income white people were compared to high-income Hispanic people, the latter group experienced higher levels of nitrogen dioxide. Altogether, people of color in the U.S. breath air with 38 percent more nitrogen dioxide in it than their white counterparts, particularly due to power plants and exhaust from vehicles.

“We were quite surprised to find such a large disparity between whites and nonwhites related to air pollution,” Marshall told the Minnesota Post. “Especially the fact that this difference is throughout the U.S., even in cities and states in the Midwest.”

Some other evidence has also pointed to disproportionately high levels of air pollution in low-income and non-white communities. A 2012 study conducted by Yale University researchers revealed that “potentially dangerous compounds such as vanadium, nitrates and zinc” exist in locations with high concentrations of people of color, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Unfortunately, people of color contribute the least amount of air pollutants, despite being the most heavily impacted by them.

Even outside of communities of color, the consequences of air pollution are widespread. Last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) determined that 7 million people die from air pollution every year, globally. As such, air quality constitutes the great environmental health risk worldwide, and contributes to a number of longer-term health problems. Dirty air is linked to asthma, kidney damage, heart disease, and cancer. Drawing on data from 2009 to 2011, State of the Air concluded that 42 percent of people living in the U.S., alone, reside in areas with “pollution levels [that] are too often dangerous to breath.”

Air pollution is not the only health issue that race factors into, as public health is riddled with racial implications on a broader level. Racial bias plays a role in doctor-patient interactions, and some groups, namely African-Americans, live with chronic diseases stemming from racial discrimination.

NJ Spotlight, Apr. 16, 2014

Officials revamp scoring system in response to NJ Spotlight analysis of how funds were allocated

The National Guard helped Hoboken residents during the flooding and power outages in the days following Sandy.

By SCOTT GURIAN

The head of a state committee responsible for doling out $25 million in Sandy energy grants has told the legal team hired by the Christie administration for the internal review of the Bridgegate scandal that his group’s original decisions were seriously flawed due to “data entry errors.”

The revelation backs up the findings of an NJ Spotlight investigation but also indicates that problems may have been even deeper and wide-ranging than was originally reported.

The disclosure comes in new documents released by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the law firm conducting an investigation into the actions of the governor’s office in the Bridgegate scandal. As part of the investigation, the legal team reviewed claims that Hoboken had been shortchanged Sandy aid for political reasons. Lawyers were told that the contractor the state hired to help sort through grant applications had mishandled the process and that many of the awards previously announced will have to be modified as a result.

The Hazard Mitigation Grant Program’s Energy Allocation Initiative was created to provide funding for generators and other backup energy solutions in municipalities affected by Sandy and previous severe storms.

It came under scrutiny in January, after Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer went public with concerns that her city should have gotten more through the program than the $142,080 it was awarded. She charged that Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno and several other administration officials had threatened withholding aid if she didn’t support a real estate redevelopment project favored by an ally of the governor.

While not finding clear evidence that threats were issued, an NJ Spotlight investigation last month did discover numerous errors in the state’s handling of the grant program.

A detailed analysis found that Hoboken was shortchanged about $700,000 and that places like Belmar and Atlantic City – which experienced severe flooding in some neighborhoods – applied for grant money but didn’t receive any funding at all.

Meanwhile, dozens of small towns that had comparatively little flooding history received much more than they should have, according to the state’s own ranking criteria.

The findings were based largely on a review of the administration’s internal scoring spreadsheet, which was obtained by the New Jersey chapter of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and shared with NJ Spotlight reporting partner WNYC/NJ Public Radio. Points were assigned based on a variety of factors, including the population of the municipality, its disaster history and whether it had conducted an energy audit.

The newly-released memo summarizing an interview with Steven Gutkin – who served as “de facto chair” of the cross-agency committee that determined the grant awards – suggests that those dozens of errors NJ Spotlight found in its investigation were merely the tip of the iceberg.

Speaking with attorneys from the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Gutkin said the Governor’s Office of Recovery and Rebuilding had asked his group to conduct a thorough review of the Energy Allocation Initiative in response to “media coverage about potential errors in the program,” which NJ Spotlight first reported in early February.

State officials had previously announced changes to some two dozen award allocations in December of last year in response to problems resulting from an “Excel formula issue,” but NJ Spotlight’s analysis found that some of those updates not only failed to fix the problems but actually made them worse.

“Gutkin’s staff did not realize the extent of the errors that had been made prior to the media coverage,” the memo says, and an initial review raised concerns that Witt O’Brien – the NJ Office of Emergency Management’s contractor for the program – had failed to fully capture all of the energy-related requests from grant applicants and properly enter them into MB3, a computer program the state was using. Upon further examination, officials discovered that “because of data entry errors, approximately 550 projects were not entered appropriately into the MB3 system, and so they were not considered and scored by the cross-agency committee or awarded allocations.”

As a result, state officials abandoned the computer program and re-started the scoring process from scratch, handwriting new tracking numbers on each paper grant application, along with detailed explanations of their scoring methodology. They also put their initials next to each score, indicating their approval.

The final scores and award allocations have yet to be released, and none of the money has been handed out yet. Gutkin indicated, however, that while more projects like Hoboken’s are now likely to be funded, the overall amount each project will receive will probably be less, since state officials will need to conduct a grading curve of sorts to remain within the grant program’s $25 million budget.

Officials say the large number of scoring mistakes shows that Hoboken wasn’t being singled-out for political reasons.

Whatever the source of the errors, NJ Spotlight’s analysis appears to show that correcting all the problems will require substantially reducing and even withdrawing awards previously announced for many municipalities – in some cases by up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it’s hard to see how the administration will be able to do that without making a lot of people angry.

NJ.com, Apr. 13, 2014

Roger Hodge, a site foreman with Environtech LLC installs a ventilation fan on a home located on Manufacturers Place that have tested positive for a chemical called TCE. The street was once home to Ronson Company, which manufactured cigarette lighters. The State Department of Environmental Protection discovered the gas underneath the homes and businesses in the area that seeps in through a basement, crawlspace or slab floor. (Robert Sciarrino)

By Barry Carter / Star-Ledger

This is a column about a horror show you pray will never happen to you.

You buy a house you can finally afford in a new neighborhood of 19 two-family homes in Newark’s Ironbound. Manufacturers Place, as the street is called, is not the prettiest of places, adjacent to a truck and scrap metal junkyard and railroad tracks.

The street is too narrow for kids to go out and play soccer or tag. There are no stoops, either, for families to sit out front. It’s just a street with homes, but, hey, at least you have your own home and the pride that goes with being able to say that.

Then out of the blue in January state officials tell you they’re sorry but it turns out that for at least 12 years you have lived on top of contaminated groundwater filled with toxic vapors that can be lethal.

They say plumes of vapors sliding around underneath residents’ homes are something called Trichloroethylene (TCE), a volatile organic compound left in the groundwater by Ronson Metals Corp., a company that once occupied the land where it made cigarette lighters and other products from the 1950s to 1989. The seepage of TCE through groundwater is a phenomenon called vapor intrusion.

If exposed to the vapors for long periods of time, residents were told, there could be nerve, kidney and liver damage, and that’s just to name a few. The compound, they were told, can also cause cancer.

Now the homeowners are angry and scared and they feel trapped. How can they get out of this dilemma? Who would buy their homes now? Who can help?

“Who is responsible?” said Ana Stival, who moved there in 2003 and says she paid $380,000 for her home. “Why did they (city/state) give permission to do something over here like this?”

Right now neither the city of Newark nor the state Department of Environmental Protection is taking the blame. Both instead are pointing the finger at each other.

In a classic case of whodunit, DEP spokesman Larry Ragonese said, deed restrictions were placed on the land that clearly spell out what can be on there — parking and nonresidential uses only. In other words, there shouldn’t be any homes on the property, and the state has no idea how that happened.

Newark says the DEP isn’t telling the whole story. Yes, there are deed restrictions, but Business Administrator Julien X. Neals said they pertain only to parcels of land across the street from the homes.

He said the city’s planning board approved the project in 2000 after it had the developer, Jose Rei of Rei Corp. get a letter from the DEP that said there were no environmental problems with the land where he wanted to build.

“They (DEP) cleared that area and the project proceeded,” Neals said. “Once we got the unrestricted use for those parcels, they were entitled to go forward.”

Scrambling on Friday afternoon, Newark did produce a letter from the DEP to Ronson, dated July 24, 2000, that appears to say there are no radiological issues to be addressed in the land cleanup.

Ragonese said the state’s position has not changed. The letter the city is talking about has nothing to do with building homes nor can it trump strict conditions in the deed.
“The deed restrictions were never removed or revoked,” he said. “No one ever came to us to seek a change in that. There’s nothing else to say.”

Meanwhile the developer can’t be found. When I called a cellphone number, a man who answered to “Jose Rei” hung up on me. His phone went straight to voicemail when I called back. The last address listed for Rei was South Terrace in Short Hills. No one answered the door. He also lived on Pennsylvania Avenue in Union, but a resident who opened the door said he hasn’t lived there in seven years. It’s almost as hard to figure out if anyone is still associated with Ronson, too. More on that later.

This all started when the DEP did a mandatory site review sometime after RCLC Inc., formerly known as Ronson Corp., closed in 1989. Ragonese said the state agency found TCE, a man-made solvent used to clean grease from metal, was present in the soil and groundwater.

As part of the remediation plan, Ragonese said, Ronson, which at some point changed names to become Prometcor, cleaned up the soil, capping it with compacted clay, textile cloth, crushed stone and asphalt.

The company, says the DEP, was also told to place a deed restriction on the property, which is as plain as day on page 4 of the deed dated Jan. 30. 2002.

Now, many years later, the DEP has found that apparently Ronson did almost everything it was supposed to do, except it walked away from the groundwater cleanup.

But the DEP can supply no evidence of whether it kept track of what the company did to make sure it completed the necessary work.

Ragonese couldn’t explain why there was no DEP follow-up or any evidence of such.
But Stephen Kehayes, Newark’s director of brownfield redevelopment with Brick City Development, has a good idea of what may have happened because he was a DEP supervisor for 27 years in its brownfield division.

Kehayes said owners of contaminated sites back then were not reporting to the state about the status of their property, such as whether the land was still capped or if deed restrictions were still in place. It didn’t help, he said, that the DEP had no good way, as it does now, to make sure owners are in compliance.

The DEP finally checked on the property in 2012 when it was in the midst of doing a systematic review of contaminated sites in the state to see if more cleanup needed to be done on outstanding cases.

Once they made it to Manufacturers Place, Ragonese said, the DEP expected see vacant land or empty Ronson buildings near collapse. After all, the deed restriction said parking lots and nonresidential only.

Instead, they were stunned to find an entire neighborhood of homes with driveways, fences, backyards and trees.

“That’s what we don’t understand,” Ragonese said. “The deed restriction is very clear. There’s housing in a place where there’s not supposed to be housing.”

Homeowners in this small working-class community see it in even starker terms.
They had no way of knowing that vapors could seep into their homes.

“Someone messed up big time here,” said Stival’s neighbor, Roberta Woisky. “I’m so upset by this situation.”

The DEP delivered the gut-check news in January to residents who attended a community meeting at the Ironbound Community Center. They were told the DEP started testing last year and high levels of TCE were found in six homes and a few businesses.

This meeting was to reach more residents who didn’t respond to DEP letters about air contamination until the Ironbound Community Corp., a social service organization, went door to door translating to an immigrant population leery of government.

“They may think it’s terrible and don’t want to know,” said Cynthia Mellon, an ICC environmental justice organizer.

In homes where TCE has been found, the state is installing an elaborate ventilation system to suck the vapors from underneath the garage floor through 40 feet of 4-inch PVC pipe that extends above the roof. Since the meeting, the number of affected homes has increased to 13 and could get higher because the state is now testing on Vincent Street, the next block over.

So many questions swirl through residents’ heads and so many worries.

Years ago, longtime residents such as 77-year-old Rosemarie Reed didn’t think anything about industry. Companies were part of the neighborhood where husbands and wives raised their children. Ronson was there, a junkyard was across the street, and another place that did something with bleach.

“It’s over the years that we’re starting to find out about chemicals,” she said. “I’m just hoping it doesn’t harm you in any way.”

The City Council chimed in recently with a resolution calling on the DEP to clean up the groundwater as it installs the air systems. That option is not on the table, but it’s something the DEP says it will look at down the road.

Residents with the air-venting system don’t like it, wondering if the ailments they have were caused by the chemical creeping into their homes.

Woisky said she takes thyroid medication and doesn’t know why when she was fit as a fiddle five years ago.

“I’m always wondering what made me feel like this,” she said. “Why am I feeling sick all of the time?”

Stival has the device, too, but she said levels of iron in her blood are elevated and her husband is always congested. Four kittens they kept in the garage, where TCE levels were high, died last year.

They’ll never know if it’s the TCE or something else in a neighborhood where life was already challenged.

Life is hard enough at Manufacturers Place already.

Planes fly above the homes constantly. Tractor-trailers puffing diesel smoke crawl down the street all day and night into a trucking yard at the end of the block. Freight trains pass twice a day at the edge of back yards, their horns blasting, the clicketyclack of train wheels rolling across the tracks just as noisy. The view when Alessandro Agostino does dishes looking out the kitchen window is a dingy iron wall topped with barbed wire that barely hides crunched up cars at a scrap metal yard.

And we can’t forget about the gizmo sending the vapors into the air that the state just installed.

He can hear it now, what a prospective buyer might say to him if he tries to sell.
“ ‘What’s this thing on the side of your house?’ ” Agostino joked.

“ ‘Oh, it’s just pushing dirty air,’ ” he’ll probably say.

It’s not much of an option, but what can you do but live with it and hope for the best?
Part of the difficulty for everyone is that the case goes so far back now. It took a long time just to find someone who was with Ronson in 1989.

I eventually did run down a nice old guy named Louis V. Aronson, the former Ronson president, now living in Whitehouse Station. He said everything was cleaned up back then as far as he knows.

“I believe so," he said.

NY Times, Apr. 13, 2014

Summary: "Scientists fear that exceeding the target degrees could potentially produce drastic effects, such as the collapse of ice sheets, a rapid rise in sea levels, difficulty growing enough food, massive die-offs of forests and mass extinctions of plant and animal species."

By Justin Gillis

BERLIN — The countries of the world have dragged their feet so long on global warming that the situation is now critical, experts appointed by the United Nations reported Sunday, and only an intensive worldwide push over the next 15 years can stave off potentially disastrous climatic changes later in the century.

It remains technically possible to keep planetary warming to a tolerable level, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found, according to a report unveiled here. But even in parts of the world like Europe that have tried hardest, governments are still a long way from taking the steps that are sufficient to do the job, the experts found.

“We cannot afford to lose another decade,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report. “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.”

The report is likely to increase the pressure to secure an ambitious new global climate treaty that is supposed to be completed in late 2015 and take effect in 2020. But the divisions between wealthy countries and poorer countries that are making such a treaty difficult, and have long bedeviled international climate talks, were on display yet again in Berlin.

Some developing countries insisted on stripping charts from the report’s executive summary that could be read as requiring greater effort from them, while rich countries — including the United States — struck out language implying that they needed to write big checks to the developing countries. Both points survived in the full version of the report, but were deleted from a synopsis meant to inform the world’s top political leaders.

The report did find some reasons for cautious optimism. The costs of renewable energy like wind and solar power are now falling so fast that their deployment on a large scale is becoming practical, the report said. In fact, extensive use of renewable energy is already starting in countries such as Denmark and Germany, and to a lesser degree in some American states, including California, Iowa and Texas.

Moreover, since the intergovernmental panel issued its last major report in 2007, far more countries, states and cities have adopted ambitious climate plans, an indication that the political determination to tackle the problem is growing in many parts of the world. They include China and the United States, which are both doing more domestically than they have been willing to commit themselves to in international treaty negotiations.

Yet the report found that the emissions problem is still outrunning the will to tackle it, with global emissions rising almost twice as fast in the first decade of this century than in the last decades of the 20th century. That reflects a huge rush to coal-fired power plants in developing countries that are climbing up the income scale, especially in China, while rich countries are making only slow progress in cutting their emissions, the report said. The longer countries delay aggressive action, the more difficult it will be to limit global warming to the level that the international community has agreed to, namely a rise in the global average temperature of no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the preindustrial level.

Scientists fear that exceeding the target degrees could potentially produce drastic effects, such as the collapse of ice sheets, a rapid rise in sea levels, difficulty growing enough food, massive die-offs of forests and mass extinctions of plant and animal species.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a United Nations body that includes hundreds of scientists, economists and other experts. The group periodically reviews the science and economics of climate change and issues major reports every five to six years. Along with Al Gore, it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for calling attention to the climate problem.

The new report, dealing with ways to limit the growth of the emissions that are causing climate change, is the third in recent months. A report released in Stockholm in September found a certainty of 95 percent or greater that humans are the main cause of climate change, while a report released in Yokohama, Japan, two weeks ago found that profound effects are already being felt around the world, and are likely to get much worse.

The latest report found that if countries keep stalling on tougher climate rules, trillions of dollars will be invested in coming years in power plants, cars and buildings that use too much energy from fossil fuels. The result, the report said, would be an emissions path that would be almost impossible to alter in time to get to the very low carbon pollution levels that scientists think are necessary by 2050.

The widespread perception that a scarcity of fossil fuels will lead to the development of alternatives in time to salvage the climate is wrong, Dr. Edenhofer said. That is because higher prices and improved drilling technology are leading to an intensified hunt for new fossil energy, and it effectively means that policies have to be found that will leave much of the world’s coal, oil and gas reserves in the ground.

“The scarcity of fossil fuels will not solve our problem,” Dr. Edenhofer said. “We are in the middle of a fossil fuel renaissance.”

The new report does not prescribe the actions governments need to take. But it does make it clear that putting a price on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, either through taxes or the sale of emission permits, is a fundamental approach that could help redirect investment toward climate-friendly technologies.

The report says that “nuclear energy could make an increasing contribution to low-carbon energy supply, but a variety of barriers and risks exist.” It cited “operational risks, and the associated concerns, uranium mining risks, financial and regulatory risks, unresolved waste management issues, nuclear weapon proliferation concerns, and adverse public opinion.”

If climate targets are to be met, the report said, annual investment in electrical power plants that use fossil fuels will need to decline by about 20 percent in the coming two decades, while investment in low-carbon energy supply will need to double from current levels.

The report warned that if greater efforts to cut emissions do not begin soon, future generations seeking to limit or reverse climate damage will have to depend on technologies that can permanently remove greenhouse gases from the air — in effect, they will be undoing the damage that will have been caused by the people of today.

But these technologies do not now exist on any appreciable scale, the report said, and there is no guarantee that they will be available in the future, much less that they will be affordable.

© 2014 The New York Times

U.S. EPA, April 8, 2014

Clean diesel grants and new ports initiative will advance sustainable technologies

WASHINGTON – Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hosting the “Advancing Sustainable Ports” summit to mark the kickoff of a new EPA initiative to recognize ports that take action to improve environmental performance. EPA will also award $4.2 million in grant funding for clean diesel projects at six U.S. ports.

“Ports are the main gateway for U.S. trade and are critical to our country’s economic growth, yet the communities surrounding ports face serious environmental challenges,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. “Today we demonstrate that through collaboration and innovation we can achieve the goals of economic growth and environmental stewardship.”

Most of the country’s busiest ports are located in or near large metropolitan areas and, as a result, people in nearby communities can be exposed to high levels of pollution. For example, diesel powered port equipment can seriously impact air quality for nearby residents and generate substantial greenhouse gas and black carbon emissions. Implementing clean air strategies at ports will reduce emissions and provide health benefits from improved air quality for workers and families who live nearby.

Over the past eight months, EPA has led a national conversation on ports, which brought together a wide variety of stakeholders from community organizations, port authorities, shippers, local governments and academia for three themed webinars to share information, goals, and successes of ports in reducing emissions and improving environmental performance. Through this process, EPA set the stage for the development of a new port recognition initiative that will provide additional incentives to improve a variety of environmental issues including improving local air quality, reducing carbon emissions, and addressing environmental justice issues. In addition, EPA’s new ports initiative program will work with port authorities to develop emission measurement tools, which will help ports better understand their energy use and environmental impact.

The grants awarded today will help six ports improve air quality and reduce carbon emissions, by providing $4.2 million in Diesel Emissions Reduction Act (DERA) grants to retrofit, replace, or repower diesel engines resulting in immediate emissions reductions in harmful pollution. The grant recipients are the Port of Seattle, the Port of Hueneme, the Port of Tacoma, the Maryland Port Administration, the Virginia Port Authority, and the Port of Los Angeles.

More information about EPA’s National Conversation on Ports: www.epa.gov/otaq/ports/

More information about the Port Summit: www.epa.gov/otaq/ports/ports-summit.htm

More information on the DERA grants for ports: www.epa.gov/otaq/ports/ports-dera–rfp.htm

[Thanks to Bill Allen for this post.]

WNYC News, Apr. 4, 2014

By Scott Gurian: NJ Spotlight

After coming under fire for a lack of transparency in how he’s handled the Sandy recovery, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has gone back to the town hall circuit in recent weeks, and members of his cabinet have been making more public appearances.

The administration has vowed to allow greater public input into its future plans. But that didn’t stop them from quietly submitting a report on hazard mitigation to the federal government last month, ahead of a publicized comment period for that very plan. The move has angered planning advocates and environmentalists, who had hoped that their expertise and feedback from the public at large would have been given greater consideration before decisions were made.

The Hazard Mitigation Plan contains New Jersey’s assessments of the risks it faces and the steps it’s taking to minimize those risks. FEMA requires the state to update its plan every three years in order to be eligible to receive disaster recovery assistance and mitigation funding, including hundreds of millions of dollars New Jersey has earmarked for buyouts of flood-damaged properties and aid to help residents elevate their homes.

When state officials released their plan early last month along with an online survey, they claimed in a news release that “This is the first time the NJ Office of Emergency Management has opened a public comment period before submitting the plan to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for approval.” But WNYC has learned that the state actually submitted its plan on March 5th, six days before the public comment period even began.

Advocacy groups that had originally been thrilled at having the opportunity to chime in are now expressing their frustrations. “They went and developed a plan on their own, just as we kind of suspected they would,” said Chuck Latini, President of the American Planning Association’s New Jersey chapter.

“We see it as really just continuing a pattern by this administration of not encouraging an honest and productive dialogue,” echoed Chris Sturm, Senior Policy Director at NJ Future, a group that promotes “responsible land use policies.”

Emergency management officials said they’re postponing all interviews until the public comment period is over. “We are trying to avoid those who wish to comment being influenced by what they are reading, or maybe refraining from commenting based on what they read or hear in the news,” a spokeswoman said in an email.

Instead, she issued a statement denying that any organizations have been “formally excluded from the planning process.” She said the state had to turn in its plan to meet a federal deadline but pledged that people’s comments will still be considered for future amendments.

Atlantic Mag, Apr. 1, 2014

by Christopher E. Smith

When I heard that my 21-year-old son, a student at Harvard, had been stopped by New York City police on more than one occasion during the brief summer he spent as a Wall Street intern, I was angry. On one occasion, while wearing his best business suit, he was forced to lie face-down on a filthy sidewalk because—well, let’s be honest about it, because of the color of his skin. As an attorney and a college professor who teaches criminal justice classes, I knew that his constitutional rights had been violated. As a parent, I feared for his safety at the hands of the police—a fear that I feel every single day, whether he is in New York or elsewhere.

Moreover, as the white father of an African-American son, I am keenly aware that I never face the suspicion and indignities that my son continuously confronts. In fact, all of the men among my African-American in-laws—and I literally mean every single one of them—can tell multiple stories of unjustified investigatory police stops of the sort that not a single one of my white male relatives has ever experienced.

In The Atlantic’s April feature story “Is Stop-and-Frisk Worth It?” author Daniel Bergner cited Professor Frank Zimring’s notion that stop-and-frisk is “a special tax on minority males.” I cannot endorse the conclusion that this “special tax” actually helps make communities safer. As indicated by the competing perspectives in Atlantic essays by Donald Braman and Paul Larkin, scholars disagree on whether crime rate data actually substantiate the claims of stop-and-frisk advocates. Either way, I do believe that the concept of a “special tax” deserves closer examination.

Proponents of stop-and-frisk often suggest that the hardships suffered by young men of color might be tolerable if officers were trained to be polite rather than aggressive and authoritarian. We need to remember, however, that we are talking about imposing an additional burden on a demographic segment of society that already experiences a set of alienating “taxes” not shared by the rest of society.

I can tell myriad stories about the ways my son is treated with suspicion and negative presumptions in nearly every arena of his life. I can describe the terrorized look on his face when, as a 7-year-old trying to learn how to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk in front of our suburban house, he was followed at 2-miles-per-hour from a few feet away by a police patrol car—a car that sped away when I came out of the front door to see what was going on. I can tell stories of teachers, coaches, and employers who have forced my son to overcome a presumption that he will cause behavior problems or that he lacks intellectual capability—all merely because of the color of his skin. I can tell you about U.S. Customs officials inexplicably ordering both of us to exit our vehicle and enter a building at the Canadian border crossing so that a team of officers could search our vehicle without our watching—an event that never occurs when I am driving back from Canada by myself.

If I hadn’t witnessed all this so closely, I never would have fully recognized the extent of the indignities African-American boys and men face. Moreover, as indicated by research recently published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the cumulative physical toll this treatment takes on African-American men can accelerate the aging process and cause early death. Thus, no “special tax” on this population can be understood without recognizing that it does not exist as a small, isolated element in people’s lives.

It’s equally important to recognize the acute dangers posed by these encounters. When my son was walking home one night during his summer in New York City, two men jumped out of the shadows and grabbed him. Any reasonable person would instantly have been jolted into wondering, “Am I being robbed?” That question demands quick decision-making: “Do I defend myself? Do I break free and try to run away?”

However, because cautious African-American men know that they are frequent targets of sudden and unexplained police stops, they must suppress their rational defensive reactions with self-imposed docility. What if these were plainclothes police officers? Any resistance could have led to my son’s being tasered or even shot. And if the police were to shoot him in this context—all alone in the shadows on an empty street late at night—that act would likely have been judged as a justifiable homicide. In my son’s case, it turned out that they were plainclothes police officers who failed to identify themselves until the encounter was well underway.

This example is by no means unique. My African-American brother-in-law, a white-collar professional, was driving to my house on Thanksgiving Day with his 20-something son when their car was stopped and surrounded by multiple police vehicles. The police officers immediately pointed guns at my relatives’ heads. If my brother-in-law or nephew—or if one of the officers—had sneezed, there could have been a terribly tragic police shooting. After the officers looked them over and told them they could go, my relatives asked why they had been stopped. The officers hemmed and hawed for a moment before saying, “You fit the description of some robbery suspects—one was wearing a Houston Astros jersey just like the one your son is wearing.”

In reality, if my in-laws had fit the description of the robbery suspects so well, there is no way the police could have ruled them out as the robbers without searching their car. Sadly, it seems likely that the police were stopping—and presumably pointing guns at—every African-American male driver who happened by. I have heard similar stories from other African-American friends—and never from any white friend or relative.

Many have noted that stop-and-frisk practices hinder important constitutional values: the liberty to walk freely down the street; the reasonable expectation of privacy against unjustified invasion of one’s person by government officials; and the equal protection of the laws. But even the best-intentioned white writers often gloss over the actual human impacts of these encounters. Now and again, an individual white elite will have an experience that personalizes this principle of individualized suspicion.

For example, Linda Greenhouse, the Yale Law School Research Scholar and New York Timescolumnist, once wrote about the “unnerving” experience of being “unaccountably pulled over by a police officer” in a quiet, residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C. at night. In Greenhouse’s words, “my blood pressure goes up as I recall it years later.” Michael Powell, another New York Times columnist, learned from his two 20-something sons that they had never been stopped by police despite traveling regularly all over New York City, while eight male African-American college students told him they’d cumulatively been stopped a total of 92 times—in encounters that included rough physical treatment. Neither of these writers lacked knowledge about these issues, but their experiences obviously humanized and heightened their awareness.

My son’s experiences aside, I can only call on one personal reference when the issue of stop-and-frisk is raised. As a graduate student in April 1981, I spent a spring break traveling around Europe. When I visited Germany, I decided to spend one afternoon walking around Communist East Berlin. I quickly found myself being stopped at every single street corner by police officers whose suspicions were undoubtedly raised by my American clothing. Because of my limited knowledge of German, every encounter involved emphatic demands and raised voices, accompanied by threatening hand-slapping gestures. While Linda Greenhouse described her one-time experience with a police officer as “unnerving,” my encounter with a Communist police state would be better described as “suffocating.” I had the sense of being helplessly trapped, aware that no matter which direction I chose to walk, I would find more police waiting for me on the next block. I often wonder whether suspicionless stop-and-frisk searches regularly force African-American males into an East Berlin-esque sense of oppression—while the rest of us go our merry ways without noticing.

I understand the necessity and inevitability of police discretion. I also understand the pressures that we place on law enforcement agencies to prevent and control crime. However, stop-and-frisk practices frequently disregard the basic requirements laid out in the seminal 1968 Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio. The Court ruled that an officer performing a stop should note “unusual conduct which leads him reasonably to conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot and that the persons with whom he is dealing may be armed and presently dangerous.” By contrast, in their reports on stop-and-frisk encounters, contemporary New York City police officers can merely check a box that says “furtive movements” or one that implausibly just says “other.”

If we truly believe that a “special tax” must be imposed in order to control crime, then we should all share in the burden of that tax. We should not take the easy and unfair route of imposing the tax on someone else—especially when that someone else is already unfairly burdened. As an intellectual exercise, why don’t we envision matching the application of stop-and-frisk to the demographic composition of a city? In New York City, if officers wanted to stop-and-frisk three African-American men on their shift, they’d also have to stop-and-frisk five white women and five white men—and proportionately equivalent numbers of Latinos and Asian-Americans. Someone might say, “Wait, it’s a waste of the officers’ time to impose these searches on innocent people instead of searching people who might actually be criminals.” But the evidence shows that New York City police were already imposing stop-and-frisk searches on innocent people nearly 90 percent of the time—it is just that the burden of those stops and searches has been endured almost exclusively by young men of color.

Moreover, if police start stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of white women and men, in the manner they’ve been searching young men of color, they will undoubtedly issue some summonses and make some arrests. There are middle-class white people in possession of illegal firearms—not to mention heroin, illegal prescription painkillers, and marijuana. The success rates may not be high. But this shouldn’t deter police officials. After all, low success rates haven’t dissuaded them from searching young men of color for contraband and firearms.

This suggestion isn’t entirely tongue-in-cheek. If police were to actually apply it, even for a short while, it would test society’s disregard for individualized suspicion and force us to think more deeply about what it means to impose stop-and-frisk on large numbers of innocent people. It is easy enough to rationalize away a “special tax” when we apply it to “them.” But how will we feel about that burden once it’s shared by all of us?

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Al Jazeera America, Apr. 1, 2014

By The Associated Press

Annie E. Casey Foundation study finds dramatic racial discrepancies among U.S. kids

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In every region of America, white and Asian children are far better positioned for success than black, Latino and Native American children, according to a new report appealing for urgent action to bridge this racial gap.

Titled "Race for Results," the report released Tuesday is by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which for decades has worked to improve child well-being in the United States.

The foundation also produces annual "Kids Count" reports, with reams of state-specific data, but these generally have not focused on race. The new report tackles the topic head-on, with charts and ratings that convey dramatic racial discrepancies.

At the core of the report is a newly devised index based on 12 indicators measuring a child’s success from birth to adulthood. The indicators include reading and math proficiency, high school graduation data, teen birthrates, employment prospects, family income and education levels, and neighborhood poverty levels.

Using a single composite score with a scale of one to 1,000, Asian children have the highest index score at 776, followed by white children at 704.

"Scores for Latino (404), American-Indian (387) and African-American (345) children are distressingly lower, and this pattern holds true in nearly every state," said the report.

Patrick McCarthy, the Casey Foundation’s president, said the findings are "a call to action that requires serious and sustained attention from the private, nonprofit, philanthropic and government sectors to create equitable opportunities for children of color."

The report was based on data from 2012, including census figures tallying the number of U.S. children under 18 at 39 million whites, 17.6 million Latinos, 10.2 million blacks, 3.4 million of Asian descent, and 640,000 American Indians, as well as about 2.8 million children of two or more races. Under census definitions, Latinos can be of various racial groups.

The report described the challenges facing African-American children as "a national crisis."

For black children, the states with the lowest scores were in the South and upper Midwest — with Wisconsin at the bottom, followed closely by Mississippi and Michigan. The highest scores were in states with relatively small black populations — Hawaii, New Hampshire, Utah and Alaska.

Outcomes varied for different subgroups of Asian and Latino children. For example, in terms of family income levels, children of Southeast Asian descent — Burmese, Hmong, Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese — faced greater hurdles than children whose families came from India, Japan, the Philippines and China.

Among Latinos, children of Mexican and Central American descent faced the biggest barriers to success; those of Cuban and South American descent fared better in the index.

The state with the highest score for Latino children was Alaska, at 573. The lowest was Alabama, at 331.

Only 25 states provided enough data to compile scores for Native American children. Their scores were highest in Texas (631), Alabama (568), Florida (554) and Kansas (553), and lowest in the upper Midwest, the Southwest and the Mountain States. The score for Indian children in South Dakota — 185 — was the lowest of any group in any state on the index.

Some of South Dakota’s reservations are among the poorest nationwide, which contributes to high levels of domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse, fetal-alcohol syndrome, teen pregnancy and low graduation rates.

The report found sharp differences in Native American children’s outcomes based on tribal affiliation. For example, Apache children were far more likely than Choctaw children to live in economically struggling families.

Among its recommendations, the report urged concerted efforts to collect and analyze race-specific data on child well-being that could be used to develop programs capable of bridging the racial gap. It said special emphasis should be placed on expanding job opportunities as children in the disadvantaged groups enter adulthood.

"Regardless of our own racial background or socio-economic position, we are inextricably interconnected as a society," the report concluded. "We must view all children in America as our own — and as key contributors to our nation’s future."

The Associated Press