One winter, a resident of a low-income housing community in Bennington pushed a shopping cart and stroller half a mile along a snowy road’s edge while traveling home from the grocery store. The cart tipped, sending the groceries into the snow and slush.
The resident, and others who live in the Willowbrook and Orchard Village low-income housing neighborhoods, “appear to be conveniently located close to shops and services. Yet residents are effectively cut off, surrounded by high-speed, multi-lane roads with no sidewalks,” according to a new report issued by the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.
The report, called “Connecting People to Power,” placed a spotlight on various communities’ access, or lack thereof, to a healthy environment — one, for example, where grocery stores are accessible, flexible transportation is available, tap water is clean, the soil is ripe for gardening and housing is free of mold.
Studies have long shown that those who are Black, Indigenous or people of color and individuals with low income are “disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards and unsafe housing, facing higher levels of air and water pollution, mold, lead, and pests,” according to a 2022 Vermont law focused on environmental justice.
But Vermonters who are most impacted by environmental harms often face barriers that keep them from reaching assistance from state organizations that could help.
In an effort to advance its environmental justice work, the Department of Environmental Conservation hired three organizations in 2021 to reach out to people impacted by environmental harms and recommend ways for the state to better reach them. Those organizations were the nonprofit Centers for Whole Communities, local advocacy group Rights and Democracy Institute, and the Environmental Justice Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Authors of the report drew from interviews with Vermonters who face risks of negative environmental exposure in Bennington, the Northeast Kingdom and the Burlington-Winooski area.
Britaney Watson, a member of the Vermont Environmental Justice Advisory Council, led the engagement work and helped draft the report. Along with themes of safe housing and transportation, many participants spoke about access, Watson said.
“We increase access, we allow for more Vermonters to improve their living situation and condition,” she said.
One meeting in September 2022 highlighted barriers to access. The report’s organizers met with high school students at AALV, formerly known as the Association for Africans Living in Vermont. All of the attendees spoke English as a second or third language, and many reported that their parents didn’t speak any English.
Many of the teens have had to translate critical information for their parents, and the report noted that it was “particularly striking to see them taking down information for how to call a lawyer if their family were ever served an eviction notice.”
The participants said their parents don’t have time to attend public meetings, especially in person and in English without translation services. The report’s authors also noted that the students “were curious and excited to learn about rulemaking and permitting processes and how they can participate in environmental decision making.”
Authors recommend a number of ways to improve access to state processes. They suggest updating the clunky Environmental Notice Bulletin, which serves as the mechanism to inform Vermonters about permits and opportunities for public comment. A mobile app, a map with environmental permits across the state, phone alerts and translations could all make the bulletin’s information more usable, according to the report.
The report also suggested that staff at the Department of Environmental Conservation create stronger relationships with individual communities, and respond to those communities’ access needs. Its first recommendation is to create public involvement plans, in which the state would outline its plan to address environmental concerns in specific communities, and would make the plan accessible to the community and broader public. Hiring community liaisons to serve as bridges between community members and the state could also improve involvement, the report states.
“When we think about developing policies and procedures and rules, we always think of them as treating everybody exactly the same,” said Carey Hengstenberg, planning manager for the Department of Environmental Conservation. “And I think what we learned, through the three communities that this contract team worked with, is that there’s very different ways that are effective” when communicating and engaging with people.
Increasing access may include paying participants to take part in meetings, the report states.
According to Hengstenberg, about 30% of the contract funding for the report went toward paying the community liaisons and interviewees who helped shape the recommendations.
Compensation was necessary “in order to create an engagement process that was meaningful and didn’t continue to extract from those who are already the most impacted around injustice and inequity,” said Ginny McGinn, executive director of Center for Whole Communities, an organizer of the report.
Watson said the group’s successful efforts to solicit feedback from those most impacted by environmental harms should serve as a model for the state.
For example, the groups found meeting times that worked for the most participants. They also “provided food, we provided child care upon request and we provided compensation as a way to acknowledge and to honor folks’ lived experiences, and honoring them as experts of their lived experience,” she said. “We were able to, with that model, get good engagement.”
Hengstenberg said that, while compensating participants has been an ongoing conversation, it comes with funding challenges that would likely need to be addressed by the Legislature.
The report also recommended that the department make grants and funding more accessible, and use Alternative Dispute Resolution, a conflict resolution strategy, when controversial issues arise. The department should train its staff, the report stated — an effort Hengstenberg, with the department, said is 75% completed and the department plans to finish this year.
While the Department of Environmental Conservation began drafting an environmental justice policy in 2018, and commissioned the report in 2021, lawmakers in Vermont passed an environmental justice law in 2022. While the two processes have been largely parallel, the report will likely serve as a foundation for the state’s forthcoming obligations under the new law.
“In 2018, when we set out to write this environmental justice policy, it became clear to us pretty quickly that we weren’t prepared, on a lot of levels, to start doing this work,” Hengstenberg said.
In 2022, when the law passed, Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore and others told lawmakers that the body needed more funding to fulfill its environmental justice work.
Asked whether she believes the state will be able to follow through with the report’s recommendations, Hengstenberg said the department has already promised the federal Environmental Protection Agency that it will carry out a list of environmental justice action items. She also pointed to a 12-hour individual staff training that is almost complete.
Still, some items will be harder to accomplish, she said.
“Environmental regulations are increasing, not decreasing, over time,” she said. “We’re tasked internally with trying to be efficient.”
That means leaning heavily on the department’s website instead of engaging with people on the ground, Hengstenberg said.
“I think this report kind of shows us that there are people being left behind by these efficiencies we’re creating,” she said.
Watson, who helped create the report, said she has concerns about funding. Still, she called the report “a great start.”
“It gives me hope that we can approach advancing environmental justice in Vermont in a way that would feel meaningful and allow for accountability to see through implementation of the law,” she said.
