Connecticut is in the midst of rewriting its environmental justice regulations for the first time since the inaugural regulations were enacted fifteen years ago. The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection is convening a working group of stakeholders to assist in drafting regulations over the next two years based on the lessons learned and experienced gained. The rule making will, for the first time, require the DEEP to evaluate the cumulative impacts of select industrial and high intensity facilities located in low-income communities or distressed municipalities when issuing permits for such facilities. We support the goal of updating the law to better understand and account for both the environmental externalities and the economic benefits of such facilities.

Environmental Justice was initially an umbrella term that evolved out of the environmental and civil rights gains of the 1960s and 1970s to describe a range of issues including the inequities and adverse impacts resulting from the siting of locally unwanted and often toxic land uses, such as hazardous waste landfills, incinerators, power plants and other high intensity uses in poor and minority communities. The environmental justice concept was refined in the 1980s in part by a widely publicized United States General Accounting Office study entitled Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. The GAO study brought into focus and provided national data demonstrating the disturbing pattern of siting hazardous waste landfills. It showed that, at the time, three out of four hazardous waste landfills examined were located in communities where African Americans made up at least 26% of the population, and whose family incomes were below the poverty level. From there, additional studies were conducted at the federal, state and local levels, and the expanded data demonstrated similar patterns not just for landfills but also for sewage treatment facilities, power plants and other high-polluting uses.