A state map showing “environmental justice” communities is back online, after the state lost access, in a Trump administration purge, to federal data about communities considered overburdened by pollution and underserved by government services.
But the Maryland Department of the Environment removed race, ethnicity and language data from the calculus that determines an area’s environmental justice score on the updated map, leaving some environmental advocates scratching their heads.
Brandywine — a majority-Black Prince George’s County community surrounded by gas-fired power plants, a coal ash dump, a Superfund site and more — has long been considered a poster child for environmental injustice in Maryland. After being ranked above the 75th percentile in the previous map, a qualifier for more careful scrutiny in environmental permitting, it now has a score of 63 out of 100.
“It’s just a map change. It’s not a reality change,” said Brandywine community leader Kamita Gray. “It just appears to me that MDE blatantly does not want to be accountable in the massive pollution and the overburden of these heavy industrial industries.”
Industrial facilities applying for a permit must list the area’s environmental justice score, and Gray worries that Brandywine’s lowered score will make it even easier for polluting facilities to win new or more flexible permits, despite the fact that residents already feel inundated, particularly by air pollution.
In a statement, MDE spokesman Jay Apperson said the agency redesigned the map after the federal data loss “with pre-downloaded federal data and Maryland-specific data from our agency and the Maryland Department of Health.”
The agency website containing the map warns that race and other categories are not included in the environmental justice score calculation, but adds that the data is still available on the site “for informational purposes only.”
“Collecting and displaying this data allows users to evaluate the relationships between demographics and pollution burden, and can be used to better understand issues related to environmental justice and racial equity in Maryland,” reads the message. “MDE cautions users against using the ‘Underserved’ map layer, or its subcategories, in any manner that would be considered discriminatory under applicable law.”
MDE, which handles environmental permitting, argues that it “consider[s] the overburdened nature of all communities when evaluating the adequacy of permit conditions,” particularly when it comes to communities over the 75th percentile on the map, Apperson said.
With an overall score of 63, Brandywine falls out of that percentile, but it has scores above 75 for at least five key indicators, so it still receives a more careful review, Apperson said.
MDE also argues that the updated environmental justice map, called MDEnviroScreen, also includes a number of beneficial new features, including a new climate change vulnerability score and a more user-friendly design.
Sacoby Wilson, a University of Maryland professor focused on environmental justice issues, said he believes that the racial data was removed from the Maryland map in response to President Donald Trump’s (R) crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion programming, which he codified in an executive order on his first day back in office.
“They’re trying to shy away from that kind of scrutiny. So, I get that,” Wilson said. “Now, what it’s done is, it’s a less-inclusive tool by excluding race.”
Wilson believes that, even if MDE continues excluding race, there are ways to strengthen the map with “race-proximal” indicators that show whether an area has suffered from racist policies, such as redlining, for example. He points to the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development’s “Just Communities” tool, which takes into account homeownership rates, residential vacancy rates and more.
“We are working to explore race-proximal, race-adjacent indicators that are not race specifically, but capture the experience of racism,” Wilson said. “We are engaging with MDE to provide them with guidance and input on the types of indicators that could be really useful.”
MDE did not respond to questions about whether the map change came in response to anti-DEI pronouncements from the Trump administration.
During a July news conference in Baltimore, Gov. Wes Moore (D) said that a loss of access to federal data at the beginning of Trump’s administration forced MDE’s map offline originally. The Trump administration removed the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice map shortly after taking office, spurring a lawsuit from environmental groups.
At the July event, Moore touted the fact that Maryland brought the tool back online without the need for federal inputs.
“Just because we no longer have a willing partner in the federal government does not mean we just sit there now and take it,” Moore said. “We mobilize, and we step up, and that is why we are updating our environmental justice map to operate independently from our federal sources.”
Moore then signed an executive order requiring state agencies to reference the map during decision-making and produce reports on their efforts to uphold environmental justice, among other requirements.
After the MDE map was taken down, Jennifer Kunze, the Maryland organizing director for Clean Water Action, said she waited “on pins and needles” for its return. The result was disappointing, she said.
It isn’t just Brandywine, Kunze said. She said that the tool seems to struggle to account for environmental justice concerns in the state’s rural areas, lowering scores for areas near Eastern Shore poultry houses, and the former Luke Paper Mill site in Allegany County.
Kunze is among a group of advocates working on the next iteration of the CHERISH Our Communities Act, a bill that failed in the last legislative session, that would have set new requirements for pollution permits in environmental justice communities, and expressly let MDE deny permits on environmental justice grounds. Last year’s bill included all Census tracts with a score at or above 75, and a 1.5-mile radius around them.
“Folks doing EJ organizing on the ground and living in frontline communities know what communities need to be covered by protections like the CHERISH Act and this tool — the way it’s currently calculated — leaves some of them out,” Kunze said.
Wilson, who has also worked on the bill, said the group is considering alternatives for this year’s bill, including lowering the threshold, using a different measurement, or allowing communities with a score over a certain level to opt in to receive additional scrutiny during environmental permitting.
In August, Gray sent a letter to MDE leadership on behalf of the Brandywine/TB Southern Region Neighborhood Coalition, urging them to publish the rationale for dropping race, ethnicity, language and age data from the environmental justice score, and conduct an audit assessing the scores rendered by the new map. She said the previous EPA environmental justice map put Brandywine in the 97th percentile.
The Brandywine/TB Southern Region Neighborhood Coalition filed a 2016 federal civil rights complaint, arguing that an effort to place a new power plant near the community violated anti-discrimination law. The Title VI complaint resulted in an “Informal Resolution Agreement” with federal and state agencies, including the EPA and MDE.
Gray said that while the Moore administration has been more vocal about upholding environmental justice, including by signing its recent executive order, she continues to see be frustrated by permit decisions and potential new facilities, including a proposed concrete batching facility.
“It’s stopping nothing on the ground,” Gray said.
Greg Sawtell, a community advocate in Baltimore’s Curtis Bay, agreed. That community abuts the Curtis Bay coal piers, and is close to a number of other industrial facilities. A medical waste incinerator, which paid a historic fine for pollution in 2013, sits across Curtis Creek.
Sawtell, the zero-waste just transition director with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust, said the community has continued to track pollution events with cameras and air monitors, including puffs of dark black smoke emitted by the incinerator and clouds of coal dust from the piers.
“While we have greater willingness to acknowledge that Curtis Bay is overburdened, and talk about it, talk about it quite a bit … Those events haven’t stopped. The government hasn’t done the things that it must do in order to prevent that,” Sawtell said.
