Dallas advisory group looks to add environmental justice measures to racial equity plan
By Leah Waters
On March 7, 2023
Community group wants city to measure neighborhoods’ distance from environmental pollution to fresh food, tree canopy coverage and solar power accessibility
Dallas’ environmental commission is asking for more specific environmental justice targets to be added to the city’s racial equity plan
The commission on Tuesday will brief the city’s workforce, education and equity committee on four “Equity Indicators” it wants Dallas to adopt that would require the city to measure neighborhoods’ proximity to environmental pollution; tree canopy coverage; solar power accessibility; and distance to fresh, healthy foods.
The workforce, education and equity committee would consider the changes before any new equity indicators are recommended for adoption by the city council.
But Evelyn Mayo, chair of the clean air group Downwinders At Risk, said the commission’s recommendations don’t reference grassroots priorities and “will not get to the bottom of those fundamental issues.”
“The most mentioned issues by the community are not included in this, and there’s no clear pathway for those to move ahead,” Mayo said. “And then even amongst the proposed recommendations, they fall short in ways that don’t really make sense.”
Despite strong community and council support for the racial equity plan adopted by the council in August in a 14-1 vote, its lack of environmental justice measures — along with concerns from residents about an inconsistent community input process — have drawn sharp criticisms from grassroots groups.
“The plan identifies both action targets and progress measures to support an environmental justice theme, but it did not introduce any new or revised equity indicators to support them,” says a Jan. 12 memo to city staff from Kathryn Bazan, chair of the Dallas Environmental Commission, a 23-member group of community advocates tasked with advising city council on environmental matters.
Half of the environmental issues raised during several community meetings with the city relate to land use and zoning, yet the racial equity plan has no indicators to measure environmental equity in land use, Bazan said in the memo.
“Vulnerable communities are disproportionately impacted by a higher pollution burden and experience negative health effects and decreased life expectancies,” she said. “The severity of this negative impact is largely determined by proximity to a source of pollution.”
The commission wants the city to adopt an environmental justice screening tool that allows Dallas to measure how close neighborhoods are to environmental pollution like air emissions, hazardous waste, landfill sites, impaired surface water, wastewater discharge facilities, or a U.S. or state-declared clean-up site.
The commission has specific proposals for other environmental issues that it says should be addressed as part of the racial equity plan:
Tree canopy coverage
The commission recommends measuring the tree canopy coverage in Dallas communities. American Forests, a nonprofit conservation group dedicated to protecting forest ecosystems, has developed the Tree Equity Score Analyzer (TESA), an interactive mapping tool that uses a Tree equity score and other data to identify where trees should be prioritized to mitigate urban heat island effects. The Texas Tree Foundation has developed the Dallas Urban Forest Master Plan in an effort to grow and maintain the area’s canopy.
Neighborhoods in Dallas without dense tree canopies are most likely to experience higher temperatures, according to a 2022 IBM study and a 2017 Texas Trees Foundation study on urban heat.
Communities of color inequitably experience the consequences of increased temperatures as they tend to be located closer to heavy industrialization and “historically limited tree growth or gentrification has removed large-caliper, mature trees to make way for new development,” the memo said.
Solar accessibility
The commission also recommends measuring the kilowatts of solar energy installed on single-family homes in Dallas to address barriers to solar ownership, according to Bazan’s memo. Dallas’ historically marginalized communities disproportionately feel negative impacts of energy prices and grid reliability, Bazan said.
Food security
The commission also recommends adding an equity indicator that would require Dallas to measure how far neighborhoods are from fresh, healthy foods.
About 36% of Dallas residents live in U.S. Census tracts defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as food deserts, a low-income area where a significant portion of the population is farther than half a mile from the nearest supermarket or grocery store.
“Lack of access to sources of healthy and affordable food make it harder for some people to eat a healthy diet and is tied to other negative health outcomes,” Bazan said.
Is it enough?
Mayo is among those who are concerned that even the commission’s proposed changes to the racial equity plan may not go far enough.
Missing from the land use and zoning recommendations are specific measures to reform long-standing industrial practices, which Mayo says is critical to undoing decades of environmental racism.
“Local municipalities are the ones who have the power to concentrate industrial land uses, low-income people, communities of color, to floodplains and all of those things,” Mayo said. “That is what happened in the city of Dallas and most major cities in this country.”
Dallas and other major cities have made concerted efforts over the decades, along with banks and home loan organizations, to “sequester to dangerous areas” Black and other non-white communities, Mayo said.
The solution to increasing equity among these historically disadvantaged communities created through zoning practices is to robustly reform those practices and begin to unmake the conditions that led to disparity, Mayo said.
Mayo said the city could also add an equity indicator that requires tracking the number of industrially zoned parcels of land in communities of color to see whether that was increasing or decreasing over time.
This piece as republished from The Dallas Morning News.