- [Announcer] "Flatland in Focus" is brought to you in part through the generous support of AARP, the Health Forward Foundation, and RSM.

- Welcome back to "Flatland in Focus."

I'm D. Rashaan Gilmore, your host.

And tonight we delve into a pressing issue at the heart of urban environmental health.

That is, environmental racism and the fight for air quality in Kansas City, Kansas.

(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music continues) Environmental justice, or the lack thereof, shapes more than just cities and lives, carving deep lines between those who can breathe clean air and those who live in the shadow of pollution.

The consequences are not just environmental, they're deeply personal, affecting health, economic opportunity, and quality of life.

So tonight we'll be taking a look at the neighborhoods of Armourdale and Argentine in Wyandotte County, where busy rail yards, heavy freight traffic, and high concentration of heavy duty industrial equipment contribute to a life expectancy that is 20 years shorter compared to neighboring Johnson County.

So let's hear from the voices on the front lines working to change this reality, activists, community leaders, and health experts each fighting for our future where environmental benefits and burdens are shared equally.

(soft upbeat music) - [Dr. Friedman] We are putting the burden of a systemic issue, like air pollution, onto individuals.

And it could be fixed at the source as a public health issue.

(soft upbeat music) - There's a centennial book at the library about Argentine, kind of talks about how bad the air quality was during the times that the smelter and the steel mill and stuff existed.

There was always heavy clouds over the community and stuff at that time.

This community was built on those industries that are damaging our health.

(soft upbeat music) I'm a resident of the Argentine community and I have been a part of this community my whole life.

We literally live a block and a half from the railroad.

We also are surrounded on all four sides by highways.

I have had neighbors who have had heart conditions and asthma, lung conditions.

(thrilling music) These monitors have been here for about eight or nine months.

And currently my monitor is showing that we are in the yellow zone.

We definitely would be more cautious on days when the wind is blowing to the south, which it looks like it is a southern wind day right now.

Yellow for us would probably be considered an okay day, but I would rather it be green.

(laughs) (thrilling music) - The EPA does have monitors in our metropolitan area, but one of them is deployed near downtown in KCK, near where city hall is.

And then another one is deployed way down south of here.

I think it's more in Johnson County than Wyandotte County.

It doesn't really capture the variety of air quality in our county, and that's why we have our air monitors deployed.

We have about 30 air monitors total and our neighborhoods always have the worst air quality when it comes to that.

So we are right now walking in the Armourdale neighborhood, residential neighborhood, which is surrounded on all four sides by a variety of things.

We've got the interstate and the rail yard on one side.

Got a bunch of chemical plants and industries around us.

There are metal recycling facilities.

And the presence of all these plants and factories around us also brings in a lot of diesel trucks to the neighborhood.

So we get hundreds of diesel trucks an hour driving by, causing a lot of harmful emissions into our community.

- I'm not really sick, but I have some allergies.

But it's people here, they live in an Armourdale who... And people there is having like asthma and has other other issues.

The daughter is sick, the mom is sick, the dog died from cancer.

So that make us like have question about it.

- Where a person lives is a greater predictor of their health outcomes than their individual characteristics or behaviors.

Associations have been established between pollution and myocardial infarction or heart attacks and lung disease, hypertension, heart failure, arrhythmias, COPD, and lung cancer.

And there's a growing body of evidence for an association potentially between pollution exposure and cognitive changes like ADHD and autism.

And amongst the elderly population, neurodegenerative disease like dementia.

Pollution in Kansas City is unevenly distributed to poor communities and communities of color.

Race is the most significant predictor of a person living near contaminated water, air, or soil.

(thrilling music) - Communities of color in particular are pushed into certain areas that people consider less desirable areas.

And then that was just perpetuated.

- Those that are most harmed are those at the fence line of industry, and fence line meaning at the shadows of that smoke stack, the communities of color, Indigenous, Brown, Black, low-income white, are always the ones that have that burden.

So there was a chemical fire that happened last year, and immediately the warning went to those in the more affluent community.

But the community that was impacted the most or where the fire was happening didn't get a notification.

The unified government didn't put out an alert until 2:30 in the afternoon.

We mobilized to call the EPA, get their monitors out there, and see what's in the air, right?

Why is it that the industry has so much power over somebody's health?

Why is it that the industry has so much power over even our local government?

We're in a critical moment because right now the EPA is also saying, "Well, we have all this money.

We need to use it."

(thrilling music) - Executive order revitalizing our nation's commitment to environmental justice for all.

- We have a big question about what's happening with respect to, I think, Justice 40 and some of the investments in the Inflation Reduction Act.

So yes, you might be investing in the communities that are overburdened, but you're still allowing industry to pollute.

So what does that mean?

Is there actual measurable net benefit?

(thrilling music) - In certain situations, what ends up happening is that the cost of the fine is just considered the cost of doing business.

It costs them less to pay off that fine than to actually fix the problem.

And it's only after years of continued violations, continued fines that it can finally be brought to the Department of Justice through EPA that says that, "Okay, these are perpetual violators and they have to be brought to a court."

And as the things run through the system, they continue to operate and they continue to impact the communities that are around them with the problems that they're causing.

(thrilling music) (gentle music) There has been a recent rule change that we were also advocates for called the rule Risk Management Plan.

And once the facility reaches a certain threshold, they are required by law to have these plans in place on how to address any potential disastrous situations.

Language justice was introduced into those new regulations of not just you have to inform the community that lives around you, but you have to ensure that the community members that are around you, if they're not English-speaking, you have to provide this information in other languages as well of what to expect, what to do in these situations.

(gentle music) - Research and science and public health information and data can be a really powerful tool for a community to utilize to push for change.

But the thing is it has to be done with community and it has to recognize community lived experience as expertise.

(gentle music) - This is the environmental action plan that was created from the community.

It's about how the community can take actions, learning, empower, advocate, and share and dream, because it's important to dream that we can do better.

- [Jessica] Who are we sacrificing?

We're sacrificing our communities of color, we're sacrificing our lower-income white communities for our oil and gas needs, our petrochemical needs when there is a solution, there's an alternative to that.

But we need really deep investments in those communities and in a way that community leads the process.

(gentle music) - All right, welcome back to the roundtable discussion of today's show.

And with me in the studio is Rah Jefferson, the executive director of Groundworks NRG, Sara Prem, director of Advocacy for Kansas and Nebraska at the American Lung Association.

And I guess I want to start with you, Sara, and just do a little bit of a level set with some of the data that we got from the American Lung Association, which said that 131 million Americans are living in areas with unhealthy levels of air pollution, nearly 40% of the population.

Why is this not something that we are all hell on fire about as a community?

It seems like we should be making some strides toward reversing that, or is that already happening?

- What you're talking about is our 2024 state of the air report, which we started...

This is our 25th year doing that report.

And that is to bring attention to the importance of air quality and the issues that we have in a lot of our communities with poor air quality.

- Can you explain the concept of environmental racism or environmental justice?

And I mentioned that in response to what Sara was just sharing because, again, it should be something that's at the forefront of, because it's where our communities are, right?

I mean, this is people are living and breathing this air, drinking water that may not be healthy.

We all know the story of Flint.

What is it that we are not understanding about the concept of environmental racism?

- For some of us, we understand the concept very well.

- [D. Rashaan] Yeah.

- We have experienced forms of racism or forms of caste our whole lives.

Others of us who are not in the same material conditions, in the same lived conditions as those of us who live next door to the fiberglass manufacturing plant, who live next door to the medical waste recycling facility, they don't understand because they haven't had to see it, live it, and be with it.

- Do you think people actually view that as environmental racism versus something that may just be an economic condition, or as not being as intentional as it might otherwise be?

- Well, our economic conditions are supported by systemically racist systems.

So it is one of the same.

However, I think just to have a clear understanding, you can look at the disproportionate amount of communities of color that are co-located near these facilities, that are co-located near the rail yards, that are co-located near the manufacturing plants, and how little is done to monitor or regulate these issues, right?

So for example, in my community, about 10 years ago, CertainTeed is the one who flagged for the EPA that their furnaces were venting hexavalent chromium.

It was not the EPA who flagged for CertainTeed, it was the other way around.

And they had already shut down the furnaces by that point, but we don't know how long it was venting hexavalent chromium.

That's the stuff from "Erin Brockovich," by the way.

- The EPA did just release some stronger standards on heavy duty trucks.

Those are the diesel emissions, like you were speaking about rail and highways.

I mean, the diesel emissions are are terrible.

They are toxic in and of themselves, but they also include the particle pollution.

And its proximity, the closer you are to highways, rail yards, the worse your situation is going to be.

So EPA is doing something, they did just increase the standards on those heavy duty trucks, but there's more, more, more, more that needs to be done.

And that's one thing that the Lung Association tries to...

So you mentioned diesel, and I was just sort of struck by the fact that there are three pipeline companies in Fairfax, in the industrial district in Northeast KCK, and they make 95% of the diesel for the Kansas City area and 100% of the jet fuel that is produced in this area.

But it's so strangely juxtaposed... Our production team, when they were out shooting the video feature were just sort of taken by the fact that you had a playground on a hill where children are being children, kids are being kids, but the backdrop to that wasn't a pretty forest of trees, it was smoke stacks.

What is the responsibility from the perspective of the American Lung Association even for companies that are in these neighborhoods and maybe are or are not doing the job they're supposed to be doing in terms of keeping the environment around them clean?

- We use the EPA's monitoring system.

So there's local, state, and federal regulatory monitors.

That's where we're getting our data from.

There are other ways, and I know we were talking earlier about the purple monitors, which communities can do, and I think that is a key activity, is that monitoring, that keeping watch.

- So let's talk about that.

Is the monitoring sufficient?

Is it helping at all to move the needle or provide any measure of at least sufficient accountability?

- No, I would say that the monitoring is oftentimes insufficient, unfortunately.

- In terms of depth or personnel or what specifically?

- In terms of co-location near the problem.

So the EPA monitor that is in Wyandotte County is at 10th and State while CertainTeed is all the way on the north end by the river.

That's not catching that.

And that's why they didn't catch it.

That's why we have these things like the purple air monitoring community, where we work with residents to install air monitors on their homes, pay them for their utility credits and things like that so that we can get a better idea of what's actually happening in our community.

Truck counting routes, things like that.

And I want to say something.

That playground on the hill that you talked about, I know what you're talking about, John Garland Park, it's a former sanitary landfill that was put in our community by HUD, the Mid-America Planning Association, which is now the Mid-America Regional Council, our unified government, the EPA, as a model sanitary landfill.

Because they said that's what Black communities need for parks, is we'll fill in their ravines, their dumping sites, and we'll put landfill stuff in there, pre RCRA, pre hazardous waste stocks.

We don't know what is in there, and they put the thing on it, and so that's a park.

So that playground is actually in between two methane vents.

It's venting methane out into the air, which the EPA does not regulate.

- Okay, so let's really dive into one aspect of this, because I think that a lot of times people assume that there's no intent or malice behind the kinds of decisions that are made from a governmental level, from a business level, and even at the community level, that nobody would intentionally, right, put a playground between two methane vents on top of a landfill with other environmental contaminants.

- And a track.

- [R. Dashaan] Right.

But is that intentional?

I mean... - Yes, it's intentional.

- And if so, who's making those decisions?

- Well, our unified government may made that decision.

And so we had several years, in fact, my father passed away in that process.

So over that process of several years of community charettes envisioning around how could that landfill actually be an environmental justice, right?

That does not only just say, "Okay, here's an amenity," but it corrects the ills that were done, the harm that was done.

We talked about putting a greenhouse on there to capture the methane.

Associated Youth Services had that idea several years ago.

Our unified government did not want to do it.

They felt no responsibility to do that.

- So let's talk about the work that you and Groundworks NRG are doing to sort of promote or really combat these efforts, promoting efforts to combat what's happening, I guess is what I really want to say.

- Well, what you were saying about it being an economic issue I think is a really good point.

So at Groundwork NRG, we work in environmental and climate justice, but also food, housing, and land sovereignty.

And what that looks like is we've been running a campaign for the last two to three years to end the unfair practice of the tax sale, right?

The tax sale is where they can take someone's home for three years and back taxes, so sometimes people... - [D. Rashaan] Somebody comes in and buys those liens and... - Were getting sold for as little as $300.

These are people who have paid off their home.

They're oftentimes elderly.

They're oftentimes people of color, maybe still suffering from COVID.

So we raised $125,000, more than, to put in the pocket of our unified government to keep these people in their homes.

Okay?

It's part and parcel of the same issues.

It's morally corrupt, is really what it is, but it's a lack of intention and care.

And yes, it is intentionally placing these things in these communities.

It stems from the historic racist policies of redlining and has never stopped.

- From a policy perspective, what is it that at the local, state, and federal level that needs to be happening?

Or what is it that they're not getting that it doesn't seem to prioritize remediating these concerns, and as Rah said, making communities whole?

- Right, and a lot of that is because when you talk about air quality, that is more the federal EPA level, so getting those standards.

That's what we're talking about, the standards for the heavy duty trucks and that sort of...

So you've got things that are happening at the federal level.

At the state level, that is voluntary.

I mean, that's the companies, the unified government would have to decide, "Let's turn over our whole fleet and make it zero emission."

It's a very complex situation with different levels of decision-making.

There is the KC Regional Climate Action Plan.

So climate change, all of this, is also impactful for that.

We have to address climate change.

And I think that also has that federal, global quality.

But I think that communities can take action and draw attention to these things and to not let their government off the hook.

- And so are there specific federal initiatives, and more importantly or as importantly, funding resources that you've been excited by that seem to hold the promise of some future possibility of sort of correcting some of what we're talking about?

Or is that an underfunded mandate as it were as well?

- If we're going to get a little political, the Biden administration has done a lot, and the recovery plan that they put forward did put a lot of money out there and has increased production of electric vehicles.

And it has helped do that quite a bit.

As far as at the local level, you're still battling all kinds of different... Where's the money going to go?

Where's the money going to come from?

- And so I have to ask then, does that make you skeptical that the funding will go where it needs to?

Because once the federal government has set it aside or sent it to the states, it's then time for the states and local communities, typically in blog grants, to figure out how they're going to use it.

Is that happening or do you have hope that it will happen?

- Yeah.

I wrote this down first thing when we start speaking.

Inspect what you expect.

Always.

It's up to every single one of us to inspect what we expect.

Okay?

Because the impacts of this universal.

Regardless of the politics, this will be at your front door.

The water is coming.

Absolutely I'm skeptical.

Absolutely I've seen money go to places where it should.

And absolutely I've seen local government tie it up when they shouldn't have.

They could have used ARPA dollars to pay those back taxes.

And our local government put eligibility restriction where that could not happen.

That is unfortunate.

And that should not happen.

It is up to us to really understand what's happening here.

There's oftentimes a false tension between labor and environment.

Do you know the individuals who are oftentimes most impacted by those diesel trucks or the individuals sitting in the cabs of those trucks?

- Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

- There is no false tension.

We hire humans, and we have rights to this world as humans, and therefore we need labor, we need environment, we need a convergence, we need to come together.

We must inspect what we expect and we must demand from our policy holders.

- But I imagine this is not a one-woman job.

And so I'm interested to know how you are working with community, how you're engaging with community, how you are organizing in a way that you ensure that the voices of those closest to the problem are also in the position of being closest to the solution too, and really making their needs and desires known.

- Absolutely.

I really appreciate that.

And with that, I want to give a shout out to the Moving Forward Network.

The movement work is not perfect.

We have a lot of the same trauma and issues in terms of trying to decolonize our practices that you see in the industrial complex.

But the Moving Forward Network was one of the driving forces behind that heavy duty truck role.

I want to give a shout out to those warriors, those peace warriors in New Jersey and California, Long Beach, Tallahassee, that pushed that forward.

You know who you are, if you see this.

In terms of how we engage the community, well, one, we're becoming a worker self-directed nonprofit.

- Explain more about what that is and how that works.

- And so we're disrupting the non-profit industrial complex, which is centered around charity, not solidarity.

Okay?

The idea that these dollars, these philanthropic dollars we have to shuck and jive, do the whole pony show for them when they've been extracted off the backs of our communities is ludicrous.

And we're seeing more and more funders understand that.

And two, also decentralized power in our own dynamics, right?

Expect how we are showing up with a white supremacy mindset in our own practices.

- And if I may interject and say that sometimes we end up replicating those same harmful, oppressive stretches.

Yes, absolutely.

- One of the ways that we're working through that is through cooperative leadership.

A cooperative leadership structure, which decentralizes power and distributes its authority and decision-making, along with the practice of conflict resolution.

Because we must be able to heal the trauma within our own communities.

No one's coming to save us.

On the ground, that looks like built environment interventions.

We have a great project right now up at 13th and Parallel, just south of the Boys and Girls Club.

Bioswells, rain gardens, retention walls.

We do vacant lot restoration, solar lights, pathways, everything, tree planting to reduce the heat island effect.

We do heat monitoring to see how hot our neighborhoods are getting, right?

We do digital literacy.

We do a lot.

I mean, it's 10 square miles and we're really trying to change the dynamics.

- Let me ask you an unfair and very big broad question.

- I'll do my best.

- And hat is, how will a warming climate exacerbate the issues of not only air quality, but just li survivability?

Yeah, exactly.

- Well, so our report talks about two kinds of pollution, ozone and particle, and it's short-term particle and annual particle.

Ozone is a direct result of climate change.

I mean, the heating of the environment is what's creating more ozone.

And then the heat keeps it here.

So it builds it and then it makes it harder to get rid of it.

So climate change is a problem we just cannot ignore any longer.

We do have to work on getting rid of these kinds of emissions.

And that starts at the federal government, but it's state level.

We can have, if states can adopt some of the EPA standards and make sure that those are being enforced, well, at the federal level, they keep strengthening those standards.

And at the local level, I mean, it might be encouraging...

The City of Kansas City, the City of Kansas City, Kansas, get all EVs, get those vehicles off the road.

And that would help with the situation.

- I often say that if you want to create a better world in any area, it could be healthcare, it could be public safety, it could be the environment, if you make it better for those who have the worst of it, if you make it better for them, then it's automatically better as part of that process for everybody else who has varying degrees of privilege.

Right?

- Right.

- I imagine, though, doing this work, actively being concerned about not only the livelihood of individuals, but the livelihoods of communities, it's got to be deeply personal for you.

And so I just wonder if you could share with our audience why they should care.

Maybe I don't live by those train tracks or by the methane stacks or any of that.

I get it, I see it.

Yes, I know I should probably buy an EV, but I love my V6, V8, whatever I've got.

Why should the average person even care?

- I suppose if you have any compassion.

If you have any compassion in your heart.

If you don't, then you probably don't care, and you won't care.

And maybe you're one of these space pirates planning to ship off to wherever you're going to ship off to.

Right.

And leave the rest of us here.

Right.

But the rest of us is larger than you think.

The rest of us is larger than you think, and they're militarizing this country for a reason.

'Cause resources will be scant.

So, I mean, it's time to wake up and really look at what's happening here, you know?

And I think if you have any sense of self preservation, you would care.

- It's just one planet and we all are sharing it and it's to all of our benefit and advantage to take care of it.

That's where we wrap up tonight's episode of "Flatland in Focus."

You've been hearing from Rah Jefferson, the executive director of Groundwork NRG, and Sara Prem, director of Advocacy for Kansas and Nebraska at the American Lung Association.

I just want to say to our viewers that each step we take toward an environmental equity state isn't just progress.

It's a promise to future generations that we all value life and want to live equally.

Thank you for joining us.

And let's continue to be advocates for the air we breathe and the soil we share.

I'm D. Rashaan Gilmore, and this has been "Flatland in Focus."

As always, thank you for the pleasure of your time.

- [Announcer] "Flatland in Focus" is brought to you in part through the generous support of AARP, the Health Forward Foundation, and RSM.

(soft upbeat music)