Protecting people’s health from environmental hazards, Maricela Mares-Alatorre and her family found out the hard way, is a never-ending fight.
She was in high school in the late 1980s when her parents, both farmworkers, organized to help prevent the construction of a toxic waste incinerator in the landfill near Kettleman City, a tiny agricultural community in California’s Central Valley.
Mares-Alatorre joined her parents on the weekends and during summer breaks from college, then became one of the leaders of the group they helped launch — El Pueblo Para el Aire y Agua Limpia/People for Clean Air and Water — when she returned to Kettleman City to raise her family. She never imagined how long the struggle would last after their initial victory in 1993, when they learned the incinerator would not be built.
“I thought it was over, right?” Mares-Alatorre said. “My parents defeated the incinerator — what more could go wrong?”
A lot, it turns out.
It’s a familiar story for communities across the country: The struggle to create a healthy environment for the residents of Kettleman City has never ended because the battle was never about just one environmental hazard.
Kettleman City is known for its almond harvests. But it faces an array of environmental threats. It sits at the crossroads of a heavily trafficked major highway and has also contended with toxic pesticide use, air pollution and water contamination — in 2010, residents learned their drinking water was spiked with arsenic and benzene. It also faces possible pollution from oil and gas drilling. The community ranks among the most pollution-burdened ZIP codes in California, according to the state’s CalEnviroScreen mapping tool.
Community groups like El Pueblo say the cumulative effects of multiple polluting sources, including the landfill — one of two operating hazardous waste landfills in the state and the only landfill that accepts waste with levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) at or above 50 parts per million — have turned their backyard into a dumping ground.
“Why is our area fit for everybody else’s trash?” said Mares-Alatorre, noting how the nearby community of Avenal, where Kettleman City’s students attend high school, has another landfill where Los Angeles sends its municipal waste. “The thing is that you’re bringing all this trash to a disadvantaged community that has way less resources to deal with the ramifications than a bigger, more economically sound place.”
Hoping for action, El Pueblo and another environmental organization, Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, filed what’s known as a Title VI complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2015.
This administrative complaint process is based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin by recipients of federal funds, such as state and local governments. In this case, the Title VI complaint sought to address the long-standing concerns that Kettleman City residents have had about the harms that come from living near the commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facility.
The Title VI complaint challenged the state’s approval of a permit to expand this landfill. The community groups also targeted decisions during the permitting process that they say effectively prevented some residents from participating. The complaint cited the use of police dogs and police intimidation during permit hearings organized by local officials.
The local permitting process was also marred by a refusal to translate key permitting documents as well as rules that didn’t give Spanish speakers equal time to talk during the hearings compared to English speakers, the complaint alleged, saying that state agencies ultimately relied on documents “that were adopted through the systematic use of racially discriminatory methods.”
Groups hoping for environmental-justice help through Title VI are often disappointed. The EPA has a long history of doing little about such complaints, the Center for Public Integrity found in a 2015 investigation, and Biden administration efforts to change course have waned amid opposition.
But the Kettleman City petition ended up on a different track. The complainants and the state agencies involved in the landfill permitting agreed to try an approach known as an alternative dispute resolution, where they would directly negotiate an agreement to resolve the matter. This approach isn’t common, but a 2023 Public Integrity review of EPA Title VI cases found that such resolutions have resulted in more robust settlement agreements compared to those handled directly by the EPA.
The Kettleman City parties negotiated for seven months. The 2016 settlement agreement with California’s Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Toxic Substances Control — DTSC for short — was both profound and historic, said Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice’s executive director, Bradley Angel. The state agencies also hailed the agreement as one of the first examples of a voluntary resolution jointly developed by state agencies and community groups under Title VI.
“DTSC and CalEPA had to acknowledge that civil rights actually had to be considered in their permit decisions, which is obvious because it’s the law, but they had ignored that forever,” said Angel, whose nonprofit was created by working-class residents in Kettleman City and San Francisco to help communities impacted by pollution, health hazards and environmental racism. “It was also very significant because while there were Kettleman City-specific provisions, there were also key provisions that applied statewide.”
Judged against the low bar of Title VI action on pollution, the agreement was a success. It required, for instance, that the state expedite a plan to get Kettleman City residents clean water. That happened two years after the agreement was signed, Angel said.
In 2022, in another change called for by the agreement, DTSC implemented new civil rights and language access policies. These include translating crucial documents, ensuring public meetings are scheduled at optimal times and locations for public participation, and providing interpretation.
But the complainants had hoped the agreement would trigger broader change. There, the results have fallen short.
“We were really looking to challenge and really bring about a change in government policies and practices around hazardous waste facility siting, permitting and the related issues of racism regarding hazardous waste facilities that are almost entirely located in communities like Kettleman City,” Angel said.
An idyllic farming community facing toxic threats
Mares-Alatorre was born in Los Angeles, but when she was 5 her parents decided to move back to the Central Valley, where the couple had met. They thought Kettleman City would be a healthier place for their family, away from urban smog and crime.
In many ways, this tiny, unincorporated community was what they envisioned: a tight-knit place where they would drive down the street and wave to neighbors they knew, and where the biggest event in town was the annual eighth-grade carnival.
When her parents bought their home in Kettleman City, the landfill, located about three-and-a-half miles southwest of the community, was not yet a state-authorized hazardous waste facility. But that changed soon after. Waste Management Inc. bought the landfill in 1979, and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control allowed the facility to manage and dispose of hazardous waste at that time.
Mares-Alatorre said that happened without input from the Kettleman City residents, who are largely Latino, Spanish-speaking and working class. Many are farmworkers, like her parents.
“The community was never told what was up there,” she said. “We never found out until Bradley Angel knocked on my parents’ door and said, ‘Did you know that you live next to the largest toxic waste dump in the western United States?’”
Related investigation
In their later Title VI complaint, the community groups outlined the longstanding health troubles the tiny community has experienced, including respiratory issues and an unexplained and sudden uptick in birth defects that was documented starting in the fall of 2007. This included babies born with cleft palates, as well as heart and brain defects.
One recent health study found high levels of particle pollution and carbon in Kettleman City’s air, which researchers noted were an indicator of diesel pollution. The study also found benzene derivatives in the air, as well as arsenic levels in residential wells that exceeded federal limits. Water contaminated by arsenic is a public health threat because long-term exposure can cause cancer and skin lesions, and is associated with heart disease and diabetes.
More than three decades ago when Angel first got involved in a battle to prevent the construction of the incinerator proposed at that landfill, he realized the power of having a seat at the table. He saw the alternative dispute resolution process for the later Title VI complaint as a way to ensure that the community’s broader goals were met.
The resulting settlement required DTSC to adopt a strong language-access policy and a new civil rights policy, both of which the agency has done.
But to this day, a major sticking point for the community groups has been California’s failure to adopt regulatory criteria to consider cumulative impacts and other socioeconomic indicators in permitting and regulatory decisions, called for both by the agreement and a state law passed in 2015 via Senate Bill 673.
This was a key concession in the Title VI agreement for the two environmental organizations because both of the state’s hazardous waste landfills are in low-income, Latino farmworker communities in the Central Valley. Many other pollution-burdened places could also benefit from permitting that takes that prior impact into serious account.
As of early January, seven-and-a-half years after the agreement was announced, DTSC was still working on two of seven items for its “Vulnerable Communities and Cumulative Impacts Permitting Criteria.” Angel said the delay puts communities in harm’s way.
“If you really consider cumulative impacts in your permit decisions … they’re going to have a hard time justifying continuing to permit these facilities,” he said.
Meanwhile, Chemical Waste Management Inc., which operates the landfill and is a subsidiary of Waste Management, is allowed to operate on a permit that technically expired more than a decade ago, Mares-Alatorre said.
“There’s no huge Erin Brockovich kind of victory here,” she said. “It’s mostly just the fact that we watchdog them or else they would get away with even more.”
Since 2013, when the facility submitted an application to the state to renew its expiring hazardous waste facility permit, the Kettleman Hills facility has operated on what the state calls a “continued permit.” This means that the facility must remain in compliance with the terms of that pre-existing permit as well as current regulations, a DTSC spokesperson told Public Integrity. The agency said it expects to release a draft this month of its decision on the permit renewal.
DTSC hired a law firm to detail its civil-rights obligations related to the permit, and the agency said it is following the recommendations.
Waste Management did not respond to requests for comment. But on its website, it says its facility “is not adversely impacting air quality for the residents of Kettleman City” and notes that a 2010 state study could not find a connection between the site and the birth defects.
In mid-November, Greenaction and El Pueblo met with officials from DTSC and CalEPA to press the state about the delay in establishing the permitting and lack of other action on hazardous waste. Angel said they left the meeting dissatisfied.
“So here we are, all these years later: There are no solutions,” Angel said. “There’s no hazardous waste reduction plan. There is no attempt to find other possible, more appropriate disposal sites. There is no serious research and development on safe treatment technologies. They still rely on dumping and burning.”
The Department of Toxic Substances Control says that it’s working to address cumulative impacts from polluting facilities as part of the permitting process because this is “critical to address environmental injustices and protect communities suffering from disproportionate pollution burdens.”
As part of this work, the agency said it’s developing clearer and stronger criteria for evaluating community vulnerabilities in the permitting process. DTSC also has two community-based pilot projects, one of which is near the Kettleman City waste facility, to examine how existing regulatory tools can address cumulative impacts.
The agency plans to hold a public workshop this year when it releases the new criteria developed as part of the SB 673 requirements.
“DTSC is committed to ensuring civil rights compliance and recognizes the importance of this, particularly given the presence of permitted hazardous waste sites in disproportionately burdened communities,” the agency said in a statement to Public Integrity.
The community groups say they plan to file another Title VI complaint to hold the state accountable to its earlier commitments.
Angel notes that the state’s agencies are more diverse since he first began advocating on behalf of Kettleman City decades ago, with environmental justice programs and departments that didn’t exist earlier. But new opportunities to directly negotiate with state officials too often don’t translate to progress on the ground, he said.
“We have a seat at the table — I mean, we’re in a meeting with a dozen top officials — but the decisions generally remain the same with a few exceptions,” Angel said.
He doesn’t expect the U.S. EPA to pull its funding from DTSC, the ultimate punishment for Title VI violations. But the residents will nonetheless force the discussion, he said. They will prepare permit challenges, line up legal support and educate the community.
When it works, the resolution agreement process can act as a critical accountability tool for vulnerable communities. It wasn’t until the 2016 settlement that Kettleman City residents got action on the water contamination they’d learned about in 2010 from environmental reviews conducted after Waste Management proposed to expand the landfill.
Mares-Alatorre said she received a call from the state the day after the Title VI agreement was signed to begin the process to find an alternative water source. Now the community gets its water from the California Aqueduct, water that runs past the town and that previously Kettleman City couldn’t access.
“That’s a huge victory,” she said.
Still, the struggle for a cleaner environment has gone on for so long that today, her son, a community organizer and policy analyst for Greenaction in Kettleman City, is the third generation in her family to press for change there.
Mares-Alatorre no longer lives in Kettleman City. She moved two years ago to nearby Hanford. But she continues as a member of El Pueblo and participates in the Title VI complaint discussions with the state.
She sees it as her responsibility to continue to speak up, pointing out the disconnect between state tools such as CalEnviroScreen that show which communities are environmentally vulnerable and the lack of action to prevent more pollution getting permitted there.
Ultimately, she said, what’s needed is a collective approach to reduce the state’s waste. It’s not enough for environmentalists to create green walking paths and use cloth shopping bags while their city’s hazardous waste is sent to Kettleman City, she said.
“They think that they’re doing great because their trash is out of sight, out of mind,” Mares-Alatorre said. “Until everyone starts feeling that responsibility and reducing the amount of waste that is generated, I don’t think there’s going to be any change.”