'The Jury's Out': Is California's Landmark Environmental Justice Law Helping Communities With the Dirtiest Air?

The South Stockton classroom where Ashley Pearl Pana spent recess trapped indoors is still there, 16 years later.

When the wind stirred up dust and soot, when the sun stewed smokestack and tailpipe exhaust into smog, when pollution squeezed her airways, Pana’s asthma forced her inside, behind the classroom’s closed door.

“All the kids were playing outside, and I’d just watch them through the windows,” Pana, now 23, said while visiting her old elementary school. A new generation of children, masked against COVID-19’s newest threats to still-developing lungs, ran in the playground.

It was a clear day, the kind that makes South Stockton’s consistently filthy air difficult to imagine. But in one of California’s most dangerously polluted communities, emergency room visits for asthma attacks are among the highest in the state.

“No matter what, air quality is always an issue in my life,” Pana said, “something I have to be constantly aware about.”

Assembly Bill 617, passed in 2017, requires local air districts and the state Air Resources Board to reduce air pollution in marginalized communities. The law established the Community Air Protection Program, which tasks residents and local officials with shaping regulations and steering state money to a handful of hot spots.

Hailed as “unprecedented” by some environmental groups, the law was supposed to create a program to measure and combat air pollution at the neighborhood level.

So far, more than $1 billion in state funds has been appropriated for community grants, industry incentives and government costs. But it's still not possible to gauge whether the program will improve the smoggy and toxic air that almost 4 million people breathe in 15 communities.

Most of those communities — including Richmond, West Oakland, Stockton, San Bernardino and Wilmington — have high poverty rates and are predominantly Latino, Black and Asian American.

Now, even as the law’s clean-air program prepares to fold in new neighborhoods, a major question lingers: Is it working?

“The jury’s out,” said Jonathan London, an associate professor of human ecology at UC Davis who is keeping tabs on the law. It’s “an ongoing experiment with the potential for significant benefits, but also significant obstacles.”

But environmental justice advocates have called the law toothless, and warn that it has “largely failed to produce the promised quantifiable, permanent, and enforceable emissions reductions.”

The struggle to achieve the law’s ambitious goals has been marked by battles between residents and local air regulators, and by jurisdictional juggling among agencies, each responsible for a different portion of pollution. Meanwhile, people continue to suffer from inhaling dirty air.

“Is it having the improvements that I want it to have, at the level that I wanted to have? No, we need a lot more,” said Assemblymember Cristina Garcia, a Democrat from Bell Gardens, who authored the bill. “Is it engaging the community and empowering them, so they could push for change? Oh, definitely.”

The law is just one tool — and, its author acknowledges, an imperfect one at that — intending to fix decades of environmental racism, questionable land-use decisions and freeway construction that have left poor communities of color hemmed in by California’s industrial corridors. It’s a monumental task, and experts say no one law will be a panacea.

At stake is the health of millions of people who live near California’s refineries, ports and freeways that are the sources of smog and other toxic pollutants that trigger asthma attacks and have been linked to cancer.

California Air Resources Board staff recently called it “a catalyst to change the way we work with communities.”

Yet some Stockton residents and community groups have had a far different experience, tangling with local air regulators about funding decisions and delayed air-pollution monitoring.

“At the beginning of this process, we were all kumbaya,” said Dillon Delvo, executive director of Little Manila Rising, a historic preservation organization turned environmental justice group in South Stockton.

“By the end,” he said, “it was terrible.”

'Tremendous amount of frustration'

For more than half a century, California’s state and local air regulators have enacted pioneering rules to clean up pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes. Trailblazing mandates to tackle diesel exhaust — a known carcinogen — and other toxic air contaminants cut Californians’ risk of getting cancer from bad air by 76%.

But it hasn’t been enough. Parts of California still have the worst air quality in the country, with about 87% of Californians living in areas that exceeded federal healthy air standards in 2020.

In the San Joaquin Valley alone, breathing fine particles is estimated to cause 1,200 premature deaths from respiratory and heart disease per year. Poor communities of color are still exposed to double the cancer-causing diesel exhaust than that of their more affluent neighbors.

Garcia’s law aimed to tackle pollution hot spots by creating a greater role for community activists and residents in the complex regulatory process. Local air districts responsible for regulating smokestack pollution must now work with communities to craft clean-air plans. The law also calls for increased air monitoring, bigger fines for polluters and faster deployment of new pollution-scrubbing retrofits on smokestacks.

Deldi Reyes, director of the Air Resources Board’s Office of Community Air Protection, told board members at an October meeting that there has been progress since the environmental justice law was enacted, with an estimated 75 tons of fine particles expected to be cut across 11 communities — equivalent to removing 75,000 heavy-duty diesel trucks from California roads.

But neither the law nor the state-developed guidelines for its implementation include specific targets for measurably improving air quality or public health in the selected communities. Though the program relies heavily on time and effort from community members, decision-making is ultimately left to state and local air regulators.

“I’d like to see more accountability built into the program,” said Dr. John Balmes, a professor of medicine at UCSF and a member of the California Air Resources Board. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

Reyes, however, urged patience. Of the 15 communities, three are still developing their clean-air plans and four are in their first year of implementation, she said. “It’s just too early to point to any of the communities and say, ‘Oh, they haven’t met their goals.’ Air quality does not change on a dime.”

An environmental justice advocate in Oakland, Margaret Gordon, agreed. “This is not instant. This is not Top Ramen.”

Even the law’s birth was contentious.

The legislation was framed as a companion to a bill extending the life of cap and trade, California’s trailblazing carbon market designed to reduce climate-warming emissions. Under cap and trade, companies operating refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities can buy or trade credits to meet a declining cap on greenhouse gases without cutting local pollution.

Environmental justice advocates fought the cap-and-trade extension, declaring it a “deal with the devil” that usurped local power to cut carbon emissions from industrial facilities like refineries. One analysis found that neighborhoods with increasing pollution during cap and trade’s early years were more likely home to people of color and people living in poverty.

The new law — less stringent than an earlier version that died in the Assembly — was supposed to end the unequal pollution burden.

Yet many residents and environmental justice advocates say the law pits disadvantaged communities against each other for selection in the program, and its effectiveness varies drastically by air district. In a UC Davis assessment, participants described a program that fails to provide adequate training for community members who may have language barriers and limited knowledge of topics like refinery flares and pollution controls for ships.

“This was like a beautiful thing that was going to bring us something into our communities to protect them from cap and trade, and also try to get the community involved,” said Magali Sanchez-Hall, an environmental activist and resident of Wilmington, in Los Angeles County. “That’s not what I have experienced, at all.”

The oil industry, a major source of industrial air pollution, has said it supports the intent of the environmental justice law. But at the negotiating table with legislators, it pushed back against stricter controls over pollution and later tried, but failed, to remove language in state guidelines that called for the “most stringent approaches for reducing emissions.”

State and local air regulators list frustrations of their own in implementing the law: insufficient funding, inadequate time to repair community relationships damaged over decades, and no new authority over local governments’ land-use decisions, such as warehouse construction.

“There is a tremendous amount of frustration between the various community groups and the district,” said Wayne Nastri, executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the powerful agency responsible for the air quality of about17 million people in the Los Angeles basin. “It’s difficult to put those programs together when there isn’t trust between the community groups and the regulators.”

Asthma, freeways and port pollution in Stockton

On the banks of the San Joaquin River sits Stockton, home to an inland port. Trucks roar over freeways that cleave a city spotted with heavy industry, creased by rail lines and ringed by farm fields.

Vehicles are a major source of smog and fine particles in South Stockton, with port-related operations accounting for about a quarter of the area’s dangerous diesel exhaust. Two of the 18 Stockton census tracts included in the state program are ranked within the top 1% of the most pollution-burdened areas in California. Eleven are in the top 25%.

Among the most racially diverse cities in the country, Stockton bears the scars of racial residential segregation and redlining. State and local officials plowed the Crosstown Freeway through communities of color, with demolitions and displacements starting in the late 1960s.

Among the neighborhoods crushed beneath freeway expansion was Little Manila, where only two of the original buildings in a once-vibrant Filipino American community remain.

Stockton neighborhoods, especially those near the freeways, have some of the highest rates of asthma-related emergency room visits in California.

Delvo, a second-generation Filipino American who co-founded Little Manila Rising, a community preservation group, is also fighting for clean air.

“It would be irresponsible for us to try to save these buildings and expect people to come here, when this,” said Delvo, gesturing at the freeway looming over him, his voice raised over the roaring trucks, “exists right here. And the fact is that there are families in this community that need to breathe this air.”

For Pana, the consequences of a childhood spent in South Stockton still linger. Her family moved there from the Philippines when she was 2 years old.

Pana has gone to the emergency room twice in just the past year for asthma attacks, and uses inhalers and other medications on a daily basis to keep her airways open.

“That’s just my life, and it was normalized,” said Pana, an aspiring social worker and former youth climate advocate with Little Manila Rising. “It’s not normal.”

Joining the Community Air Protection Program, however, hasn’t been the salve for generations of environmental racism that Pana, Delvo and others had hoped for.

Delvo once sat on the program’s community steering committee before a colleague took over the role. Now he wonders whether the law can ever really be effective, given its reliance on air districts like the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District that have long presided over some of the most polluted air in the country. At a board meeting, a top air district official called the committee merely a “consultative body” without “any direct authority.”

“I think the intention of the legislation is good,” Delvo said. “But once it comes into the hands of whatever local agency is controlling it, they control the outcome of it. That’s the problem. That’s why you have widespread marginalization, specifically in the Central Valley.”

The effort in Stockton has been plagued by delays and jurisdictional infighting. One example: A program to monitor the air at local schools that stalled after the Stockton Unified School District refused to host the devices, according to the air district. Stockton Unified representatives did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The biggest battle came when advocacy groups questioned a district program to provide $5 million to the port to help pay for cleaner equipment, tugboat engines and a pollution capture device for tankers.

After months of discussion with community activists, the South Coast Air Quality Management District committed to cutting smog-forming gases and sulfur from oil refineries in half by 2030, and in November set new mandates to eliminate up to eight tons a day of emissions from 16 oil refineries and other industrial plants.

The new rules, projected to cost the companies more than $2 billion, are intended to satisfy the environmental justice law’s requirement that industries accelerate installation of the best available technology to control smog-forming emissions and other pollution. They also play a key role in the Los Angeles basin’s latest efforts to comply with national health standards for smog — a half-century-long quest for the nation’s smoggiest region.

In their negotiations, oil companies asked the district to prove “both technical feasibility and cost effectiveness” and “provide a reasonable schedule” to install new technology on refinery heaters.

As a result, the timelines stretch to 2035 — far beyond the law’s Dec. 31, 2023, deadline. About half of the emissions reductions are expected by next year.

Another measure adopted last year takes aim at diesel exhaust and smog-forming gases from Southern California’s warehouses, a growing source in the San Bernardino area, which is another of the 15 communities in the state’s environmental justice program.

The Bay Area also enacted a rule last year to cut refinery pollution.

But in the Wilmington, Carson and West Long Beach area, advocates called the new refinery rule a limited victory that has taken, and will take, far too long.

Now all eyes have turned to pollution from the ports, where recent shipping backups have caused soot and smog to skyrocket. After years of negotiations with the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the air district board decided that if the port fails to come up with an acceptable clean-air plan by this Friday, the board will draft mandatory rules.

“It’s still a battle to get clean-air regulation,” said Chris Chavez, who grew up in West Long Beach and is now deputy policy director with the Coalition for Clean Air. “It’s just that we have a better shot at it now than we had a couple years ago.”

Community groups call for change

After more than four years, the law has reached an inflection point.

The People’s Blueprint, proposed by community groups and environmental advocates, seeks explicit new policies and training promoting equity and inclusion. It also calls for greater transparency and community control over budgets, and consequences for air districts that fail to show progress or act without community input.

State air board officials are reviewing the proposal, and plan to draft new guidelines expected to be considered next year. “There is nothing off the table,” the air board’s Reyes told CalMatters. “We really need to find ways to expand the benefits of the program … because it’s not sustainable, especially if the funding levels stay consistent in the way that they have.”

Millions of Californians live in thousands of census tracts the state considers disadvantaged, in part because they may bear disproportionate burdens of pollution. Focusing on only 15 communities “is not satisfying,” said Garcia, the original bill's author. “We’re leaving behind a bunch of potential communities, and they all deserve justice.”

Legislative efforts to tackle environmental justice more widely, however, have stalled.

Last year, Garcia introduced a bill barring refineries and other facilities that fail to promptly install the latest pollution-scrubbing technology from participating in cap and trade. Bills in the Senate and Assembly proposed adding environmental justice representatives to the Los Angeles basin air district’s board. Two more bills tried to take aim at industrial and warehouse expansion.

None succeeded, though some have already been revived for another pass through the Legislature.

In the meantime, residents across the state are still waiting to find out whether California’s landmark environmental justice law will make a difference in their daily lives.

If not, “then community members and organizations have to take matters into their own hands,” Pana said, standing outside her old school in Stockton. “We’re going to keep fighting for it.”