EPA opens civil rights probe into Alabama’s management of sewage infrastructure funds

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will investigate possible racial discrimination in Alabama’s management of funds that can be used to bolster sewage infrastructure.

In a notice issued Tuesday, the Biden administration said it will look into whether the state excludes residents from participating in its water infrastructure program or denies them benefits on the basis of race. 

The decision comes after civil rights and environmental groups accused Alabama of discriminating against Black residents through the management of its clean water funds. 

Their complaint states that Alabama makes it “impossible for people who need help with onsite sanitation to access this money” — a problem that “disproportionately harm[s] Alabama’s Black residents.”

Specifically, they say that Alabama’s Department of Environmental Management blocks access to the funds in a number of ways, including not considering financial need, conducting “inadequate” outreach to disadvantaged communities and giving few points in its scoring system to people who use at-home sewer systems rather than public systems. 

In doing so, they argue that the state perpetuates harms caused by sewage exposure and denies “Black residents an equal opportunity to compete for federal funding.”

The fact that the EPA is investigating does not mean that the allegations will be substantiated. In fact, the EPA recently dropped a civil rights probe into Louisiana, saying it did not find civil rights violations there.

Under the Biden administration, EPA Administrator Michael Regan has toured a number of states, looking to address racial and other forms of inequality linked to environmental issues.

The state of Alabama disagrees with the allegations underlying the agency’s newest probe. 

Alabama has “made addressing the wastewater and drinking water needs of disadvantaged communities a priority” in awarding federal funding, said M. Lynn Battle, a spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, in an email. 

Battle said that in 2022, 34 percent of the wastewater and drinking water funding awarded by the agency went to communities in the Black Belt region — the one that the civil rights complaint says is facing harms.  

She said the department “recognizes the challenges faced by poor, disadvantaged and minority communities due to inadequate resources” and welcomes “the opportunity to provide information to EPA to counter the allegations in the complaints and to answer any questions the federal agency might have.”

Alabama’s Black Belt region stretches across several southern-central counties of the state. It is named for its dark, fertile soil. It has a significant African American and low-income population. 

“A lot of people lack access to a centralized wastewater treatment system and so they have either septic systems that don’t work and are failing or in many cases, people discharge the sewage from their homes in what’s called a ‘straight pipe,’ which just dumps the sewage, untreated, into their yard,” said Becky Hammer, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups who complained. 

The complaint says that the smell of sewage in the area can be “a near-constant nuisance” and that rain can mean that there will be a sewage backup into peoples’ homes. 

“Other residents bar their children from playing in their yards because of the risk of exposure to human waste,” it states. 

The sewage problem has also come under criticism from the United Nations, and a representative in 2017 described seeing “various houses in rural areas that were surrounded by cesspools of sewage that flowed out of broken or non-existent septic systems.”

In that statement, Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said “the problem doesn’t appear on the political or governmental radar screen” since most of the impacted residents are Black. 

The Justice Department in 2021 launched a separate investigation into accusations of discrimination amid sewage-related issues in the state. It settled that case earlier this year, requiring Alabama’s Department of Public Health to create a plan to improve access to adequate sanitation in the Black Belt’s Lowndes County. 

Hammer noted that the case in question did not deal with water infrastructure funds, which the current probe does. 

“What we’re asking for is for changes in how Alabama runs the Clean Water State Revolving Fund program,” she said.