The Biden administration is kicking off a new initiative this week to ensure the poorest communities in the United States have access to billions of infrastructure bill funding to replace their crumbling wastewater, drinking water and stormwater systems.
It represents a mid-term adjustment to President Biden’s signature administration performance, with the goal of accelerating aid to local governments that lack the staff and know-how to apply for $55 billion in funding for water projects tucked away in the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which expired in November.
On Tuesday, top officials from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture will unveil a plan to provide technical assistance to 11 impoverished communities in the South, Appalachians and tribal areas.
The announcement will take place in Lowndes County, Ala., a 1960s civil rights battleground where more than half of residents have no access to functional septic or municipal wastewater systems. Hundreds of people, almost all black, resort to homemade ‘straight pipes’, which pump raw sewage into their gardens, nearby creeks and the streets.
“In all my travels, the time I spent in Lowndes County has been daunting and frankly very hard to handle,” said Michael S. Regan, the EPA administrator, who has been touring the country as part of the government’s environmental justice initiative.
“This is an environment where kids play in the same yard with raw sewage, houses where garbage ends up in people’s tubs and the sinks where they do their dishes,” added Mr. Regan, a former North Carolina environmental officer who is the first black man leading the EPA “These are really, really tough experiences.”
In a statement, Mr Biden said: “This is the United States of America: No one should have raw sewage in their backyard or seep into their home.”
The government will focus its aid on communities in seven states: Alabama’s Lowndes and Greene counties; Bolivar County, Mississippi; Doña Ana County and Santo Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico; Duplin and Halifax Counties in North Carolina; Harlan County, Kentucky; McDowell and Raleigh County in West Virginia; and the San Carlos Apache tribe in Arizona.
Initial funding for the effort is approximately $5 million. But Mitch Landrieu, a former New Orleans mayor who oversees infrastructure law coordination for Mr. Biden, said the move was a major shift that would give local officials greater access to a wide range of aid.
Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, said his ultimate goal was to eliminate the benefits some counties have in gaining access to a wide variety of federal aid programs. “They need to learn how to play the game,” he said. “And they have to learn to play the game on multiple levels, with multiple departments.”
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Beginning this month, experts from the EPA and the Department of Agriculture will work directly with local officials to prepare needs assessments and project lists, prepare the detailed proposals demanded by state governments, and ensure projects are executed efficiently.
The idea for the change, Mr Landrieu said, came from Mr Biden. In January, while on Air Force One, he read an article in DailyExpertNews documenting the problems in Lowndes County. He then instructed his assistants to make sure the issues were resolved “right now,” Mr. Landrieu and Mr. Vilsack said.
“You can’t just send money and hope that the states and the locals come together,” Mr Landrieu added. “It’s important to be on the ground to be sure.”
Environmentalists, who have been urging federal officials for years to take a more active role in helping these regions, said the initiative was welcome news but wouldn’t work long-term unless the White House remained involved indefinitely.
“I think this is the beginning, and only a first step, and not an end in itself,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, an Alabama and MacArthur resident, whose 2020 book “Waste” highlighted the Lowndes County sanitation crisis.
Ms Flowers said she wanted to see Mr Biden’s team move forward and urged them to require all new plumbing systems to come with a 10-year money-back guarantee to ensure they don’t fail. in the harsh conditions.
“We need to have sustainable solutions to climate change,” said Ms Flowers. “But we also need to make sure that the people down here have access to the same infrastructure as rich families.”
If any part of the country can see transformational benefits from the infrastructure law, it’s Alabama’s Black Belt, an expanse of 17 counties named for the loamy soil that once made it a center of slave-labor cotton production.
About $25 billion is being allocated to replace failing drinking water systems in cities like Flint, Mich., and Jackson, Miss., which received a lot of attention on the water quality portion of the bill. The measure also includes $11.7 billion in new funding to upgrade municipal sewage and drainage systems, septic tanks and clustered systems for small communities.
The main channel for the money is an existing loan program that has been retrofitted to allow communities to waive debt repayments, turning the funding into a grant.
While the revolving loan fund is generally considered a successful program, a survey last year by the Environmental Policy Innovation Center and the University of Michigan found that many states were less likely to raise revolving loans on behalf of poor communities with larger minorities.
According to the program’s annual reports, Alabama’s revolving loan fund has funded few projects in this part of the state in recent years, other than a major upgrade of the Selma sewage system.
The state government in Montgomery has done little over the years to address the problems in Lowndes and the neighboring counties. In November, citing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice opened an investigation into allegations that Alabama had discriminated against black residents of Lowndes County by providing them with “reduced access to adequate sanitation.”
In the Black Belt, the destructive legacy of racism—slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, malicious neglect by white politicians—is as much present as the dense, coal-hard soil of the areas. The soil is inviting yet unforgiving, ideal for growing cash crops but too impenetrable for water flow to accommodate standard septic systems.
“When we think of the atrocities we’ve seen in the Black Belt,” Mr. Regan said, his voice trailing off. “Let me say this: all these people have a certain income and a certain race. We have to recognize that systemic racism still exists.”
