Evanston adopts Environmental Justice Resolution
Image via Wikimedia
On Monday, September 14, the Evanston City Council voted 8-0 in favor of adopting an environmental justice resolution. The resolution acknowledges the disproportionate effects of environmental issues on communities of color in the Evanston area, and outlines actions to correct these injustices.
The Evanston City Council, Citizens’ Greener Evanston, Environmental Justice Evanston, and the City's Equity and Empowerment Commission and Environment Board collaborated to write this resolution. Actions that the resolution outlines are increasing public engagement on environmental issues, including environmental justice in Evanston policy, code, ordinance, and decision making, and creating and maintaining a geographic information system (GIS) mapping tool that identifies factors of environmental issues in areas of Evanston.
“For example, it may identify on the map where polluting factories or businesses are,” said Rick Nelson, co-chair of Environmental Justice Evanston. “The City may go ‘Well, do we want to keep allowing more and more companies to move into this specific area?’”
Prior to the City Council meeting, the resolution also passed in the Planning and Development Committee.
“[The resolution] was highly vetted. We had taken this thing through a lot of iterations,” Nelson said. “That, I believe, is why it, unanimously, in both of those meetings, passed.”
Although the resolution passed unanimously, it did face quite an elongated process before it got to this point.
“There’s kind of been a lot of starts and stops, and hiccups along the way,” Nelson said. “We probably would have had this done five months earlier, as far as the resolution being adopted, if the coronavirus hadn’t happened.”
The coronavirus put this environmental justice resolution on hold, but other circumstances elongated the process of adopting this resolution before the pandemic hit. Several years ago, Environmental Justice Evanston started their policy writing goals with the idea of a city ordinance.
Local activists and community members birthed the idea of an environmental justice ordinance soon after the City of Evanston invited them to create a committee on environmental justice. The committee, Environmental Justice Evanston, aimed to address environmental justice issues, participate in community advocacy, and write policy on these issues. For the first year or so of their operation, they focused on creating this ordinance, but moved away from this to focus on community advocacy.
Environmental Justice eventually moved back towards their policy writings goals, but progress was slow.
“We had a couple of people within the City who we were working with that were very busy, so we kind of weren’t making great progress,” Nelson said. “We were kind of holding out hope that they were going to be able to help us as partners, and then both of them left the City.”
After another period of slowed advancement, receiving feedback from Evanston groups, and making edits, Environmental Justice Evanston partnered about a year ago with Director of Community Development Johanna Leonard and Sustainability Coordinator Kumar Jensen.
“They kind of knew all the steps that we really needed to do, as far as who to meet with, in what order,” Nelson said. “They actually helped us with language in the resolution. That was a huge step for us.”
The decision ultimately was made to write a resolution before an ordinance. The resolution lays out the terms, ideas, and goals for a potential ordinance to come in the future.