The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is launching a civil rights investigation into whether Alabama discriminated against Black residents when handing out funding for wastewater infrastructure.
The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice filed the complaint this spring, arguing Alabama’s policies for distributing money have made it difficult for people — particularly Black residents in the state's poverty-stricken Black Belt — to get help for onsite sanitation needs.
Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of The Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, said in a statement, “Sanitation is a basic human right that every person in this country, and in the state of Alabama, should have equal access to.
The EPA wrote in a Tuesday letter to the Alabama Department of Environmental Management it will investigate the complaint, specifically looking at implementation of the Clean Water State Revolving Fund and whether practices exclude or discriminate against "residents in the Black Belt region of Alabama, on the basis of race.”
