This story was updated at 2:20 p.m. EDT.
EPA has opened a new civil rights probe into Alabama’s environmental agency, with a focus on allegedly discriminatory Clean Air Act permitting practices near a predominantly Black neighborhood in Mobile.
In a complaint initially filed last year, a coalition of groups had challenged the state’s decision to renew air permits for five local industrial plants in a one-week span “without meaningful consideration of the disparate impact” of their emissions on nearby communities, including the area known as Africatown.
In now agreeing to investigate, EPA will examine whether that run of permitting renewals illegally discriminated against Africatown residents, according to a letter this week from the agency’s Office of External Civil Rights Compliance to the Alabama Department of Environmental Management.
