This event was the City Council meeting for the City of Santa Ana on february 15th 2022. The meeting took place in the city of Santa Ana council chambers. This meeting was organized by the city and city council. The purpose of this event was to award community members, pass agenda items, and listen to community concerns.
Council members Phan, Penaloza, Lopez, Barcerra, Hernandez, and Mendoza were all present along with Mayor Sarmiento. It is important to note that during agenda item number 26 Councilmember Phan left the chambers due to a formal complaint filed against her. During public comments on agenda item 26 Council members Hernandez and Penaloza left for unexplained reasons and missed the majority of public comments. Councilmemebr Lopez was not present for MPNA comments and a few oteh republic comments. I think that Councilmembrs Hernandez and Penaloza leaving during public comments on thai matter indicates a lack of interest and support for community members.
The most notable speakers at this event were community members who talked during public comments, city council, and the Mayor.
Many public comments were made on this matter with many written letters sent to the council which were not read during the meeting. The most notable public comments were made by the director of OCEJ, executive director of MPNA, attorney with the environmental law clinic at UCI,
Consensus amongst most commenters was that the city should not be moving forward with the GPU until they conduct better community engagement and address the EIJ in more detail.
After public comments the mayor started off the council comments by saying he was not prepared to move forward on the city plan. He did however say that he would like to move forward with the general plan by the next meeting. He explained how the council immediately stopped pushing the general plan when they received a letter from the attorney general telling the city they must engage with the community on EIJ concerns. He also pointed to how after this letter the council held hundreds of meetings with EJ groups. After saying these things he said that in all this time there has not been enough movement and at this point the EJ groups are delaying the city plan which has been nearly 7 years in the making. He finished by saying that the EJ groups are hurting the communities that they want to protect and that there will be one more meeting and we are done.
Council-member Bacerra said we need to pass the plan tonight and that two more weeks will not do anything. He said that the EJ groups keep demanding to move the goal post further and are not offering any solutions, all they want is more time.
Council-member Penaloza agreed with Bacerra’s statements and further stressed how the council has held hundreds of meetings. He stated that in all of these meetings all the EJ groups wanted was more time and when given the time they offered no solutions to EIJ.
Council-member Lopez did not want the plan to move forward. She cited lead pollution data sources to show how the city needs to do more in regard to the GPU. She said tha too many of her constituents have concerns over EJ in the city plan so she does not want the GPU to move forward.
Council-member Hernandez did not say a lot other than agreeing that the plan is taking too long and should be moved forward.
Council-member Mendoza agreed with Lopez in saying that the general plan does not cover enough EJ problems and said the plan should not move forward.
After these statements Council-member Penaloza then tried to present a notion to pass the general plan. Bacerra then said he would want to make some amendments first before passing the plan which was done on the spot. Most amendments changed some language in the GPU EJ section. The most notable amendment was the adding of a permanent EJ staffer on the city staff. After these amendments were made Penaloza attempted to pass the notion which failed with a 3-3 vote. Council-members Lopez, Mendoza and Mayor Sarminto voted against the notion.
The mayor stated the amendments were hastily put on the GPU and that the council needed to wait 30 days before passing the plan. With this the Mayor attempted to pass a notion giving EJ groups 30 days to come up with bullet points on what they wanted passed. This notion also failed with a 3-3 vote. Council-members Hernandez, Bacerra, and Penaloza voted against it.
This resulted in the agenda item to be later discussed at the next town council meeting.
Groups referred to by Councilmembers and the Mayor were Madison Park Neighborhood Association (MPNA), Orange County Environmental Justice (OCEJ), and the University of California, Irvine (UCI). EJ groups such as MPNA and OCEj were mentioned by council members to explain which groups they have worked with. The mayor called out these groups to identify the EJ group that must provide the council with bullet points on their concerns. The mayor also referenced UCI to explain his disappointment in the school and said that he would expect better from the institution.
Meetings with these EJ groups were also mentioned heavily from council members Bacerra, Pendaloza, and Mayor Sarmiento. The point of referencing these meetings was to show council has held hundreds of meetings with EJ groups and still have not been offered any solutions or given any ideas for what the city plan update (CPU) should have in its EJ section.
The concept of environmental justice was the most discussed concept.
Mayor Sarmiento said the city can not engage with all 330,000 citizens in Santa Ana when it comes to EJ concerns. This was in response to community comments saying that the city needed to better engage the city. They said that a poll that reached less than 1% of the population and was not in Spanish was not enough.
The city council meeting showed me which council-members were for or against EJ groups further delaying the plan in order to put in policies that would improve EJ in Santa Ana. It showed how the City Council as a whole is prepared to be done with the process of the GPU. Some council members however are more willing to give EJ groups time to send finishing touches to the council whereas some members want to pass the GPU as soon as possible.
“It is difficult to imagine any of these studies exerting as much of an impact on public discourse and policy as they did if they had not been closely connected to litigation, advocacy, and regulatory interest in addressing the emerging issue of environmental justice.” (6)
“EJ scholarship has uncovered environmental and health disparities based not only on race, class, and gender, but also on ethnicity, nationality, indigenous status, immigration and citizenship status, sexual orientation, age, and the intersections among these categories (Nyseth-Brehm & Pellow, 2014; Chakraborty, Collins, & Grineski, 2016; Gaard, 2018). Activists are increasingly appealing to these diverse axes of identity to mobilize broad-based organizing on environmental, healthcare, and immigration policies (Hestres & Nisbet, 2018).” (9)
“In Europe, EJ is often seen as an extension of protections for human rights, including rights of access to environmental information, participation in decision making, and access to the courts, which are enshrined in the United Nations Economic Convention for Europe’s1998 Aarhus Convention (Mason, 2010). In the global South, EJ issues are more often framed as matters of climate justice, participatory and sustainable development and conservation, indigenous and women’s rights, food and energy sovereignty, workplace safety and health, or the environmentalism of the poor (Carmin & Agyeman, 2011; Carruthers, 2008; Martinez-Alier, 2002; Reed & George, 2018; Walker, 2012).” (10)
“The goals of community-engaged scholarship are the generation, exchange and application of mutually beneficial and socially useful knowledge and practices developed through active partnerships between the academy and the community (Engagement Scholarship Consortium, 2018).” (11)
“A more inclusive scholarly process is crucial for strengthening marginalized groups’ rights to access and create knowledge that can help build their power to influence regulation, policy, and institutional practices. ES is scholarship “done with, rather than for or on, a community” (Furco, 2005, p. 10), and this is reason alone to prefer ES to other modes of inquiry into EJ.” (15)
“Ensuring that map making is a democratic process owned and controlled by community members requires that local people, not outside researchers, define the geographic or other boundaries over what counts as part of the “community.””(29)
“EJ research can also ground-truth existing regulatory data that is out-of-date or incomplete, especially emissions data that is reported by industry. In addition, ground-truthing can show how environmental standards for broad geographic areas can fail to protect EJ communities from pollution hot spots that exceed those standards.” (31)
“Data scientists can also use large data sets and algorithms to develop new measures of environmental and social inequities. For example, a team led by researchers at the University of Minnesota recently created a “pollution inequity” metric, which measures the difference between the environmental health damage caused and experienced by a group or individual...” (33)
“While real-time analysis of crowdsourced data can help track the immediate effects of environmental disasters, it may not be as useful for documenting long-term, cumulative toxic exposures typical of many EJ issues. … Much of that expertise is concentrated in corporate, government, and academic institutions, which may be unable or unwilling to collaborate with community-based EJ organizations. EJ researchers could play a valuable role in helping to foster big data literacy…” (33)
“EJ storytelling is a means of gathering testimonial evidence for research and organizing (Evans, 2002). Stories are a grassroots form of making meaning that is often more accessible and immediate in its impacts than academic research, building commitment to collective action (Newman, 2012). Storytelling lends itself to communicating complex causality in a form that can be more memorable than scientific data (Griffiths, 2007).” (34)
In the “Introduction” and “Foundations” sections, the author describes the utility of an “engaged scholarship” approach to academic environmental justice research and outlines several models for engaged scholarship. These models lie along the spectra of the apolitical to the political, and include different types of development, types of engagement, and types of expertise. The author argues in favor of an engaged scholarship approach to EJ as a way to root EJ research in actual EiJ problems and EJ needs. Note that the author defines EJ with the four dimensions of distributive justice, procedural justice, process justice, and restorative/corrective justice.
The sections II. METHODS and III. CHALLENGES AND RESPONSES detail methods and potential pitfalls in engaged scholarship with local communities. Methods can include: investment in easy-to-use and low cost technologies for citizen science uses (e.g., online mapping tools, low cost air quality monitoring devices), using storytelling methods for cultural research and to advance EJ goals, and adequately training and preparing researchers for community collaborations (see Hyde (2017) framework on pg. 38). Pitfalls can include: scholars assuming homogeneity in a community, tensions between community goals and academic goals (e.g., scholarly productivity vs. community education), and limitations imposed by academic IRBs for collaboration. The author provides several examples of community collaboration focus, with an apparent focus on citizen science/crowdsourced data collection efforts.
The examples of community and participatory-based work in action can be used to talk about the importance of qualitative data and how to frame people without formal scientific training as experts and engaged researchers.
I am curious if theater of the oppressed has been used in STEM and/or environmental education? Found the following
Raphale’s call for future research along the following lines: systems thinking, investigation into why things work and fail, how aspirations of collaborative projects are met and unmet, how indeterminacy and complexity characterize participatory action and research–are questions that I am interrogating through my research as well.