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The LDEQ’s organizational predecessor was founded as the Stream Control Commission (SCC) in 1940. 

The death of a young man in Iberville Parish later spurred the formation of the Department of Environmental Quality. In 1978, 19-year-old Kirtley Jackson died from hydrogen sulfide fumes from an unlicensed hazardous waste pit. In 1983, the Louisiana Environmental Quality Act authorized the established of LDEQ. 

In 1988, environmental scientist Paul Templet was appointed to head the LDEQ by Gov. Buddy Roemer. At the time, the first annual National Toxics Release Inventory had just been released and Louisiana was listed as one of the worst offenders. Templet and Roemer worked with the Legislature to pass a law “requiring that toxic pollution statewide be cut in half over a decade, a goal Louisiana industry met and exceeded” (Russell 2019). Templet developed a plan to create environmental scorecards tied to tax incentives and other incentives. Under Templet, LDEQ took action to protect human health from pollution. For instance, LDEQ fined and revoked a permit from Marine Shale Processors, a company using dangerous industrial waste in an area of St. Mary Parish with a cluster of rare pediatric cancers. Templet describes his work in LDEQ in “Defending the Public Domain: Pollution, Subsidies and Poverty” (2001). In this paper, Templet includes data showing how investment and jobs in Louisiana increased as pollution declined (contrary to common industry warnings). 

The president of Marine Shale Processors ultimately spent $400,000 on ads against Roemer in the 1991 gubernatorial primary. Roemer ended up in third place behind Edwin Edwards and white supremacist David Duke.

Dr. Paul Templet Interview. 1988. Louisiana: The State We’re In.  PBS Digital Collection. http://ladigitalmedia.org/video_v2/asset-detail/LSWI-1116-05_Templet. 

Russell, Gordon. 2019. “How an Environmental Regulator Became Known for Protecting Industry.” ProPublica. December 19, 2019. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-an-environmental-regulator-became-known-for-protecting-industry.

Kaare Johnson Talks. 2023. “Dr. Paul Templet, Former Head of La DEQ Joins Kaare To Discuss Lack of Enforcement And More!” Streamed on Sep 11, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-8jJtKRI2w. 

Templet, Paul H. 2001. “Defending the Public Domain: Pollution, Subsidies and Poverty.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.333280.

The department is divided into the following entities:

The Office of the Secretary

The Office of Management and Finance

The Office of Environmental Services

The Office of Environmental Compliance

The Office of Environmental Assessment

Regional Offices in Baton Rouge, Harahan, Bayou Lafourche, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Alexandria, Monroe, and Shreveport. 

Aurelia Skipwith Giacometto was just appointed by the Landry administration as DEQ Secretary. She formerly served in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (2020-2021) under the Trump administration. Prior to these positions, she worked as an executive for Mosanto Co. and has played an active role in pushing back on environmental justice efforts and climate science (e.g. contributing to leading the Steamboat Institute, a nonprofit against climate change science). She is also part of the advisory board of Collossal BioSciences, a company specializing in genetic engineering that is attempting to resurrect the woolly mammoth (O’Donoghue 2023). Giacometto’s predecessor, Chuck Carr Brown, was a former Exxon employee.

O’Donoghue, Julie, Louisiana Illuminator November 15, and 2023. 2023. “Jeff Landry Picks Former Trump Official, First Black Woman for Environmental Post.” Louisiana Illuminator (blog). November 15, 2023. https://lailluminator.com/2023/11/15/landry-environment/.

A survey of DEQ employees conducted by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor Office in 2006 revealed the department’s challenges with poor communication and knowledge infrastructure. Employees noted in the survey a need for better mechanisms through which to share information within LDEQ (“about who does what and other issues”) and better training for new employees. 

Louisiana Legislative Auditor. 2006. “Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.”

https://app2.lla.state.la.us/publicreports.nsf/0/bbc259a7e7a73cfa8625713b002c8e7b/$file/00001572.pdf?openelement&.7773098.

"In response to growing public pressure, state legislators created the Stream Control Commission (SCC) in 1940. It advocated cooperation as a way to retain industries and protect their payrolls, and it relied in part on industrial expertise to set pollution thresholds. Touting its early accomplishments, the SCC claimed its policy resulted in an “almost 100% correction of that [pollution] from oil refineries.”13 Thus on the eve of the wartime industrial build up, the state admitted that refiners had created pollution but claimed that the SCC was an effective response and had pollution under control.” (Colten 2012, 96)

 "By the early 1950s the SCC suggested that pollution was only noticeable during low-river stages and that “little remains to complain about regarding the effluent coming from this [Baton Rouge Esso] plant.” Such positions accommodated industry’s continuing reliance on the river as a waste disposal sink.14” (Colten 2012, 96-97)

“Escalating pollution problems, however, exposed the inadequacies of the system and prompted a series of water-quality investigations. Federal studies in the 1950s asserted that pollution was a pressing problem, but the prevailing view among state officials was that pollution was a limited, localized issue; their permitting and enforcement actions, which did little to impede uncontrolled discharges to the river, reflected this perception. The state’s lackluster response continued into the 1960s. Following an industrial spill that contaminated public water supplies in 1960, the state created a warning system that placed the burden on water-supply operators to close their intakes and imposed no penalties or new requirements on industries responsible for spills.15” (Colten 2012, 97)

“A major fish kill during the winter of 1963–1964 created a nationally significant event that served as the tipping point for a policy shift. Endrin, an agricultural chemical used in sugarcane fields in south Louisiana, was responsible for an estimated 5 million fish deaths that winter. Louisiana officials were unable to pinpoint the source and requested assistance from the U.S. Public Health Service. The federal investigation pointed toward an Endrin manufacturer far upriver in Memphis, Tennessee, not lower-river sugar planters or grinding mills. Occurring shortly after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), this event captured public attention. Congress conducted hearings on the calamity, and the Public Health Service convened a public conference on interstate pollution of the lower Mississippi. This event transformed public and government opinions about the scale of pollution and recast lower–Mississippi River pollution as a regional problem that could harm people, not just fish.16” (Colten 2012, 97)

“Industrial pollution came under even more intense scrutiny in 1974 when a national exposé reported that the New Orleans water supply contained cancer-causing organic chemicals and that the city’s residents had a history of above-average cancer rates. The exposé sparked a debate among Louisiana officials and garnered considerable national attention as it cast the Mississippi River as a waterway sacrificed for industrial gain.” (Colten 2012, 97)

“By the 1990s the Baton Rouge–New Orleans industrial corridor stood out as one of the most prominent zones of chemical plant explosions. In addition to the threat from a deadly chlorine leak when a barge sank during Hurricane Betsy in 1965, major explosions at the Shell refinery at Norco (in 1979 and 1988) and at the Exxon (former Standard) refinery at Baton Rouge (in 1989) caused fatalities and inflicted damage on neighboring communities.7” (Colten 2012, 94)

Craig E. Colten. 2012. "An Incomplete Solution: Oil and Water in Louisiana." Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 1, June 2012, Pages 91–99, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas023.

In the years following Gov. Buddy Roemer and Paul Templet’s leadership of the DEQ, “Louisiana has not seen a governor make environmental protection a priority” (Russell 2019). Templet was replaced with Kai Midboe, an attorney who had formerly represented the gas and oil industry. The environmental scorecard program ended. In 2008, Bobby Jindal became governor and cut 300 positions from the department. 

Between 2008 and 2018, Louisiana reduced environmental protection program funding by 35% and reduced its staffing by 30% (Environmental Integrity Project 2019). A 2021 legislative audit of LDEQ found that “DEQ faces challenges related to low staffing levels, high workloads, frequent turnover of staff, and ineffective data systems that make it more difficult to perform its regulatory work. For example, DEQ’s positions dedicated to air quality regulation decreased 14.6%, from 247 in fiscal year 2010 to 211 in 2019.” (Louisiana Legislative Auditor 2021).

Today, LDEQ explicitly avoids use of the term “Cancer Alley,” according to the department spokesperson Greg Langley: “ ‘That term implies that there is a large geographic area that has higher cancer incidence than the state average. We have not seen higher cancer incidence over large areas of the industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.’ ”—this, despite the data from the EPA showing that almost every census tract in the area is ranked in the top 5% nationally for cancer risk as a result of toxic air pollution (LaRose 2024).  

 “The Thin Green Line.” Environmental Integrity Project. December 5, 2019.

Russel, Gordon. 2019. “How an Environmental Regulator Became Known for Protecting Industry.” ProPublica. December 19, 2019. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-an-environmental-regulator-became-known-for-protecting-industry.

Kaare Johnson Talks. 2023. “Dr. Paul Templet, Former Head of La DEQ Joins Kaare To Discuss Lack of Enforcement And More!” Streamed on Sep 11, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-8jJtKRI2w. 

Templet, Paul H. 2001. “Defending the Public Domain: Pollution, Subsidies and Poverty.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.333280.

LaRose, Greg, Louisiana Illuminator February 1, and 2024. 2024. “DEQ Remains in Denial over ‘Cancer Alley’ Industry Correlations.” Louisiana Illuminator (blog). February 1, 2024. https://lailluminator.com/2024/02/01/cancer-alley-3/. 

Louisiana Legislative Auditor. 2021. “Monitoring and Enforcement of Air Quality. Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.” https://app2.lla.state.la.us/publicreports.nsf/0/bbc259a7e7a73cfa8625713b002c8e7b/$file/00001572.pdf?openelement&.7773098. 

Currently, LDEQ appears limited in its capacities to advance justice and good governance. A 2022 study conducted by Tulane University’s  Kimberly Terrell and Gianna St. Julien “found that from 2019 to 2021, LDEQ permitted industrial emissions of pollution that were 7 to 21 times higher among Black communities than in predominantly white ones” (Rose 2024). The same year,  local environmental justice groups filed complaints with the EPA declaring that the LDEQ was complicit in racial discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. The EPA opened a civil rights investigation to examine permitting practices in Louisiana and began developing an agreement with LDEQ mandating investigations into current exposure to air pollutants alongside social and health vulnerability indicators. However, in June 2023, former State Attorney General and current governor Jeff Landry opened a lawsuit against the EPA, arguing that any civil rights investigation required evidence of intended discrimination before it could be allowed to proceed. In the lawsuit, “discrimination” was framed in a way that reduced racism to individual bias and behavior, thereby obfuscating the structural and systemic arrangements of racial differentiation and discrimination that have persisted over time. Following Landry’s lawsuit, the EPA investigation closed before releasing any findings or finalizing the agreement with LDEQ. This chain of events has important implications for environmental justice cases across the United States and could produce a “chilling effect”—e.i. curbing the EPA’s ability to conduct Civil Rights Act investigations in other states (Nolan 2024).

Nolan, Delaney. 2024. “The EPA Is Backing Down From Environmental Justice Cases Nationwide.” The Intercept. January 20, 2024. https://theintercept.com/2024/01/19/epa-environmental-justice-lawsuits/.

“DEQ and other state agencies have largely reduced the process to a checklist sloughed onto permit applicants, who, like Research Associates, Inc., are hardly objective about the impacts of their own proposals.” (Houck 441)

Houck, O. A. (2012). "Save ourselves: the environmental case that changed louisiana." Louisiana Law Review, 72(2), 409-442. 

“DEQ does not issue enforcement actions in a timely manner to permitted facilities that violate air permit requirements. From fiscal years 2015 through 2019, the time it took DEQ to issue enforcement actions increased by 102.1%, from an average of 289 days to an average of 585 days. As a result, there is a risk that facilities may have violations that remain uncorrected for years.” (Louisiana Legislative Auditor 2021, 11)

“We also found that DEQ does not always address violations until years after the violation occurred, which further delays enforcement. “ (Louisiana Legislative Auditor 2021, 13)

"DEQ does not effectively track the penalties it has assessed and whether facilities have paid their penalties.” (Louisiana Legislative Auditor 2021, 14)

Louisiana Legislative Auditor. 2021. “Monitoring and Enforcement of Air Quality. Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.” https://app2.lla.state.la.us/publicreports.nsf/0/bbc259a7e7a73cfa8625713b002c8e7b/$file/00001572.pdf?openelement&.7773098. 

Nolan, Delaney. 2024. “The EPA Is Backing Down From Environmental Justice Cases Nationwide.” The Intercept. January 20, 2024. https://theintercept.com/2024/01/19/epa-environmental-justice-lawsuits/.

LaRose, Greg, Louisiana Illuminator February 1, and 2024. 2024. “DEQ Remains in Denial over ‘Cancer Alley’ Industry Correlations.” Louisiana Illuminator (blog). February 1, 2024. https://lailluminator.com/2024/02/01/cancer-alley-3/.

Laughland, Oliver, and Delaney Nolan. 2024. “‘Certainly Intimidation’: Louisiana Sues EPA for Emails of Journalists and ‘Cancer Alley’ Residents.” The Guardian, February 2, 2024, sec. US news. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/02/louisiana-sues-epa-emails-journalists-cancer-alley-residents.

O’Donoghue, Julie, Louisiana Illuminator November 15, and 2023. 2023. “Jeff Landry Picks Former Trump Official, First Black Woman for Environmental Post.” Louisiana Illuminator (blog). November 15, 2023. https://lailluminator.com/2023/11/15/landry-environment/.