Most people who pay attention to local news have heard the word “seeker” used often in the back-and-forth of municipal affairs, especially by planning boards. Most of them probably know that what “seeker” stands for is the State Environmental Quality Review Act, or SEQR as it’s commonly acronymized. (Yes, it probably should be SEQRA, and your Editorial Team has heard it referred to that way, but SEQR wins both on economy of syllables and popular usage. More about how language is a creature of community assent rather than a thing dictated from above by pedants and grammar nerds will be in an upcoming editorial.)

What SEQR does is mandate a process to identify and gauge potential harms to the environment which may lurk in any application before your friendly local planning board for site plan approval. While it’s often charged with dampening development by pouring a bucket of burdensome regulations and expensive requirements on proposals, it also plays a huge part in protecting our communities from pollution. The Town of Woodstock has gone so far as to adopt its own EQR law, colloquially known as TWEQR, or “tweaker.” (We imagine that developers who have to deal with its legendary specificity might suspect its authors of crystal meth use ... ) Anyone who works with SEQR or writes about it knows how big a role it plays in the approval process, and how what the law calls a “positive” environmental impact is anything but.

So it was with interest that we read about a new area of scrutiny which state regulators are looking to add to SEQR: environmental justice. Put simply, environmental justice is the acknowledgement that environmentally harmful projects have historically been disproportionally placed where marginalized communities live, and an acknowledgment that it must stop happening. Examples include the water woes in Flint, Mich., the PCB dumping in black neighborhoods of Warren County, N.C. and how air pollution in certain South Bronx neighborhoods is so bad that they’ve come to be called “asthma alleys.”

According to a map on the city website, Kingston has two “potential environmental justice areas” — a vaguely crown-shaped polygon centered around Broadway and Cornell Street in Midtown and a lobster claw-shaped area in Rondout running east from Route 9W through Ponckhockie and all the way out to Kingston Point. The areas are also scattered around Ulster County, according to this map on the county website.

They’re largely where you might think they’d be, and in a few places — the aforementioned Town of Woodstock, for instance — you might not. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that much of the Village of Ellenville and Town of Wawarsing are depicted as either “potential environmental justice areas” or “disadvantaged communities.” Economically speaking, those locales on the far side of the county have been down so goddamned long that anything looks like up to them, including the first wave of gentrifiers which are beginning to make themselves known. (Thinking of how the Stockade used to look 20 years ago will give you a pretty decent idea of how the village looks today; we’ll let you know when people start making “Don’t Brooklyn Ellenville stickers.)

It's beyond our scope to try to predict how adding environmental justice rules to SEQR will affect everybody. This current push is a result of a state law that went into effect two years ago, so we think these changes are inevitable, unless there’s a Republican governor in Albany in 2027.

What we will predict is that these new rules will only make the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency’s attempt to place a new landfill in Wawarsing harder by placing another hurdle in its path. Might UCRRA try to come up with a site plan application right away to get it filed before the environmental justice SEQR rules go into effect, so as to potentially avoid this sensitive and potentially project-dooming topic? Or is the landfill by definition environmentally unjust by its very placement in the county’s most economically distressed township?

How environmental injustice happens is people who need to place toxic [fill in the blank] choose to put it in a place where the people are the least equipped to effectively protest against it. This reminds us of comments made earlier in this process to the effect of ruling out alternate landfill sites in Plattekill. Said UCRRA Executive Director Marc Rider at a presentation last year before the Wawarsing Town Board, “While the Cornerstone Study identified two sites in the Town of Plattekill as ‘technically feasible,’ my review of the pros and cons of these two sites suggests that they are not likely to be successful in the permitting and entitlement process due to a variety of factors.” We cannot help but think one of those factors is an active community uprising currently battling against a proposed “big box” warehouse project.

As we have noted before, 10 years is not a long time at all when it comes to getting a project like a landfill approved. At some point soon, the gloves are going to have to come off and Wawarsing will be told, in no uncertain terms and community protest notwithstanding, that they’re getting the landfill. Then we’ll see how environmental justice works in Ulster County.