On September 6, the Sierra Club's Delaware Chapter received the Community Service Award from the Newark Branch of the NAACP at its 18th annual Freedom Fund Dinner. Above, that's Amy Roe, Conservation Co-Chair of the Delaware Chapter, receiving the award from Gary Hayman, president of the Newark Branch NAACP. The two organizations have been working together for decades on environmental justice issues.
"It's a tremendous honor to be recognized by the NAACP with this award," Roe says. "We began working together over contamination concerns at the Newark Housing Authority's Cleveland Heights public housing project, which was built on the former City of Newark landfill and wastewater treatment plant."
The EPA identified pollution concerns at the public housing project in the 1980s, and during the 2000s the project was evacuated. The Newark Housing Authority went through brownfields remediation and is now in the process of redeveloping the housing project. "Construction is underway, and we are continuing to work on the issue," says Roe.
More recently, the organizations teamed up to prevent the permitting of a tire incinerator in the town of New Castle. "Incinerators are banned in Delaware, and we worked together to build a coalition against the project," Roe says. "We submitted technical comments show that the proposed incinerator met the definition of the ban."
The incinerator facility would have been located right next to housing where most of the residents are people of color. The Secretary of the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control issued an opinion finding that the project did indeed fall under the incinerator ban and could not be permitted.
The NAACP was also one of the Delaware Chapter's coalition partners that opposed the construction of a new power plant on the University of Delaware campus in Newark. "We had a broad coalition of neighborhood, civic, environmental, and social justice groups working together to protect air quality in a community that many powerful elected officials chose as a 'sacrifice zone' for this power plant," Roe says.
In July, the university terminated the lease on the project, stating that the proposed 279-megawatt power plant "was not consistent with a first-class science and technology campus and high-quality development to which UD is committed." That's Roe, below, in action on the power plant campaign.
"The Delaware Sierra Club and the NAACP Newark Branch are modeling a solutions-oriented way forward for collaborative partnerships," says Leslie Fields, director of the Sierra Club's Environmental Justice and Community Partnerships program." Such partnerships should be lifted up more often in order to give hope to other communities. Congratulations to all involved and thanks for helping solve some of the most intractable environmental justice issues."