Cover Story: The Color of Air

Residents of Winton Hills live within walls of pollution. To the north and east are Interstate 75 and a row of industrial plants. Between Este Avenue and the Mill Creek, the factories produce food additives, adhesives, solvents and a variety of other substances and products.

To the north, also on Este Avenue, are two garbage landfills: the Center Road landfill, a city operation that closed 25 years ago; and the ELDA landfill, shut down in 1998. Both release methane gas, much of which is burned off or harvested.

For 21 years Linda Briscoe has lived in Winton Terrace, one of two Winton Hills public housing projects owned by the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA). In the course of two decades of off-the-cuff environmental education, Briscoe’s been to Mississippi, Louisiana and other hot spots in the environmental justice movement.

But what she’s seen elsewhere doesn’t compare to her neighborhood, she says.

“Nowhere (else) have I seen this many people living so close to a landfill and so many chemical companies close by,” Briscoe says. “We call it the ‘toxic donut.’

We’re surrounded.”

Winton Terrace and its companion project, Finlater Gardens, are two of CMHA’s most popular communities. Their 1,168 apartments are on bus lines close to jobs and were extensively renovated in the early 1990s. Sometimes apartments are rented even before they’re vacant.

But the 2,000 or so people living in or near the projects are also in the middle of what might be the most regularly polluted part of Cincinnati. When it comes to pollution, Lower Price Hill is Winton Hills’ only rival. Both neighborhoods have mostly poor residents. The vast majority in Winton Hills are black, the vast majority in Lower Price Hill are white or Hispanic.

All of the major companies in and near Winton Hills have air pollution permits from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA). None of the companies in Hamilton County exceeded the limits of their permits in 2000, according to OEPA spokesman Andy Thompson.

But a better way to put it is no companies have told OEPA they exceeded their permits. The agency relies on companies to report their pollution releases under the Toxic Release Inventory.

But what about the combined effect of having two landfills and approximately 40 companies that release pollution within two Winton Hills zip codes? Is it unreasonable to assume all this affects the health of residents?

“That’s kind of the question that plagues a lot of the controversies,” says John Delicath, who teaches a course on environmental justice at the University of Cincinnati.

Reluctant dog, little bite
In 1983 the U.S. General Accounting Office found that most hazardous waste sites in the country are in low-income communities, according to Delicath. In 1987 the United Church of Christ in New York found that also to be true for minority communities, according to the report “Toxic Waste in the United States.” Three out of five blacks and Hispanics in the United States live in communities with hazardous waste sites.

Those studies and others propelled activists and residents to begin working to prevent already-polluted communities from receiving more pollution. Environmental justice is the name of a growing movement to provide healthy environments to all.

In 1994 President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to use the concept of environmental justice in decision making. In 1997 the city of Cincinnati adopted a similar policy for city-financed projects. The city used environmental justice in its decision to exclude Winton Hills as the site for a city-owned transfer station, according to Dennis Murphey, director of the city’s Office of Environmental Management.

Despite these advances, the lead environmental regulator in Ohio, the OEPA, doesn’t follow any specific environmental justice policies or laws. That’s partly because the business-friendly Ohio General Assembly hasn’t passed a law directing the OEPA to do so. The other reason is that business-friendly Gov. Bob Taft appoints the OEPA director.

Even the federal policy is just that — a policy without the backing of laws passed by Congress, Delicath says.

“There really is no law that says we have to do this to protect minority and low-income communities,” he says. “States are pretty much free to their own devices.”

No local environmental activists expected OEPA to warmly embrace environmental justice, based on OEPA’s reputation for being a reluctant watchdog with a small bite.

“(The OEPA) will very rarely look at anything from a health perspective,” says Marilyn Wall, chair of the Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club and the Environmental Community Organization, in the city of Wyoming. Wall has spent 20 years working for environmental groups in Ohio.

Activists and Winton Hills residents were distraught a year ago when OEPA approved a permit for Waste Management of Ohio to operate a waste transfer station on its ELDA property. The transfer station would compact trash from around the Tristate; then larger trucks would haul it to another landfill.

Residents and opponents of the transfer station turned to the Cincinnati Health Department for help late last year. The health department was Waste Management’s last stop in the permitting process. The company needed an operating permit, just as a restaurant needs a city permit to serve food.

The board of health couldn’t legally consider environmental justice, but it could consider the applicant’s “competency.” Board members voted 5-1 to deny the permit, citing a history of Waste Management fines and violations inside and outside Ohio, dating back more than a decade.

The company argues the transfer station is built to contain all pollution and will be regularly inspected, including by the Board of Health.

Waste Management has already spent $2.5 million to build the facility and is appealing in court. The matter could be resolved in six months, according to Robert Leiniger, senior legal counsel for Waste Management of Ohio.

‘Time to move the people’
Linda Briscoe, who has lived on Winneste Avenue for 21 years, fell off a ladder while working at the downtown YWCA in 1981, shattering her knee. She spent the next 18 months in a cast. Although a doctor told her she wouldn’t walk without a limp, she does.

Briscoe didn’t plan to stay long when she moved to an apartment on the southwest edge of Winton Hills with her two daughters and son, now grown.

“When I got here I just wanted to get well and get out of here,” Briscoe says.

But she noticed a lot of sick people living there — people with asthma, high blood pressure and diabetes — and felt an obligation to help. She knew or knew of young people, 16 and 20 years old, who died from heart attacks. In 1984 she formed a women’s health group, beginning her tenure as a key neighborhood watchdog. Later she earned degrees in community organization and human services from the Union Institute.

Briscoe matter-of-factly shows visitors around Winton Terrace, Finlater Gardens, the public housing developments, and Silver Oak Estates, a privately owned but federally subsidized apartment complex. She’s given the tour many times. Neighbors know Briscoe as the local environmental advocate, the person who knows what’s going on; few look twice as she walks around buildings and explains her history.

The silver pipes, power lines and steam vents of Este Avenue industrial facilities peek over Winton Terrace’s trees and buildings. Farther north, the ELDA landfill dwarfs parts of Silver Oaks, extending to within a few hundred feet of the some of the apartments.

Twenty years ago Briscoe didn’t know much about landfills, pollution or the science of studying the environment.

“Didn’t nobody walk up to me and say ‘Here’s the book,’ ” she says.

She wishes someone had. Some people in Winton Hills, including Briscoe, didn’t even know they lived next to a landfill.

“When I got involved, my kid was playing all over the landfill,” she says.

At first Briscoe and her neighbors just wanted some sort of buffer between the ELDA landfill and their homes.

“The more and more they tried to brush us off, the more we got into the community,” Briscoe says.

Briscoe isn’t intimidated by bureaucracy, science or businesses. She’s convinced there is a connection between the local pollution and the health of Winton Hills residents. She’s so convinced that if Waste Management successfully appeals the Board of Health decision, she wants a mass relocation.

“It’s time to move the people out,” Briscoe says.

It’s happened once before. In the early 1990s OEPA discovered methane gas leaking into some of the 800 Ridgewood apartments next to the ELDA landfill, she says. All of the residents were moved and the apartments demolished. Briscoe and others had pushed for air monitors for all of Winton Hills, but only got them for Ridgewood.

In 1997 the city of Cincinnati refused to renew Waste Management’s permit to operate the 25-year-old landfill.

Most disturbing is that Waste Management knew about the methane problem but understated it, according to attorney David Altman. He represented five residents, including Briscoe, and the local group Communities United For Action (CUFA) in a lawsuit to correct pollution from the ELDA landfill. Waste Management settled the case in June 1999 for $2.5 million.

“Those things have now pretty much been acknowledged,” Altman says.

Leiniger agrees methane was leaking from the landfill, but says none of it was found inside the Ridgewood apartments.

Winton Hills’ plight attracted national attention in the 1990s. The director of the U.S. EPA visited in 1996.

In 2000 the U.S. EPA sponsored a study of the neighborhood’s air quality. The study didn’t reveal striking levels of pollution, but did confirmed there is reason for concern.

Last year Robert Bullard — the professor at Clark Atlanta University credited with founding the environmental justice movement — visited Winton Hills.

Today Briscoe sits on a number of panels, including some assembled by the nearby companies. On the surface, the community and the businesses seem to be cooperating. The 1999 ELDA landfill settlement mandated meetings between Waste Management and community representatives to monitor the company’s maintenance of the landfill.

But that good-natured cooperation is being tested by the dispute over the waste transfer station. There’s always been mistrust between Winton Hills residents and nearby companies, according to Briscoe. She believes the companies are watching residents as much as she’s watching them.

Briscoe credits Sun Chemical Corp. for being concerned about community input. Cooperation from other nearby companies varies, she says.

“Most of them feel they don’t have to deal with us,” she says.

Beware the garbage juice
Today Briscoe and the other activists are focused on keeping out the waste transfer station. The company wants a 24-hour operation, with 700 trucks daily using Este Avenue to reach the station, according to Briscoe.

“Can you imagine?” she says.

Leiniger can’t. He says he doesn’t know where that number came from. He says current plans call for 60 new trips per day.

“It truly is not going to significantly add to the traffic on Este Avenue,” Leiniger says.

The transfer station is completely enclosed and will not add significant pollution; nor will leachate — or garbage juice — leak outside. The station is on Este Avenue, on the other side of the ELDA landfill from Winton Terrace and the other apartments.

Waste Management is appealing the health board’s decision to the Ohio Environmental Review Appeals Commission, which held a preliminary hearing May 8 in Columbus. Leiniger says the case could be resolved in several months.

OEPA held a public hearing on the transfer station in June 1999 in Winton Terrace. Some residents didn’t feel it was fair to allow a transfer station after fighting for years to close the ELDA landfill.

The OEPA acknowledged the sentiment, but said in a written response it had no authority to use environmental justice as a criterion. The OEPA said that even the U.S. EPA doesn’t usually deny permits because of its environmental justice policy.

The OEPA did, however, mention zoning rules as a way to regulate polluting businesses. After two years of rewriting, Cincinnati’s new zoning code is nearly ready for adoption.

When the new code is finished, businesses with pollution permits could be required to stay 1,000 feet or more away from each other, according to Steven Kurtz, an administrator for land use management in the city’s Planning Department. Those kinds of details should be presented to the Cincinnati Planning Commission within weeks.

OEPA seemed satisfied with Waste Management’s proposal. Leiniger defended OEPA’s reputation and thoroughness.

“(OEPA) is certainly as stringent in terms of anyone I’ve ever encountered,” he says.

The city’s board of health is an all-volunteer body with no specific expertise in sanitation or garbage handling, according to Leiniger. He also defends Waste Management’s record.

“(Waste Management’s) reputation in Ohio and our performance in Ohio is absolutely outstanding,” he says. “We have an excellent compliance record.”

The claim drew an audible smirk from Akron attorney Walter Mendenhall. He represents Akron citizens in a fight against a Waste Management transfer station operating on a residential street, which is one of five or six transfer stations the company runs in Ohio, according to Leiniger.

“The response around here is they haven’t been made to comply,” Mendenhall says.

The company took over the Akron facility in the mid-1990s, according to Mendenhall. It had been a recycling facility since it opened in 1971, handling cardboard, scrap metal and other similar material. In the mid-1990s residents noticed a nasty stench coming from the transfer station — the stench of regular garbage. Ever since then they’ve been fighting to close it.

Waste Management argues the term “solid waste,” used in the original 1971 transfer station agreement, allows the facility to be used for a full-fledged waste transfer station. Leiniger says the zoning definitely allows for commercial waste, such as garbage from restaurants. The dispute is about whether the facility can handle residential garbage.

“There’s never been a dispute from anybody that commercial and industrial trash could be transferred through there,” Leiniger says.

Mendenhall says “solid waste” never meant anything more than scrap metal and cardboard — not household garbage.

Three years ago Waste Management appealed a city of Akron decision that the company was violating the city’s zoning. But the city never asked for an injunction to keep the company from bringing more garbage to the facility, Mendenhall says. Instead, the city let the case drag on in court for three years.

About two months ago the city announced it was settling the case, Mendenhall says. The proposed settlement not only allows the facility to stand, but could allow it to expand, which has residents and Mendenhall — a former city councilman — furious. Mendenhall, representing the residents for free, is trying to take over the case before the city settles.

It’s all in their heads — or lungs
If you see Briscoe outside, she’ll almost certainly be wearing long pants and long sleeves.

Several years ago dark spots appeared on her skin; a hospital visit revealed they were chemical burns. She blames neighborhood pollution for the spots, which she now prevents with special skin cream and clothes that cover her.

“So when you see me — I don’t care if it’s 90 — you’ll see me with long sleeves on,” she says.

Briscoe is convinced pollution harms Winton Hills residents. The women’s health group she organized conducts informal surveys every six months or so.

But it will take much more than that to convince regulators. There hasn’t been any comprehensive study of the community’s health to determine whether residents really are unusually sick. So far no one is lining up to do that kind of work, which could cost millions of dollars.

The Cincinnati Department of Health doesn’t see that kind of study as its responsibility, according to Dr. Walter Handy, a psychologist and assistant health commissioner.

“We’re not a research organization,” Handy says. “We’re a service organization.”

Neither does CMHA, the owner and manager of Winton Terrace and Finlater Gardens, feel obliged to study residents’ health.

“In our case, we attended to the things we could attend to,” says Don Troendle, executive director of CMHA.

Troendle refers to the renovations in the early 1990s that removed asbestos and lead paint from the buildings. CMHA also covered the dirt on community playgrounds with solid surfaces to keep the dust out of the air.

Both Hand and Troendle point to OEPA as the lead environmental regulator. But it took the U.S. EPA to finance the 2000 study of Winton Hills’ air. Four air monitors took samples in the community every 12 days for a year; a fifth monitor was placed in Westwood, for comparison.

The study cost the U.S. EPA hundreds of thousands of dollars, even with the U.S. EPA’s donated labor and equipment, because chemical analyses are expensive.

The U.S. EPA stressed it wanted a fair study, according to its co-author, Peter Scheff, a professor of occupational, environmental and health sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Given the divisions between the community and industry, the assignment was no small task.

“Everybody thought everybody else had a bias,” Scheff says. “One could read the report and come to a variety of conclusions on it.”

Scheff didn’t design the study; he only interpreted it.

However, he says, the study brings up a number of issues that should be addressed. For example, the quantity of chemicals, such as acetone, in the air cannot be ignored. Acetone is used to make plastic, fibers, drugs and other chemicals. It is also used to dissolve other substances. Acetone is not considered a cancer-causing agent by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Toxicologically speaking, it’s an area of concern,” he says.

Although Scheff says the overall air quality in Winton Hills isn’t great, it’s about the same as other similar urban neighborhoods.

Handy doesn’t believe the study reaches any meaningful conclusions about health risk because it doesn’t measure residents’ exposure to pollution or their general health.

Handy calls attention to the field of “risk communication,” which deals with why people are sometimes afraid of things that aren’t really dangerous, and why they sometimes don’t fear true danger.

“The perception that people have of their risk often has no relationship to what their actual risk is,” Handy says.

Fear seems to relate to whether or not people can see or control the threat, and if the supposed threat is manmade, according to Handy. Airborne chemicals from industrial plants trigger all three fears.

A good example might be cancer and heart disease, Handy says. People fear cancer, but heart disease kills more Americans.

Handy believes Briscoe’s concerns need attention, but doubts they can be proven with any degree of clarity.

“What St. Louis emits comes to Cincinnati,” Handy says. “I don’t mean to make this complicated, but it is.”

Leiniger, however, understands how Winton Hills residents could believe their environment is hurting them.

“I think it’s absolutely reasonable for them to believe that,” Leiniger says. “Who wouldn’t, really?”

But Troendle, the director of CMHA, is more skeptical.

“The information I have seen has not substantiated that there is a serious health issue there,” he says.

Marilyn Evans, director of CUFA and a 20-year veteran of the local environmental movement, believes Winton Hills residents are less healthy because of where they live.

As part of the $2.5 million ELDA lawsuit settlement, CUFA began offering free environmental physicals late last year to Winton Hills residents. So far about 20 people have responded. That’s far from a scientific sample, but Evans says kidney problems are common.

Evans, who lives in South Cumminsville, has asthma and allergies; she says she gets a headache when visiting Winton Hills.

“As far as living there, I wouldn’t live there,” she says.

The concept of environmental justice is simple, according to Murphey.

“The difficulty is turning it into real practice,” he says.

That will take a lot of science, money, time and probably agitation.

“This argument is going to go on for years,” Evans says.

· the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at www.atsdr.cdc.gov. For the health effects of specific chemicals click on ToxFAQs.

· the USEPA at www.epa.gov and the Ohio EPA and its Toxic Release Inventory at

Residents of Winton Hills live within walls of pollution. To the north and east are Interstate 75 and a row of industrial plants. Between Este Avenue and the Mill Creek, the factories produce food additives, adhesives, solvents and a variety of other substances and products.

To the north, also on Este Avenue, are two garbage landfills: the Center Road landfill, a city operation that closed 25 years ago; and the ELDA landfill, shut down in 1998. Both release methane gas, much of which is burned off or harvested.

For 21 years Linda Briscoe has lived in Winton Terrace, one of two Winton Hills public housing projects owned by the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA). In the course of two decades of off-the-cuff environmental education, Briscoe’s been to Mississippi, Louisiana and other hot spots in the environmental justice movement.

But what she’s seen elsewhere doesn’t compare to her neighborhood, she says.

“Nowhere (else) have I seen this many people living so close to a landfill and so many chemical companies close by,” Briscoe says. “We call it the ‘toxic donut.’

We’re surrounded.”

Winton Terrace and its companion project, Finlater Gardens, are two of CMHA’s most popular communities. Their 1,168 apartments are on bus lines close to jobs and were extensively renovated in the early 1990s. Sometimes apartments are rented even before they’re vacant.

But the 2,000 or so people living in or near the projects are also in the middle of what might be the most regularly polluted part of Cincinnati. When it comes to pollution, Lower Price Hill is Winton Hills’ only rival. Both neighborhoods have mostly poor residents. The vast majority in Winton Hills are black, the vast majority in Lower Price Hill are white or Hispanic.

All of the major companies in and near Winton Hills have air pollution permits from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA). None of the companies in Hamilton County exceeded the limits of their permits in 2000, according to OEPA spokesman Andy Thompson.

But a better way to put it is no companies have told OEPA they exceeded their permits. The agency relies on companies to report their pollution releases under the Toxic Release Inventory.

But what about the combined effect of having two landfills and approximately 40 companies that release pollution within two Winton Hills zip codes? Is it unreasonable to assume all this affects the health of residents?

“That’s kind of the question that plagues a lot of the controversies,” says John Delicath, who teaches a course on environmental justice at the University of Cincinnati.

Reluctant dog, little bite
In 1983 the U.S. General Accounting Office found that most hazardous waste sites in the country are in low-income communities, according to Delicath. In 1987 the United Church of Christ in New York found that also to be true for minority communities, according to the report “Toxic Waste in the United States.” Three out of five blacks and Hispanics in the United States live in communities with hazardous waste sites.

Those studies and others propelled activists and residents to begin working to prevent already-polluted communities from receiving more pollution. Environmental justice is the name of a growing movement to provide healthy environments to all.

In 1994 President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to use the concept of environmental justice in decision making. In 1997 the city of Cincinnati adopted a similar policy for city-financed projects. The city used environmental justice in its decision to exclude Winton Hills as the site for a city-owned transfer station, according to Dennis Murphey, director of the city’s Office of Environmental Management.

Despite these advances, the lead environmental regulator in Ohio, the OEPA, doesn’t follow any specific environmental justice policies or laws. That’s partly because the business-friendly Ohio General Assembly hasn’t passed a law directing the OEPA to do so. The other reason is that business-friendly Gov. Bob Taft appoints the OEPA director.

Even the federal policy is just that — a policy without the backing of laws passed by Congress, Delicath says.

“There really is no law that says we have to do this to protect minority and low-income communities,” he says. “States are pretty much free to their own devices.”

No local environmental activists expected OEPA to warmly embrace environmental justice, based on OEPA’s reputation for being a reluctant watchdog with a small bite.

“(The OEPA) will very rarely look at anything from a health perspective,” says Marilyn Wall, chair of the Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club and the Environmental Community Organization, in the city of Wyoming. Wall has spent 20 years working for environmental groups in Ohio.

Activists and Winton Hills residents were distraught a year ago when OEPA approved a permit for Waste Management of Ohio to operate a waste transfer station on its ELDA property. The transfer station would compact trash from around the Tristate; then larger trucks would haul it to another landfill.

Residents and opponents of the transfer station turned to the Cincinnati Health Department for help late last year. The health department was Waste Management’s last stop in the permitting process. The company needed an operating permit, just as a restaurant needs a city permit to serve food.

The board of health couldn’t legally consider environmental justice, but it could consider the applicant’s “competency.” Board members voted 5-1 to deny the permit, citing a history of Waste Management fines and violations inside and outside Ohio, dating back more than a decade.

The company argues the transfer station is built to contain all pollution and will be regularly inspected, including by the Board of Health.

Waste Management has already spent $2.5 million to build the facility and is appealing in court. The matter could be resolved in six months, according to Robert Leiniger, senior legal counsel for Waste Management of Ohio.

‘Time to move the people’
Linda Briscoe, who has lived on Winneste Avenue for 21 years, fell off a ladder while working at the downtown YWCA in 1981, shattering her knee. She spent the next 18 months in a cast. Although a doctor told her she wouldn’t walk without a limp, she does.

Briscoe didn’t plan to stay long when she moved to an apartment on the southwest edge of Winton Hills with her two daughters and son, now grown.

“When I got here I just wanted to get well and get out of here,” Briscoe says.

But she noticed a lot of sick people living there — people with asthma, high blood pressure and diabetes — and felt an obligation to help. She knew or knew of young people, 16 and 20 years old, who died from heart attacks. In 1984 she formed a women’s health group, beginning her tenure as a key neighborhood watchdog. Later she earned degrees in community organization and human services from the Union Institute.

Briscoe matter-of-factly shows visitors around Winton Terrace, Finlater Gardens, the public housing developments, and Silver Oak Estates, a privately owned but federally subsidized apartment complex. She’s given the tour many times. Neighbors know Briscoe as the local environmental advocate, the person who knows what’s going on; few look twice as she walks around buildings and explains her history.

The silver pipes, power lines and steam vents of Este Avenue industrial facilities peek over Winton Terrace’s trees and buildings. Farther north, the ELDA landfill dwarfs parts of Silver Oaks, extending to within a few hundred feet of the some of the apartments.

Twenty years ago Briscoe didn’t know much about landfills, pollution or the science of studying the environment.

“Didn’t nobody walk up to me and say ‘Here’s the book,’ ” she says.

She wishes someone had. Some people in Winton Hills, including Briscoe, didn’t even know they lived next to a landfill.

“When I got involved, my kid was playing all over the landfill,” she says.

At first Briscoe and her neighbors just wanted some sort of buffer between the ELDA landfill and their homes.

“The more and more they tried to brush us off, the more we got into the community,” Briscoe says.

Briscoe isn’t intimidated by bureaucracy, science or businesses. She’s convinced there is a connection between the local pollution and the health of Winton Hills residents. She’s so convinced that if Waste Management successfully appeals the Board of Health decision, she wants a mass relocation.

“It’s time to move the people out,” Briscoe says.

It’s happened once before. In the early 1990s OEPA discovered methane gas leaking into some of the 800 Ridgewood apartments next to the ELDA landfill, she says. All of the residents were moved and the apartments demolished. Briscoe and others had pushed for air monitors for all of Winton Hills, but only got them for Ridgewood.

In 1997 the city of Cincinnati refused to renew Waste Management’s permit to operate the 25-year-old landfill.

Most disturbing is that Waste Management knew about the methane problem but understated it, according to attorney David Altman. He represented five residents, including Briscoe, and the local group Communities United For Action (CUFA) in a lawsuit to correct pollution from the ELDA landfill. Waste Management settled the case in June 1999 for $2.5 million.

“Those things have now pretty much been acknowledged,” Altman says.

Leiniger agrees methane was leaking from the landfill, but says none of it was found inside the Ridgewood apartments.

Winton Hills’ plight attracted national attention in the 1990s. The director of the U.S. EPA visited in 1996.

In 2000 the U.S. EPA sponsored a study of the neighborhood’s air quality. The study didn’t reveal striking levels of pollution, but did confirmed there is reason for concern.

Last year Robert Bullard — the professor at Clark Atlanta University credited with founding the environmental justice movement — visited Winton Hills.

Today Briscoe sits on a number of panels, including some assembled by the nearby companies. On the surface, the community and the businesses seem to be cooperating. The 1999 ELDA landfill settlement mandated meetings between Waste Management and community representatives to monitor the company’s maintenance of the landfill.

But that good-natured cooperation is being tested by the dispute over the waste transfer station. There’s always been mistrust between Winton Hills residents and nearby companies, according to Briscoe. She believes the companies are watching residents as much as she’s watching them.

Briscoe credits Sun Chemical Corp. for being concerned about community input. Cooperation from other nearby companies varies, she says.

“Most of them feel they don’t have to deal with us,” she says.

Beware the garbage juice
Today Briscoe and the other activists are focused on keeping out the waste transfer station. The company wants a 24-hour operation, with 700 trucks daily using Este Avenue to reach the station, according to Briscoe.

“Can you imagine?” she says.

Leiniger can’t. He says he doesn’t know where that number came from. He says current plans call for 60 new trips per day.

“It truly is not going to significantly add to the traffic on Este Avenue,” Leiniger says.

The transfer station is completely enclosed and will not add significant pollution; nor will leachate — or garbage juice — leak outside. The station is on Este Avenue, on the other side of the ELDA landfill from Winton Terrace and the other apartments.

Waste Management is appealing the health board’s decision to the Ohio Environmental Review Appeals Commission, which held a preliminary hearing May 8 in Columbus. Leiniger says the case could be resolved in several months.

OEPA held a public hearing on the transfer station in June 1999 in Winton Terrace. Some residents didn’t feel it was fair to allow a transfer station after fighting for years to close the ELDA landfill.

The OEPA acknowledged the sentiment, but said in a written response it had no authority to use environmental justice as a criterion. The OEPA said that even the U.S. EPA doesn’t usually deny permits because of its environmental justice policy.

The OEPA did, however, mention zoning rules as a way to regulate polluting businesses. After two years of rewriting, Cincinnati’s new zoning code is nearly ready for adoption.

When the new code is finished, businesses with pollution permits could be required to stay 1,000 feet or more away from each other, according to Steven Kurtz, an administrator for land use management in the city’s Planning Department. Those kinds of details should be presented to the Cincinnati Planning Commission within weeks.

OEPA seemed satisfied with Waste Management’s proposal. Leiniger defended OEPA’s reputation and thoroughness.

“(OEPA) is certainly as stringent in terms of anyone I’ve ever encountered,” he says.

The city’s board of health is an all-volunteer body with no specific expertise in sanitation or garbage handling, according to Leiniger. He also defends Waste Management’s record.

“(Waste Management’s) reputation in Ohio and our performance in Ohio is absolutely outstanding,” he says. “We have an excellent compliance record.”

The claim drew an audible smirk from Akron attorney Walter Mendenhall. He represents Akron citizens in a fight against a Waste Management transfer station operating on a residential street, which is one of five or six transfer stations the company runs in Ohio, according to Leiniger.

“The response around here is they haven’t been made to comply,” Mendenhall says.

The company took over the Akron facility in the mid-1990s, according to Mendenhall. It had been a recycling facility since it opened in 1971, handling cardboard, scrap metal and other similar material. In the mid-1990s residents noticed a nasty stench coming from the transfer station — the stench of regular garbage. Ever since then they’ve been fighting to close it.

Waste Management argues the term “solid waste,” used in the original 1971 transfer station agreement, allows the facility to be used for a full-fledged waste transfer station. Leiniger says the zoning definitely allows for commercial waste, such as garbage from restaurants. The dispute is about whether the facility can handle residential garbage.

“There’s never been a dispute from anybody that commercial and industrial trash could be transferred through there,” Leiniger says.

Mendenhall says “solid waste” never meant anything more than scrap metal and cardboard — not household garbage.

Three years ago Waste Management appealed a city of Akron decision that the company was violating the city’s zoning. But the city never asked for an injunction to keep the company from bringing more garbage to the facility, Mendenhall says. Instead, the city let the case drag on in court for three years.

About two months ago the city announced it was settling the case, Mendenhall says. The proposed settlement not only allows the facility to stand, but could allow it to expand, which has residents and Mendenhall — a former city councilman — furious. Mendenhall, representing the residents for free, is trying to take over the case before the city settles.

It’s all in their heads — or lungs
If you see Briscoe outside, she’ll almost certainly be wearing long pants and long sleeves.

Several years ago dark spots appeared on her skin; a hospital visit revealed they were chemical burns. She blames neighborhood pollution for the spots, which she now prevents with special skin cream and clothes that cover her.

“So when you see me — I don’t care if it’s 90 — you’ll see me with long sleeves on,” she says.

Briscoe is convinced pollution harms Winton Hills residents. The women’s health group she organized conducts informal surveys every six months or so.

But it will take much more than that to convince regulators. There hasn’t been any comprehensive study of the community’s health to determine whether residents really are unusually sick. So far no one is lining up to do that kind of work, which could cost millions of dollars.

The Cincinnati Department of Health doesn’t see that kind of study as its responsibility, according to Dr. Walter Handy, a psychologist and assistant health commissioner.

“We’re not a research organization,” Handy says. “We’re a service organization.”

Neither does CMHA, the owner and manager of Winton Terrace and Finlater Gardens, feel obliged to study residents’ health.

“In our case, we attended to the things we could attend to,” says Don Troendle, executive director of CMHA.

Troendle refers to the renovations in the early 1990s that removed asbestos and lead paint from the buildings. CMHA also covered the dirt on community playgrounds with solid surfaces to keep the dust out of the air.

Both Hand and Troendle point to OEPA as the lead environmental regulator. But it took the U.S. EPA to finance the 2000 study of Winton Hills’ air. Four air monitors took samples in the community every 12 days for a year; a fifth monitor was placed in Westwood, for comparison.

The study cost the U.S. EPA hundreds of thousands of dollars, even with the U.S. EPA’s donated labor and equipment, because chemical analyses are expensive.

The U.S. EPA stressed it wanted a fair study, according to its co-author, Peter Scheff, a professor of occupational, environmental and health sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Given the divisions between the community and industry, the assignment was no small task.

“Everybody thought everybody else had a bias,” Scheff says. “One could read the report and come to a variety of conclusions on it.”

Scheff didn’t design the study; he only interpreted it.

However, he says, the study brings up a number of issues that should be addressed. For example, the quantity of chemicals, such as acetone, in the air cannot be ignored. Acetone is used to make plastic, fibers, drugs and other chemicals. It is also used to dissolve other substances. Acetone is not considered a cancer-causing agent by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Toxicologically speaking, it’s an area of concern,” he says.

Although Scheff says the overall air quality in Winton Hills isn’t great, it’s about the same as other similar urban neighborhoods.

Handy doesn’t believe the study reaches any meaningful conclusions about health risk because it doesn’t measure residents’ exposure to pollution or their general health.

Handy calls attention to the field of “risk communication,” which deals with why people are sometimes afraid of things that aren’t really dangerous, and why they sometimes don’t fear true danger.

“The perception that people have of their risk often has no relationship to what their actual risk is,” Handy says.

Fear seems to relate to whether or not people can see or control the threat, and if the supposed threat is manmade, according to Handy. Airborne chemicals from industrial plants trigger all three fears.

A good example might be cancer and heart disease, Handy says. People fear cancer, but heart disease kills more Americans.

Handy believes Briscoe’s concerns need attention, but doubts they can be proven with any degree of clarity.

“What St. Louis emits comes to Cincinnati,” Handy says. “I don’t mean to make this complicated, but it is.”

Leiniger, however, understands how Winton Hills residents could believe their environment is hurting them.

“I think it’s absolutely reasonable for them to believe that,” Leiniger says. “Who wouldn’t, really?”

But Troendle, the director of CMHA, is more skeptical.

“The information I have seen has not substantiated that there is a serious health issue there,” he says.

Marilyn Evans, director of CUFA and a 20-year veteran of the local environmental movement, believes Winton Hills residents are less healthy because of where they live.

As part of the $2.5 million ELDA lawsuit settlement, CUFA began offering free environmental physicals late last year to Winton Hills residents. So far about 20 people have responded. That’s far from a scientific sample, but Evans says kidney problems are common.

Evans, who lives in South Cumminsville, has asthma and allergies; she says she gets a headache when visiting Winton Hills.

“As far as living there, I wouldn’t live there,” she says.

The concept of environmental justice is simple, according to Murphey.

“The difficulty is turning it into real practice,” he says.

That will take a lot of science, money, time and probably agitation.

“This argument is going to go on for years,” Evans says.

· the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at www.atsdr.cdc.gov. For the health effects of specific chemicals click on ToxFAQs.

· the USEPA at www.epa.gov and the Ohio EPA and its Toxic Release Inventory at www.epa.state.oh.us.

· www.scorecard.org to access environmental information by entering a zip code.

· the U.S. Department for Housing and Urban Development’s pollution mapper at www.hud.gov. Click on “your community,” then “e-maps.”

This article appears in May 15-21, 2002.