New Haven Independent

It took members of the New Haven Environmental Justice Network and its parent organization, the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice, five years to convince the legislature to pass the state’s first environmental justice law.

They and other environmentalists celebrated that and some other victories, while watching some other important bills die in the legislative session that ended last week.

The new law, if signed by the governor, will identify two dozen towns and three dozen neighborhoods in other towns as “environmental justice communities.” Proponents of building polluting facilities in those areas would be required to do “enhanced public outreach” and “negotiate with the chief elected official and the environmental justice community about environmental benefits to offset some of the proposed environmental hazards.”

Click here to read CCEJ Director Mark Mitchell’s summary of the bill and its implications.

Schafer, a member of the New Haven group, said the local activists strongly supported the bill and cheer its passage. “People will finally be able to argue not just about the impact of a single new proposal,” she said, “but to look at each one in the context of what exists already. It’s not necessarily to stop development, but rather to work with the business community to reduce its environmental impact, for example, by changing the kind of fuel a new project uses.”

The biggest environmental news of the session is that in the waning hours, both houses passed An Act Concerning Connecticut Global Warming Solutions, which puts Connecticut in the good company of California, New Jersey, Washington and Hawaii as the only states in the country with mandatory global warming emissions limits. Gov. M. Jodi Rell has promised to sign it.

“This should help us fulfill the promise of the 2004 climate goals law and make our state agencies demonstrate ongoing progress towards meeting the emissions limits,” wrote Roger Smith in an email to supporters.

As coordinator of the Connecticut Climate Coalition, Smith was one of the movers behind the ultimate success of the bill, which won bipartisan support. The legislation requires state agencies to create and continually update and improve a climate plan that will achieve reductions of Connecticut’s global warming emissions to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2010 and 80 percent below 2001 levels by 2050. Those reductions are considered the minimum necessary by climate scientists to forestall catastrophic changes from global warming.

Another notable success was passage of the so-called Toxic Toys bill. If signed into law, it will reduce the amount of lead allowed in children’s products sold or manufactured in the state to 300 parts per million by July 1, 2009, and to no more than 100 ppm by July 1, 2011. Paint used on children’s products will need to meet a 90 ppm standard by July 1, 2009, and asbestos will become illegal for use in children’s products.

But efforts to restrict or ban other toxic chemicals, including bisphenol A and phthalates, from products like food and beverage containers, fell short. Click here to read more detail from a press release put out by the Connecticut Coalition for a Safe and Healthy Environment.

Other environmental bills that died were an expansion of the bottle bill to include single-serve plastic water bottles (and possibly other beverages not currently covered, like non-carbonated soft drinks and teas); a “right to dry” bill that would have allowed people living in condos to hang their wash on outdoor clotheslines, and several others that died because they had fiscal notes attached, and the General Assembly decided — as it was confronting a multi-million dollar surplus that turned into a multi-million dollar deficit — that it would adopt no changes to last year’s budget.