Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Nevada making strides, but environmental justice issues still a concern for communities of color

Car Exhaust

Michael Sohn / AP

A car is surrounded by exhaust gases in this Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019, file photo.

Priscella Gomez remembers not being able to breathe.

Born with asthma, Gomez moved to Las Vegas when she was around 9. Her asthma attacks often kept her out of school. Eventually, she said, the attacks got to the point where she missed the majority of her fifth grade year.

“I was in and out of the doctor’s office, I was on a lot of medication,’ she said. “It was just a better environment for me to be home.”

The reason, she said, was the walk to her school took her past an industrial complex. The fumes those factories emitted would trigger her asthma. Her mom couldn’t drive Gomez to school, so she was stuck.

Gomez’s situation is not unique. In Nevada and across the country, activists say communities of color have been hit disproportionately from environmental issues because their neighborhoods often are closest to freeways and industrial plants and the pollutants associated with them.

The neighborhood in which Gomez, who is Latina, grew up in was mainly African-American and Latino families. It was cheaper than other areas, she said.

“I used to live in California, and (there) I would have asthma attacks, but it wasn’t as severe as it was once I moved here,” Gomez said.

Andy Maggi, executive director of the League of Conservation Voters of Nevada, said that communities of color were historically put in areas affected by manufacturing and other industries. He stressed that this problem was one that affected communities nationwide, especially in Nevada.

“It is impacting Nevadans. It’s impacting communities of color nationally (and) internationally,” Maggi said.

Rudy Zamora, the program director of Chispa Nevada, a Latino-focused organizing arm of the League of Conservation Voters, said it was important to take into account the communities that are routinely affected by such pollutants when developing climate change and environmental policy.

“It’s important to reach out to Latino and low-income families because a lot of the time we’re the ones that are disproportionately affected by climate change, and we’re the ones that are living closer to the highways, closer to the heavily-polluted areas," Zamora said.

Zamora touted measures passed in the 2019 session of the Nevada Legislature as good policy, including bills creating programs to increase access to solar energy and to help transition from diesel to electric school buses.

The electric bus bill, which sets up an incentive structure for public schools, was signed by Gov. Steve Sisolak soon after it was sent to his desk in May. In his signatory remarks, Sisolak referenced the affect diesel exhaust can have on children.

“Roughly 181,000 Nevada kids ride the bus to and from school and are exposed to this dirty pollution on a daily basis,” Sisolak wrote.

While Zamora said Nevada lawmakers were going down the right path, he returned to the root of the issue — people in the affected communities must be part of the policymaking process. Zamora said that there is a need for lawmakers to involve affected communities in the decision-making process. Too often, he said, representatives of these communities are brought to the table as observers rather than contributing members.

“A lot of the time we just want to have these cookie-cutter policies that are going to fix the situations without having those conversations with communities,” Zamora said. “If we're not having the conversations with communities, we can’t necessarily know what we’re trying to fix, except that we’re trying to fix pollution at a larger scale.”

Gomez, whose hasn’t had an asthma attack in years, said that people who may not be directly affected by the issue — those whose neighborhoods might not share space with factories — may overlook its affect.

“Usually, I think, this topic is overlooked,” Gomez said. “Like any other thing, if it doesn’t affect you, people kind of don’t think about it because it’s not affecting their family or … themselves.”