For South Side Environmental Justice Advocates, the Fight for the Hazel M. Johnson Ordinance is a Fight for their Home
Myrna Salgado-Romo was already thinking about her next steps when she left high school. A soon-to-be single mother, she needed a career path that would support her and her daughter. With her aunt’s encouragement, in 1995 Salgado-Romo enrolled in a program at the Spanish Coalition for Jobs—now renamed the National Latino Education Institute–an organization dedicated to providing professional development and education opportunities to Chicago’s Spanish-speaking community.
Salgado-Romo graduated less than a year later with a certificate in office technology that helped her secure a job. She retained a soft spot in her heart for the organization. Later, as an office manager at a charter school, Salgado-Romo helped National Latino Education Institute students enroll their children in her school.
So when she learned in 2018 that students and faculty at the institute housed in McKinley Park were struggling to breathe indoors, it weighed on her. The change came after MAT Asphalt began operating next door. On days when the plant was active, air quality in the school was worse.
“Having an institute like this in my community where I was able to go and pursue further education . . . was amazing,” said Salgado-Romo. “These students who are going there now don’t have that same experience.”
Salgado-Romo teamed up with other neighbors to protest the plant’s installation. One of their first community meetings was held in the National Latino Education Institute’s building. What started as a mission to fight MAT became Neighbors For Environmental Justice (N4EJ), a nonprofit focused on addressing environmental inequities in Chicago.
N4EJ is one of multiple environmental justice organizations in Chicago championing the recently introduced Hazel M Johnson Cumulative Impact ordinance. The legislation is meant to address the layers of current and historic environmental hazards South and Southwest side residents experience. Some are celebrating its introduction, glad to take a first step towards addressing a longstanding legacy of environmental inequity, but others think it doesn’t go far enough.
The ordinance is named for Hazel M. Johnson, frequently called the “mother of the environmental justice movement.” Johnson was an Altgeld Gardens resident whose work fighting the installation of new toxic waste dumps and pushing for clean water testing in her area received national attention.
The ordinance would require any new or expanding industrial operation to conduct a cumulative impact assessment and notify anyone within a 660-foot radius of their plans to build. The idea is to make the process more informed and responsive to the people it will affect. But while the ordinance is aimed at changing the process of development in industrial zones, it doesn’t change where those zones are.
Baltazar Enriquez, president of the Little Village Community Council, is familiar with the way industrial air pollution is affecting his neighborhood. When he heard the city was working on an environmental impact ordinance, he was initially excited. His feelings changed when he learned the legislation wouldn’t alter existing zones.
“It’s telling polluters if you go and set up shop in an industrial area that you’re already zoned for, you’re good,” he said. “And most of those industrial areas are in Black or brown neighborhoods . . . it’s like putting salt in the wound.”
In 2022, N4EJ created an air quality monitoring program to track pollution around McKinley Park after the city refused to fund operations for monitoring pollution from MAT Asphalt. The system, which is paid for, installed and monitored by the grassroots organization, picks up on levels of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and ozone.
The city’s inaction comes despite 279 complaints mentioning the asphalt factory’s pollution registered to Chicago’s 311 system. According to City of Chicago data, the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) conducted more than 300 inspections, finding violations “valid” more than 50 times and marking complaints as resolved more than 30 times.
“My baby’s nursery smelled like petroleum this morning when we woke up at 7 AM [with] the windows and doors closed,” stated one complaint from October 2021.
A July 2020 complaint compared the smells coming from the asphalt plant to the smell of fireworks, while 14 other complaints stated they experienced a burning sensation in their throats.
Records of environmental enforcement administrative hearings against MAT Asphalt dating back to 2019 indicate that the company has been fined by the City of Chicago 11 times since 2019, with fines totaling less than twenty thousand dollars.
The Hazel M. Johnson ordinance does not apply to existing operations, so projects like MAT asphalt won’t be required to complete an assessment unless they expand.
Salgado-Romo sees the legislation as a necessary compromise. Given that many of the industries are well-established where they are, it wouldn’t be feasible to ask them to get up and move shop. According to her, the ordinance is a step forward, not the end of the effort to advocate for environmental justice reform in the Southwest Side.
“We are trying to protect the home we live in,” Salgado-Romo said.