A state advisory board is recommending that the state rescind permits for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and Mountain Valley Pipeline, as the person the board is supposed to advise, Gov. Ralph Northam, continues to push back.
Northam, a Democrat, has been under fire from environmentalists on the pipelines, but he has said he is satisfied that state agencies are conducting a thorough review of the projects.
The Advisory Council on Environmental Justice, which on Tuesday formally urged the governor to direct state agencies to suspend water- and air-quality permits for the pipeline projects, was created last year by then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
Work on the projects has been suspended in Virginia after federal judges found that federal agencies had issued permits without adequate scrutiny.
Activists are touting the council’s recommendation, which came after council members met in recent weeks with residents in the community of Union Hill in Buckingham County, a historically African-American area that is the planned site of a compressor station for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
The Union Hill compressor station faces a state air-quality permit hearing on Sept. 11. The advisory council recommended that Northam suspend that process to give it deeper review.
“The ACEJ is the first and only governmental body which listened to our community,” said Kathie Mosley, the chair of Concern for the New Generation, the Buckingham County chapter of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League.
“After hearing our concerns, they researched our claims and agreed that the siting of the compressor station in the Union Hill community is an environmental justice issue,” said Mosley, criticizing Dominion Virginia Energy, which is leading the work on the pipeline projects, saying she believes the goal of Dominion “is to buy us off.”
“We do not want their money, their pipeline or their compressor station. We want our historic African-American community to remain intact without its toxic compressor station,” Mosley said.
Activist Sharon Ponton, the coordinator of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League’s Stop the Pipelines campaign, hailed the ACEJ as “a breath of fresh air” in a process she labeled as “riddled with road blocks, poor work by the agencies overseeing and approving these projects, and glaring failures to complete meaningful environmental justice and historical/cultural analyses of the communities along the paths of the pipelines.”
Mosley concluded: “I am pleased the ACEJ has the courage to stand up for the people and what is right. We hope the Governor will now take the environmental racism issue seriously. What Dominion is trying to do in Union Hill is unacceptable.”
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Chris Graham
