Since the inception of environmental justice (EJ) movement in the early 1980s, environmental inequities have been broadly studied, primarily in terms of race/ethnicity and economic class. Meanwhile, a growing amount of studies have found that state environmental protection agencies perform less rigorous implementation activities in the communities with a high percent of racial/ethnic minorities.

Despite the high-profile Executive Order 12898 by the Clinton administration, the federal government commitment has neither been consistent nor sufficient in the past two decades. In the context of environmental federalism, states differ dramatically in policy adoption and practices with respect to EJ. Although over 30 states have some form of legislative and/or administrative EJ policy, few of them have taken substantive steps (e.g., comprehensive legislation or administrative rule change, permitting, standard setting, or enforcement policies) to alter the course of environmental inequity.

Following the Interim Environmental Justice Policy of the U.S. EPA Region 2, in the mid-2003, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) issued Commissioner Policy 29 (CP-29) to officially incorporate the concerns of EJ into the major regulatory permit review and key aspects of enforcement process. The core of CP-29 is the employment of geographic information system tools to identify the potential environmental justice areas (PEJA) at the census-block-group level across the state, in terms of race/ethnicity and poverty status. As an important component of CP-29, supplemental compliance and enforcement inspections are required to be conducted in the facilities which are located in the PEJAs. This policy aims to facilitate a better identification of the vulnerable communities, reduce the regulatory uncertainties, boost the public engagement, and ultimately enhance the environmental well-being of the marginalized subpopulations.

This study has two research objectives: (1) to evaluate whether and the extent to which CP-29 effectively raises the policy implementation attention to the PEJAs, and (2) to ascertain the potential variations across the administrative regions of DEC. Empirically, this project devises a multilevel cross-sectional design to assess the agency’s compliance monitoring and assurance practice patterns at the block-group level in New York State in the pre- and post-CP-29 era. The dependant variables are the inspection and enforcement activities of air pollution, wastewater, and hazardous waste management programs. The data is garnered from EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online database. The key explanatory variables are the state-designated PEJAs (coded as 1 and 0 otherwise) and the related information is collected from NYSGIS Clearinghouse database. Using Census 2000 and 2005-2009 American Community Survey, this study also controls for several variables that are pertinent to environmental policy implementation practices (especially in those related to EJ). Block-group-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics include English proficiency, linguistic isolation, education attainment, and median household income. In addition, county-level task environments include the number of regulated facilities, nonattainment status, EPA inspections in the previous year, the number of facilities characterized as high priority violator, labor of manufacturing employment, population, and population density. Lastly, an indicator variable for DEC administrative regions is included. Due to the count outcome variable, multilevel over-dispersed Poisson models are used.