Lawyering Up: Building Community-Centered Governance & Accountability

Well, speaking of those basic rights, we have bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act that give ordinary people the right to take a polluter to court themselves when regulators will not act and industry refuses to uphold the law.

Break down what a citizen suit actually is and why it is so important now more than ever for every frontline community to understand how it all works.

Citizen suits are... an incredible tool that when Congress passed laws, like the foundational environmental laws in the 1970s, they really wanted those laws to protect people's health, right? I mean, just like we are now, there was a lot of pollution.

There was a lot of just industrial sources that were polluting in in ways that were harming communities and it's just a like matter of like government resources that they're not that the the um folks who would work for like the the federal epa or your state agency they're not going to be able to take on every case that's causing where a polluter is causing harm to a community so congress put another um protective avenue in there where citizens can, as long as they are harmed in some way by the pollution, they can send what's called a notice of intent to sue.

They have to also send it to the government as a like, hey, we're worried about this.

If y'all aren't going to do something, we are going to sue this polluter.

This is which government? Their state government? They have to send notice to both the state and the federal government because both have the ability to also hold the polluter accountable.

But in many cases, they don't, either because they just have limited resources or for whatever reason.

And so if the government doesn't step in when you send that notice letter, then you can file a complaint in federal court for the federal environmental laws and you can file hold the polluter accountable and get, you know, injunctive relief, like some sort of remedy that reduces the pollution and requires them to comply with the law.

So it's a really powerful tool for communities.

And I think it's even more so now when we're seeing a lack of willingness on the part of the federal EPA to enforce our bedrock environmental laws.

And in many cases, especially in the South where I work, we're seeing sort of reduced resources for government holding corporate actors accountable as well.

And so it really does provide an avenue for communities to take action and make sure that their health is protected to the degree that it is required to be by law.

The one thing I'll say, though, about citizen suits is they're very resource intensive.

And they're resource intensive for lawyers, but they're also resource intensive for the community organization and its members who might be involved.

So it's not a decision that communities usually take on lightly, particularly because a lot of times the polluter is also an employer in the town and things like that.

So it's an important tool, and it's also one that we use when... nothing else is working to hold that polluter accountable or to get them to do what they are supposed to do to protect public health.

Yeah.

So then the citizen suit is kind of like a final resort to a certain extent, right? This is if I've gone through due process of existing government systems.

I have done everything.

We've sat in on the meetings.

We've organized.

We've petitioned.

We've done everything that we could possibly think of.

The citizen suit is then a last ditch resort to attempt to.