Thank you.
Certainly this bill is not about getting a study done. This bill is about collecting the information, going forward and having a strategy that actually addresses and prevents environmental racism and promotes environmental justice.
Again, when a community is having adverse health effects, one of the first things that happen—I'm going to be blunt—is that the industry in question hires what I like to call “consultitudes”. You pay the dollars and you get the report you want: Guess what—there may be a lot of toxic waste here, but somehow, theoretically, through mathematical models worked out by the “consultitudes”, none of that hazardous toxic material is ever going to hurt anybody, so we'll just leave it there.
The community needs to have access to its own experts. It needs its own epidemiologists. It needs its own toxicologists. When a government pairs up with a community to increase its sense of agency, to improve on, as Dr. McArthur mentioned, its lack of equal political power in the situation, so that the community that's experiencing adverse health effects and that also is exposed to high levels of an environmental contaminant has access to the experts working at its direction, and the government ultimately makes a decision about the cleanup and how it will be costed and how people's health will be protected, the community itself is empowered to participate with the same degree of resources or at least some degree of resources against a large polluter.