White House Retrofits Infrastructure Bill to Better Help Poor Communities

This week, the Biden administration will launch a new initiative to ensure that the most vulnerable communities in America have access to billions of dollars from the infrastructure bill to repair their crumbling storm water, drinking water, and wastewater systems.

It represents a midcourse adjustment on the signature achievement of President Biden’s administration, with a goal of speeding up assistance to local governments that lack the staffing and know-how to apply for $55 billion in funding for water projects tucked into the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which passed in November.

Tuesday will see top officials from the Environmental Protection Agency (and the Agriculture Department) announce a plan to provide technical support to 11 impoverished communities in South, Appalachia, and tribal areas.

Lowndes County, Ala. will announce the news. It is a 1960 civil rights battleground that saw more than half the residents without access to septic systems or municipal wastewater systems. Hundreds of people, almost all of them Black, resort to using homemade “straight pipes,” which pump raw sewage into their yards, nearby creeks and the streets.

“In all my travels, the time I spent in Lowndes County was disheartening and frankly very hard to process,” said Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, who has crisscrossed the country as part of the administration’s environmental justice initiative.

“This is an environment where children are playing in the same yard with raw sewage, homes where waste is backing up into people’s tubs and the very sinks where they wash their dishes,” added Mr. Regan, a former environmental official in North Carolina who is the first Black man to run the E.P.A. “These are really, really tough experiences.”

In a statement, Mr. Biden said, “This is the United States of America: No one should have raw sewage in their backyards or seeping into their homes.”

The administration will target its assistance to communities in seven states: Lowndes and Greene Counties in Alabama; Bolivar County, Mississippi; Doña Ana County and Santo Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico; Duplin and Halifax Counties in North Carolina; Harlan County, Kentucky; McDowell and Raleigh Counties in West Virginia; and the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona.

The initial funding is approximately $5 million. Mitch Landrieu is a former mayor in New Orleans and oversees coordination of Mr. Biden’s infrastructure act. He said the move was a significant change that would allow local officials more access to a wide range assistance.

Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary said that his ultimate goal was to eliminate certain advantages that some counties enjoy when they have access to a wide range of federal aid programs. “They have to learn how to play the game,” he said. “And they have to learn how to play the game at multiple levels, with multiple departments.”

E.P.A.. will begin to operate this month. E.P.A. and Agriculture Department experts will work directly with local officials in order to create project lists and needs assessments, draft detailed proposals for state governments, and ensure projects are executed efficiently.

Mr. Landrieu claimed that the idea for the change was a result of Mr. Biden. He read an article in The New York Times in January about the lowndes County problems while on Air Force One. He then instructed his aides to make sure the issues were dealt with “right now,” Mr. Landrieu and Mr. Vilsack said.

“You can’t just send money out and hope that the states and the locals get together,” Mr. Landrieu added. “It’s important to be on the ground to make sure.”

Environmental activists who have urged federal officials for years to take a more active part in these areas’ assistance said the initiative was welcome but would not work long term unless the White House continued to be engaged indefinitely.

“I think this is the beginning, and just a first step, not an end in itself,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, an Alabama native and MacArthur fellow whose 2020 book “Waste” highlighted the sanitation crisis in Lowndes County.

Ms. Flowers said she wanted to see Mr. Biden’s team go further, and is urging them to require that all new sanitation systems come with a 10-year money back warranty to ensure they do not fail in the harsh conditions.

“We have to have sustainable solutions for climate change,” Ms. Flowers said. “But we also have to ensure people down here have access to the same infrastructure as wealthy families.”

If any part of the country stands to see transformational benefits from the infrastructure act, it is Alabama’s Black Belt, an expanse of 17 counties named for the loamy soil that once made it a center of slave-labor cotton production.

Around $25 billion has been allocated to replace failing drinking water systems in cities like Flint, Mich., Jackson, Miss., where the bill received much of the attention. The measure also includes $11.7 million in new funding to upgrade municipal drainage and sewer systems.

The main conduit for the money comes from an existing loan program that has been retrofitted to allow communities the opportunity to forgo repayment of their debt and turn the funding into grants.

While the revolving lending fund is generally regarded to be a successful program, an analysis by the Environmental Policy Innovation Center of the University of Michigan last year showed that many states were less likely than others to tap revolving funding funds for poor communities or larger minority populations.

Alabama’s revolving loan fund has financed few projects in this part of the state in recent years, apart from a major wastewater system upgrade in Selma, according to the program’s annual reports.

Montgomery’s state government has done little over the years to address Lowndes County’s problems. In November, the Justice Department’s civil rights division, citing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opened an investigation into charges that Alabama had discriminated against Black residents in Lowndes County by offering them “diminished access to adequate sanitation.”

In the Black Belt, the destructive legacy of racism — slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, malign neglect by white politicians — is as much a presence underfoot as the areas’s dense, coal-hard soil. The ground is fertile and easy to cultivate cash crops. However, it is too inaccessible to allow for standard septic systems to be installed.

“When we think about the atrocities that we’ve seen throughout the Black Belt,” Mr. Regan said, his voice trailing off. “Let me just say this: All of these people are of a certain income and a certain race. We have to acknowledge that systemic racism still exists.”