Chicago Mayor Receives Blueprint for ’Green New Deal’ to Address Environmental Justice

CHICAGO—Mayor Brandon Johnson received a blueprint last week for tackling some of the most important issues—including environmental justice—facing the city from his transition committee.

 A team of environmental justice leaders outlined what a “Green New Deal” could look like in Chicago with ideas including utility affordability measures, clean energy job opportunities, streamlined stormwater management and environmental justice curricula in schools.

Nearly 400 individuals were part of the transition committee. Eleven subcommittees delivered ideas focused on major issues, including immigration, education, public safety and environmental justice. 

Committee members and the mayor gathered on July 6 at the Greater Harvest Baptist Church on the South Side to announce the culmination of the report. Together, the committee developed a 223-page transition report outlining the most pressing issues affecting Chicagoans, suggesting goals and assessments for the mayor.

Each subcommittee called for cross-collaboration between different levels of government, within agencies and with community members having a seat at the table. That, along with racial equity as a main theme, set the general tone of the report.

The environmental justice subcommittee comprised 25 members from business, civic, social justice and community-based organizations. The group’s recommendations focused on a Green New Deal for Chicago, a framework meant to serve “as guiding principles for our efforts to realize a cleaner, healthier, more just, and sustainable city,” the report states.

“We must fundamentally re-envision how all neighborhoods in Chicago can be places where residents, natural resources and businesses thrive in mutually beneficial ways,” said Jung Yoon, a co-chair of the environmental justice subcommittee and campaign director at Grassroots Collaborative, a coalliton of community and labor organizations. “It is time to co-govern with frontline communities who have disproportionately borne the impact of pollution, climate change, racism and economic disenfranchisement.”

Members of the transition committee’s environmental justice team are hopeful that the Johnson administration will prioritize environmental justice more than previous administrations, based on the mayor’s lived experience with the issue and his progressive stance on social and racial justice.

Johnson, a lifelong resident of Austin, a West Side community, ran a social justice campaign influenced by his personal understanding of the disproportionate impacts polluting industry and changing climate have on communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. His own neighborhood saw some of the worst flooding earlier this month after as much as nine inches of rain fell on parts of the city. Johnson has said that he, like many in Chicago’s environmental justice communities, suffers from asthma. 

Among the major goals the environmental justice subcommittee listed in the report was the establishment of a Department of Environment, a promise former Mayor Lori Lightfoot made, but failed to deliver on. Johnson made the same promise, and at a press conference a day after the heavy rain that flooded homes across the city, he reiterated that a new Department of Environment would help the city better prepare for natural disasters, like heavy rains that flood the same homes every year.

According to the report, the department would be tasked with ensuring the city’s climate and environmental goals are met, securing funding to support these goals and coordinating resources to support underserved communities impacted by environmental pollution.

Colleen Smith, another co-chair of the subcommittee, sees some of its recommendations as low-hanging fruit, such as conducting a city-wide environmental cumulative impact assessment that would build on recent actions from the city. Days before the end of her term, Lightfoot signed an executive order calling for an assessment of cumulative environmental burdens across the city and the establishment of community and interagency groups charged with carrying forward environmental justice actions and requiring the city to develop new community engagement standards.

The new environmental justice suggestions also build on a settlement between the city and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which found in an investigation of Chicago’s zoning, planning and land-use policies that the city was environmentally racist, discriminating against communities with high Black and brown populations. The city is required to come up with a plan to reform those policies by Sept. 1, the Chicago Sun-Times reported in May. 

Some of the recommendations focused on stricter permitting processes for polluting sources in environmental justice communities and better enforcement by the Chicago Department of Public Health of air pollution rules.

Dany Robles, a member of the environmental justice subcommittee, said the committee recognized that there is a prime opportunity to launch some of these goals by leveraging federal funds available from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year.

The environmental justice recommendations also emphasized the need for job opportunities for communities in clean energy transition and other environmental efforts like accelerating lead service line replacement and electrification of buildings.

Each of the major goals listed in the environmental justice section includes suggested near- and long-term goals, stakeholder engagement and metrics. The six main goals outlined include:

• Ensure effective environmental justice oversight and responsiveness
• Fully resource a new Department of Environment with a focus on environmental justice
• Achieve a Green New Deal for water
• Secure a just transition to an equitable, decarbonized Chicago
• Guarantee utilities are provided in a fair, equitable and affordable manner with an investment emphasis on communities facing the greatest utility burden
• Achieve a Green New Deal for schools 

Smith, who is also the director of government affairs at Invenergy, a sustainable energy company, anticipates environmental oversight of polluting industries continuing to be one of the most challenging pursuits.

“The longer-term goal of ensuring effective environmental justice oversight and responsiveness will take years to be done in a way that really honors what that means and dismantles some policies within the city that have perpetrated harms,” said Smith.

Several of the environmental justice recommendations overlap with other subjects, such as education, housing and public health. Among the newer ideas listed in the blueprint are building green social housing and the larger focus on green schools, with suggestions ranging from heat adaptation of school buildings to climate curricula. 

“Generally, the framing is intentionally political and intentionally bold about using a frame of a Green New Deal to address environment and climate justice issues,” Yoon told Inside Climate News. “I think there is a lot of excitement around how Chicago, as the third-largest city, can really pave the way to show what a Green New Deal in action can look like in our city so we can address current environmental and economic and racial disparities in a sustainable future.”