‘They couldn’t care less’: plan to solve sewage crisis in Illinois town merely ‘a patch’
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Residents of a majority-Black community that have endured long-term flooding from sewage claim that a proposed plan to remedy the issue is insufficient. The Guardian reported last month on how even modest rainfall causes Centreville, 10 minutes from downtown St Louis, to be overwhelmed by sewage that overwhelms homes and streets.
Following the Guardian’s reporting on the “humanitarian crisis” in Centreville, Illinois senators Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin urged the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to approve federal funding that could potentially address the city’s failing infrastructure.
But citizens say their calls for help have been met with silence or half-measures from local officials. A Centreville community group says the plan put forth by local officials doesn’t sufficiently address the severity of the problems facing the town and say they’ve been excluded from conversations about the path forward
“They couldn’t care less about what we think,” resident Valerie Marion, a member of Centreville Citizens for Change, the community group behind the letter, told the Guardian. “They couldn’t care less about how we live. They gonna do what they want to do, and we just have to deal with it.”
A town of about 5,000 residents, Centreville is located just across the Mississippi River from St Louis in a flood plain known as the American Bottom. The community has suffered for years from extreme flooding and sewage problems that have eroded infrastructure, wreaked costly damage to homes, and resulted in health issues, residents say.
The city of Centreville and other local authorities recently applied for a $22.9m grant to make repairs to the sanitary sewer system. But in a letter to the governor and the Illinois Emergency Management Agency last month, residents say the funding application “does not reflect the complexity of the problems” in the town and that it was authored, without resident input, by the same local officials who have failed to address those issues for years.
Failure to seek input from Centreville residents “resulted in a missed opportunity to create a proposal that encompasses the full scope of the problems”, continued the letter, which was also signed by attorneys representing Centreville residents in a lawsuit against the city and the environmental groups Earthjustice and the National Resources Defense Council.
The frustration underscores the extent to which members of this community, which is about 95% Black and one of the poorest in the nation, feels neglected by political leaders and shut out of discussions about how to solve issues in the area.
Nicole Nelson, executive director of Equity Legal Services and one of the lawyers representing Centreville residents in a lawsuit, told the Guardian that the grant did not include anything related to health testing, storm water flooding, problems with surrounding sewer systems, or funding to aid residents with home repairs. Conscious of the fact that many residents have shouldered the costs of replacing furnaces and hot water tanks and been forced to attend to structural and property damage themselves, Centreville Citizens for Change have called these repairs “long overdue”.
“People out here need a lot of help,” said Centreville Citizens for Change leader and longtime resident Walter Byrd, adding that the funding would merely “put a patch” on the problems without fully solving them. “When you put a patch on it,” he said, “it comes right back”.
Rebecca Clark, spokesperson for the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, told the Guardian that the resident concerns in the letter have been referred to the St Clair County Emergency Management Agency. A spokesperson for Governor J B Pritzker responded to the Guardian’s request for comment by pointing to recent remarks by the governor in which he described the situation in Centreville as a “textbook example of environmental racism” and promised to use “every tool at [his] disposal” to address the situation.
A decision on the city’s grant application is expected early this summer. The city of Centreville, one of the defendants in the lawsuit that was filed last year on behalf of two residents, did not respond to a request for comment.
