When it rains in Alabama’s Black Belt, poop gurgles up from the earth. A new federal grant program wants to stop it from happening.
It is a crisis that has long roots dating back to slavery, and has been the focus of Black Alabama activists for generations. Last year, the Justice Department determined that the state had discriminated against Black residents for decades by allowing entire counties to fester in feces.
And in a race against Mother Nature, former President Donald Trump, and the conservative Supreme Court, the Biden administration announced last week that it was giving $14 million directly to Texas A&M University and the Black Belt Unincorporated Wastewater Program, a trusted community organization, to lead a program installing onsite wastewater treatment systems throughout Alabama’s 17 Black Belt counties.
The community group’s director, Sherry Bradley, said that the money leaves the group “ecstatic and even more focused” and gives them “a safety net to continue” their work as attacks mount against environmental health funding.
Read More: Alabama Discriminated Against Black Residents, Feds Confirm
The funding is part of $325 million in grants recently made available to help Black and low-income communities improve climate resilience and cut pollution. As Biden’s presidency comes to a close, these grants to 21 universities, nonprofits, and community groups mark the first recipients through the administration’s $2 billion Community Change Grant Program.
Other examples of grants include community-run programs to plant trees in Houston, which had half of its trees impacted by Hurricane Beryl, and to start workforce training programs in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and South Los Angeles for welding, electric vehicle maintenance, and cleaning up lead contamination.
The administration hailed the spending as “the single-largest investment in environmental justice ever” and the cornerstone of its racial and economic justice-oriented programs. It falls under the administration’s Justice40 initiative, the first federal policy to directly call for climate and environment spending to benefit the communities that have been bankrupted by severe weather, climate change, and environmental racism.
But time may be running out on multiple fronts. As climate disasters ramp up and pollution impacts become more evident, a future Trump administration vows to gut the program, and recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings have opened up the doors for potential litigation that would defang it.
On page 422 of the 448-page document outlining Project 2025’s goals for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, it calls for Trump to “stop all grants to advocacy groups” on day one.
It’s a playbook that is already being utilized at the state level. Just a few days after the federal government made the money available for Bradley’s group, Republican lawmakers in Alabama delayed a contract of $2 million from the state to the group to do the same work.
Read More: Why Biden’s Hallmark Environmental Program Has Been Slow to Take Root
The EPA expects to dole out the $1.7 billion by the end of the year in anticipation of any attacks.
As Capital B has reported, these grants are notable because for the first time the funding is being given directly to community organizations that are creating and running the programs, rather than the government. Michael Regan, the first Black man to run the federal government’s environmental agency, said the nation’s “ability to deliver tangible results for communities” depends on such innovative funding attempts.
Building trust
While public sewers have served a vast majority of America’s homes since 1970, roughly 25% of the country still relies on septic tanks and individual sewage systems. New England states and the Southeast have the highest proportion of homes served by these systems, but the issue is much more dire in the South because of high poverty rates and the exorbitant price tag to run them.
Depending on a property’s soil condition, installing an onsite septic system in Alabama can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000. In four of the 17 Black Belt counties, more than 10% of households rake in less than $10,000 per year, making the price tag unattainable.
An onsite septic tank is a large, watertight container buried underground that receives and treats household wastewater from toilets, sinks, and showers.
In the tanks, once combined, solid waste settles at the bottom as sludge, while oils and grease form a scum layer on top. As it settles, bacteria breaks down waste, and then the remaining liquid flows out to a drain field where it is further purified by the soil. But if a tank fails, the bacteria-filled liquid can settle in people’s yards, creating health crises. In 2017, a United Nations poverty official toured the region and claimed that the crisis was like nothing he had ever seen in a wealthy country.
Read More: How Slavery and Sharecropping Created a Sewage Crisis in Alabama’s Black Belt
Over the past three years, the Black Belt Unincorporated Wastewater Program has installed about 100 systems. The federal funding will help them provide anywhere from 500 to a couple of thousand households with systems. There are more than 200,000 households in the Black Belt.
The septic systems installed with the award dollars will use solar panels to power pumps when needed, the group said.
In addition to the direct installation of tanks, the organization also educates homeowners throughout the state. Last year, in an interview with Capital B, Bradley explained that cultural education is lacking. For example, given that Southern cuisine consists of a lot of fried foods, it is not always apparent to people that they can’t pour their grease into the system.
The organization’s presence in the region has also helped alleviate homeowner’s fears about losing their property to bad actors — or the government. As Capital B has extensively reported, in recent years, private companies and even city governments have taken insidious steps to take property from Black homeowners. In the Black Belt, some families have lost their homes or land as collateral after taking out loans to pay for the septic tanks, Bradley said.
The federal government has a low-interest loan program for such endeavors, but it is underused.
“People still have the mindset like, ‘Don’t get on any program because they’ll take your house, your land,’” Bradley explained. “A lot of people will tell you they’re not gonna trust the health department, but they’ve seen our work. They’ve talked to their neighbors about how we’ve treated them.”
This is exactly the goal of these grants. The “grants put communities in the driver’s seat on the road to righting the environmental wrongs of the past,” said John Podesta, a senior climate policy adviser in the Biden administration.
Still, the grants don’t align with Republican goals. However, Vice President Kamala Harris has signaled that she would continue to “go after polluters” and prioritize reversing some of the effects of environmental racism if elected this November.
As a candidate in 2019, she even put forth more progressive environmental and climate policy plans than Biden.