The EPA wanted to remove toxic waste from a Birmingham neighborhood, which would have cost tens of millions of dollars. The state’s influence machine kicked into high gear.
Residents of North Birmingham, most of whom are African American, live in the shadow of energy plants and the waste they create. By Steven Mufson Steven Mufson Reporter covering the business of climate change Email Bio Follow April 24 at 11:41 AM BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — In autumn of 2013, a senior executive from a powerful coal company and a lawyer from one of the state’s most influential firms hashed out a strategy for avoiding a serious — and expensive — problem.
Someone who could persuade the people living on contaminated land to protest not the pollution, but the cleanup. Oliver Robinson is a 6-foot-4-inch Birmingham native who led a thrilling Alabama-Birmingham team to the Elite 8 of the NCAA tournament. When he ran for office, he was elected in a landslide. The bribe This tale of power, pollution and duplicity played out in Alabama’s poorest communities, in its executive suites and its storied courtrooms.
Everyone knew Robinson, the 6-foot-4-inch Birmingham native who led a thrilling Alabama-Birmingham team to the Elite 8 of the NCAA tournament. When he ran for office, he was elected in a landslide. “Joel, go back to Dave and the Drummond people and let them know that we will need $7,000 per month,” Robinson wrote on Dec. 11 in an email later divulged by federal prosecutors.
Robinson had set up the foundation to promote financial literacy among low-income families and students. Every year its Black Achievers Awards Gala was one of the highlights of the social and philanthropic calendar and it buffed Robinson’s image. Keisha Brown sits outside her home in Birmingham. Brown has respiratory problems that she attributes to the level of pollution in her area. 'An urban nightmare' Ground zero in the plot was the Superfund site, just a 10-minute drive from the Balch & Bingham offices in downtown Birmingham. Homeowners like Keisha Brown had long sensed that they lived on the front lines of an environmental disaster.
A stack from the ERP Coke plants releases fumes. But with time, it had devolved into what Brown called “an urban nightmare.” U.S. steel output began to dwindle and people moved away. The Methodist church left. A handful of grocery stores closed. Bus service was discontinued. Some abandoned homes were demolished. Those left behind complained of soot.
Drummond’s coking operation had violated air pollution limits before the Superfund flap. In 2004, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management cited ABC Coke for allegedly exceeding the daily limits on the release of benzopyrene, a cancer-causing pollutant, 37 times. Roberson, a biologist by training who had once been the compliance chief for hazardous waste at the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, argued that the Drummond-owned ABC Coke facilities were a mile and a half away from the Superfund site and that airborne toxic pollution couldn’t float that far.
“The only time I can remember when Drummond got beat on something is when they wanted to mine property owned by the University of Alabama right on the edge of the Black Warrior River,” said Jack Drake, an Alabama civil rights and plaintiffs’ lawyer. He also drafted a letter for the superintendent of Tarrant schools to rescind the school board’s permission for the EPA to test soil samples.
“I was surprised when I started getting letters from senators saying the state of Alabama would not move forward and support an NPL listing because it came with such force,” said Heather McTeer Toney, who was then the regional EPA administrator. Then came letters from congressmen and the governor.The law firm Balch & Bingham has been a political player in Alabama since 1922. In his campaign, Robinson got a lot of help from Gilbert.
Gilbert instructed one of Balch & Bingham’s new, bottom-rung lawyers to draft three versions of a “community” letter that Robinson would get residents to sign. Gilbert asked the associate to “dumb them down a bit” to make them sound more authentic and not like a “coordinated effort.” Georgia Waugh, Juanita Bates and Shekelah Weatherspoon socialize in their Harriman Park neighborhood, which is surrounded by industry. Many homes in the neighborhood have been vacated, and residents complain about health issues related to pollution. Robinson also reached out to his first campaign manager, Hezekiah Jackson, who was president of the Birmingham chapter of the NAACP.
Tracy would later testify that Gilbert said he had checked the plan with Balch’s ethics experts and that community outreach through a foundation was “perfectly fine.” “I’m not sure why we cloak the reference in our invoice,” chief operating officer David Miceli wrote in a Sept. 22, 2015, email.The internal back and forth, documented later in the criminal case, dragged on for months.
“Quitting a job like that . . . always portends something,” Al.com journalist John Archibald opined that day. He said the explanation “caused many in Birmingham to snort breakfast beverage through their noses.”In February 2017, its agents paid a visit to Robinson, looking into tax evasion charges; he had not paid taxes on the money he took from the foundation. Robinson made little effort to deny charges. Tears welled up in his eyes, an FBI report noted, and his lips quivered.
By September, Gilbert and Roberson were charged with bribery, conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering. But Robinson’s own testimony and a trail of emails and invoices proved a potent combination at the trial. Drummond initially stuck by Roberson, its executive. “While we respect the judicial process, we consider David to be a man of integrity who would not knowingly engage in wrongdoing,” the company said in a statement when he was convicted.
“Joel was a friend,” Roberson said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I don’t consider him much of a friend now for doing what he’s done to me.” A short distance and a world away from Balch & Bingham’s offices and the federal courthouse, the EPA has been gradually cleaning up some of the toxic waste in the 35th Avenue Superfund site.
EPA’s reason for not unilaterally adding the site to the national priorities list is that there is not enough Superfund money to cover the costs of cleaning up the 1,337 existing sites now, including a dozen in Alabama.
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