Steven Mufson reports for the Washington Post | April 24
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.
The Environmental Protection Agency wanted to clean up toxic soil in the 35th Avenue Superfund site in north Birmingham, where residents, about 95 percent of them African Americans, live in the shadow of massive waste berms, industrial chimneys, and the fortresses of steel, coking and cement manufacturing.
For more than a century, those industrial plants had generated jobs — but also noxious emissions and waste. In 2009, the EPA found elevated levels of toxic chemicals, in some cases three times the amount considered dangerous enough to require immediate removal. In 2013 the agency notified Drummond, the coal company, and four other manufacturers nearby that they would have to spend tens of millions of dollars to dig up and replace the soil on hundreds of residential yards. David Roberson, Drummond’s vice president and top lobbyist, worried that it would cost his company $100 million or more.
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Roberson and Joel Gilbert, a powerhouse lawyer with Balch & Bingham, had fought off environmental rules before. But for this campaign they needed a public face, someone with credibility both with the state government in Montgomery and the black communities in north Birmingham.
Someone who could persuade the people living on contaminated land to protest not the pollution, but the cleanup.
By early 2014, they had chosen Oliver L. Robinson Jr. (D), an African American state legislator and former University of Alabama at Birmingham basketball star.
But that was long before they all turned on each other. Before the guilty verdicts. Before the prison sentences that, so far, only one of them is serving.
