CCEEB’s ten core principles and perspectives are organized under three general themes we think environmental justice policies should embrace: fairness, certainty and balance.

CCEEB members will continue open channels of communication with the elected and non-elected representatives of the communities where they do business as well as with relevant regulatory agencies.

FAIRNESS

• All people are entitled to a healthy environment and fair treatment under environmental laws, regulations and policies. Legitimate environmental concerns of people of all races, cultures and income levels need to be addressed by rational policy and program decisions.

• Environmental justice policies should be designed to ensure that environmental programs and standards protect people fairly. Environmental justice policies should be designed to identify and correct problems of unfairness caused by misapplications or gaps in standards and regulations.

• All people should have convenient access to relevant information and the opportunity for meaningful participation in decision-making processes that affect the environmental quality of their communities.

• Environmental justice policy can help identify and correct public health problems, but should neither be expected nor required to resolve broader issues of social injustice or past ill-advised land use planning and urban design. Therefore, mitigation of impacts should be directly related and proportional to the specific type of impact resulting from the source. Future land use planning and zoning decisions should be mindful of environmental justice concerns. Environmental justice policy should not create an intrusive role for the state or federal government in what are appropriately local land use decisions.

• Environmental justice policies and environmental programs should be designed to provide the greatest possible clarity and certainty for all stakeholders. Environmental justice policy approaches must clearly define terms and establish reasonable goals, objectives and methods to demonstrate compliance. Should environmental justice concerns emerge in an authorization process, they should be evaluated as early as possible to provide timely decisions and certainty for both the community and the authorization proponent.

• Environmental justice policy and environmental programs should be founded on sound science. Sound data and rational regulatory policies should be developed to cope with the complex issues associated with cumulative impacts. Initiatives should be designed to measure levels of exposure in communities because proximity to a source does not in and of itself equate to environmental health risk.

• If environmental requirements are met, an activity should be considered both environmentally acceptable and fair. However, there may be unusual situations in which a showing of adverse impact could be made despite environmental compliance. The identification and resolution of such situations should be made through prudent environmental program adjustments following due process and based on rigorous science. Government agencies establish environmental standards to protect human health, and issue environmental permits in accordance with those standards. As a threshold for consideration of environmental justice claims, an adverse impact needs to be demonstrated. Presumably, an adverse impact does not exist if existing environmental requirements are met. If there is no adverse impact, grounds do not exist for consideration of whether any particular community is experiencing a disproportionate impact.

• Environmental concerns should be balanced with legitimate community concerns for economic development and jobs.

• Valuable environmental regulatory initiatives should not be curtailed unless they are shown to undermine public health protection. Benefits that can be garnered from initiatives such as the use of market based incentives to achieve air quality goals or the redevelopment of urban brownfields property should continue to be aggressively pursued. If only one aspect or part of a reform causes a public health problem, only that aspect or part should be reevaluated.

• To prevent shifting problems from one environmental medium to another (e.g., from air to water), environmental justice policies should be designed to address all environmental media.