Campbell to discuss problems concerning clean energy, public health

By Dan E. Way

dway@heraldsun.com; 918-1035

CHAPEL HILL -- One of the town's leading activists for environmental justice in the Rogers Road community has been invited to the Obama Administration's green energy table, and he's hoping to come back from Washington later this week with a commitment for federal stimulus money to clean up long-standing water and air quality issues in his neighborhood.

"I guess all that noise we've been making, somebody listened," the Rev. Robert Campbell said Saturday. He will be at the White House on Friday to speak to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about issues in the Rogers-Eubanks roads community related to clean energy and public health.

Campbell, president of the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association and co-founder and co-chairman of the Coalition to End Environmental Racism, among his many environmental roles, has been invited to join a panel in a White House briefing on the public health benefits of a clean energy economy. Public health advocates and community leaders, experts from U.S. agencies and White House officials will engage in a discussion on the lasting public health benefits of a clean energy economy.

"It's an opportunity to tell our story and be involved in the climate and the energy and environmental issues that relate to public health," Campbell said.

"We've been checking the water quality in our community, the air quality in our community, looking at the effects that methane gas may have on our community," and how much of that might be linked to the nearby county landfill, he said.

"If we were more green efficient, we wouldn't have the problems that landfills create," Campbell said.

"We hope that we might be able to influence some type of policy change, especially when it comes to landfills and facilities that deal with our waste," he said. "The question is should there be a national campaign for reducing, reusing and recycling."

But on the local level, Campbell is keenly interested in the sort of green that will expand testing and build infrastructure.

"It's all about funding. We're in a period where the funding is not there," but unmet needs are urgent, he said.

A grant application submitted to the Atlanta region of the federal Environmental Protection Agency is what caught the Obama Administration's attention, Campbell said.

The EPA's regional director "was impressed with how we wrote it up and some of the programs we were doing creating green jobs in our community by cleaning up some of the dump sites and putting some of our young men to work doing community projects," Campbell said.

If money were available, failing septic systems could be replaced by hooking the community onto municipal sewer lines, new water lines could be installed in place of old wells that could be capped and expanded monitoring of air quality could be conducted, Campbell said.

But for now, the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association is preparing for Monday's Chapel Hill Town Council review of the Small Area Task Force final report, and Tuesday's Board of Orange County Commissioners meeting to seek approval of a water quality survey and water sampling.