[dropcap size=big]T[/dropcap]he L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to release $5.2 million for the ongoing lead contamination cleanup efforts stemming from the closed Exide battery recycling facility in the city of Vernon. The leak affected hundreds of thousands of people in parts of Southeast and East L.A. As of last year, only a few hundred of those homes had been cleaned by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.
“We need as much money as we can get,” says Terry Gonzales, a Boyle Heights resident and activist for Exide cleanup efforts. “But it’s really unclear to us as a community how that money is being spent. It’s unclear how much money is really going to the cleanup.”
Gonzales is worried that a large portion of the $5.2 million will go towards repaying that loan of $176.6 million, money which she and other activists argue isn’t being properly spent and allocated, and not towards actual cleanup efforts. She accuses DTSC of sitting on the $176.6 cleanup loan, and not actually using it for toxic cleanup efforts.
The new money actually comes from a settlement reached by multiple local and state agencies over the 2015 natural gas leak in Porter Ranch that fined the company responsible, SoCal Gas, $119.5 million for the largest gas leak in U.S. history. The Exide cleanup has so far been the largest environmental toxins cleanup in California history.