California environmental regulators have rolled out a revised version of the state’s pollution-mapping tool, and the update is drawing sharp criticism from community groups in the Bay Area who say it could cost their neighborhoods badly needed cleanup dollars — a debate that carries implications for how California weighs environmental burden statewide, including here in the Inland Empire.
The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment released the fifth edition of CalEnviroScreen in July, adding new measures such as diabetes rates and small pollution sources like gas stations, while also refreshing older data points like childhood lead exposure. The tool is used to rank California census tracts by environmental and health burden, and those rankings carry real financial weight.
Advocates in San Francisco say the update actually waters down scores for several vulnerable neighborhoods, making them appear cleaner on paper even though conditions on the ground haven’t improved. In earlier draft versions of the tool, six census tracts in Chinatown and the Tenderloin ranked in the top 25% statewide — a threshold that matters because California law requires a quarter of the state’s cap-and-invest revenue, generated from fees on polluting companies, to go toward communities identified as disadvantaged.
By the time the final version was published, those six tracts had fallen out of the top 25%. Other struggling areas, including parts of the Mission District and South of Market, never made the cut either. Meanwhile, dense urban pollution hot spots elsewhere in the state — including sections of southeast Los Angeles and Long Beach — continued to rank among the most burdened.
Eddie Ahn, executive director of the nonprofit Brightline Defense, didn’t mince words about the outcome, calling it evidence of deeper flaws in how the state approaches environmental scoring. State officials, however, say the shifts reflect routine data updates and technical corrections rather than any intentional downgrading of these communities. Amy Gilson, a spokesperson for the health hazard office, said CalEnviroScreen produces a relative ranking system, not an absolute measure of harm, and is designed to help identify the state’s most affected areas.
Some researchers argue the disagreement points to a structural issue with the tool itself. Benjamin Huynh, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said combining 23 different indicators — from air pollution to nearby dumps — into one composite score inevitably introduces judgment calls that can skew results. He noted that scientists have long cautioned against using these blended scores as the sole basis for high-stakes funding decisions, since they’re better suited for exploring patterns than making definitive policy calls.
Huynh pointed out that dense San Francisco neighborhoods may suffer from poor indoor air quality, a factor the statewide tool doesn’t measure because comparable data isn’t available everywhere. Gilson said the state’s approach is intended to keep the system transparent, broadly applicable and consistent with guidance from the National Academies of Sciences.
The stakes are significant. Disadvantaged communities have received more than $7.2 billion since 2015 through the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, though lawmakers continue to negotiate how much money flows into that fund each year. CalEnviroScreen rankings also influence other funding streams, including regional grant programs.
Pratibha Tekkey, director of community organizing at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said her organization has relied on funding tied to CalEnviroScreen rankings to distribute hundreds of air purifiers to residents. She worries the new scores don’t reflect what people in these neighborhoods actually experience day to day.
“You can’t just be a scientist looking at data points and deciding this is what it would be,” Tekkey said. “You have to see who is living there, what health challenges they face, what economic challenges they face.”
Malcolm Yeung, chief executive of the Chinatown Community Development Center, said the revised model puts crowded urban communities at an unfair disadvantage. He noted that Chinatown, despite being one of the most densely populated residential areas in California, no longer scores competitively under the new system.
State officials say they reviewed community feedback closely and made targeted corrections to indicators such as diesel exhaust, hazardous waste sites and fine-particle pollution, including accounting for additional emissions sources. Gilson said those adjustments produced only minor shifts in scores for most Bay Area tracts and had a limited effect on the region’s overall share of top-ranked areas.
Beyond the scoring tool itself, CalEPA is also revisiting how it formally defines a “disadvantaged community,” a designation that determines funding eligibility. The current proposal would include tracts ranked in the top 25% of the new CalEnviroScreen tool, tracts in the top 5% for pollution burden, tracts that overlapped with the previous version’s top 25%, and tribal lands. The agency held two public workshops in July, with the public comment period closing recently.
Brightline Defense has pushed for a broader definition, suggesting the state include tracts within a half-mile of top-ranked areas, raise the threshold to the top 35% overall, and factor in tracts that scored in the top 25% under a previous version of the tool. Ahn said in written comments that the agency should eventually pursue larger reforms to ensure funding can be targeted more precisely to communities with specific, localized needs.
Gilson said the state’s goal is to strike a balance between being inclusive and preserving the integrity of the designation so that funding isn’t spread too thin. She added that communities outside the top 25% aren’t necessarily locked out of state support, since other laws require prioritizing low-income areas regardless of their CalEnviroScreen ranking.
Any major overhaul of the underlying model, Gilson said, would require extensive research and evaluation. Feedback gathered from this round of criticism, she said, will help inform the next version of CalEnviroScreen, with work on that update expected to begin in 2027.
Original source: CalMatters
