The Consultant's Memo: The 1984 Cerrell Report, and how South Central L.A. stopped an incinerator

In 1984, the California Waste Management Board commissioned a study on how to site waste incinerators. The report, written by the political consulting firm Cerrell Associates of Los Angeles and entitled Political Difficulties Facing Waste-to-Energy Conversion Plant Siting (popularly known as the Cerrell Report), set out “to assist in selecting a site that offers the least potential of generating public opposition.” The report acknowledged that “since the 1970s, political criteria have become every bit as important in determining the outcome of a project as engineering factors.” The Cerrell Report suggests that companies target small, rural communities whose residents are low income, older people, or people with a high school education or less; communities with a high proportion of Catholic residents; and communities whose residents are engaged in resource extractive industries such as agriculture, mining, and forestry. Ideally, the report states, “officials and companies should look for lower socioeconomic neighborhoods that are also in a heavy industrial area with little, if any, commercial activity.”
Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 356

My reflection In 1985, Sheila Cannon, a private-duty nurse raising four children in South Central Los Angeles, learned that the city planned to build its first garbage-burning power plant two blocks from her home (National Wildlife, 1991). The project was called LANCER, the Los Angeles City Energy Recovery project. It would burn 1,600 tons of household trash a day, next to the Santa Monica Freeway (CEQAnet, State Clearinghouse No. 1984082910). The site, at 41st and Alameda streets, sat in a residential area of about 16,000 people, near Jefferson High School (Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles). The plant would be a waste-to-energy incinerator: it burns garbage and sells the electricity.

Her sister, Robin Cannon, read the project's environmental impact report, the study California law requires before a big public project can go ahead. According to one account of the fight, she called Sheila and said, "Sheila, they're trying to kill us" (Giraffe Heroes Project). That summer, Robin Cannon and a neighbor, Charlotte Bullock, founded Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles (Wikipedia).

They had almost nothing to fight with. None of them had organized a campaign before. When they brought their objections to the city council, the members brushed them aside, National Wildlife reported, as "gnatlike humming from the politically cloutless." The big environmental groups weren't much help either. The Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund reportedly declined to join, calling it a community health issue rather than an environmental one (Wikipedia, summarizing the group's history).

Now set their fight beside a document written the year before, across town.

In 1984, the California Waste Management Board, a state agency, paid a political consulting firm on Larchmont Boulevard in Los Angeles, Cerrell Associates, to study why waste-to-energy plants kept getting stuck. The answer was in the report's conclusion: "Public opposition has become the greatest single obstacle" (J. Stephen Powell, Political Difficulties Facing Waste-to-Energy Conversion Plant Siting, Cerrell Associates, 1984, p. 39). So the report did something unusual. It drew a portrait of the people who fight and the people who don't.

A demographic picture of likely opponents, it said, "would be invaluable to an effective siting program" (p. 11). It then supplied one. The person least likely to oppose a facility, it said, is older, has "a high school education or less," and holds a conservative, free-market outlook (p. 16). A chart listed more traits of communities least likely to resist: rural, small (under 25,000 people), low income, Catholic, long-time residents, and open to promises of jobs and money. And the report told planners where not to build: middle- and higher-income neighborhoods, it advised, should not fall within one mile, or even five miles, of a proposed site (p. 26). Siting, the choice of where to put a facility, had become as much a political calculation as an engineering one.

That is the report people usually quote, and it is damning. But one sentence on page 26 changes how I read the rest: "All socioeconomic groupings tend to resent the nearby siting of major facilities," it says, "but the middle and upper-socioeconomic strata possess better resources to effectuate their opposition."

Read that twice. The consultants weren't saying poor neighborhoods don't care. They were saying poor neighborhoods can't afford to win. The variable wasn't feeling. It was power.

And by the report's own chart, South Central Los Angeles should have been trouble for planners. The chart lists California and urban communities among those most likely to resist. What the neighborhood lacked was what the report counted most: money, time, lawyers, connections.

So the Cannons and Bullock went out and built those things. They turned a technical report into fact sheets their neighbors could read. They went to every political forum they could find. And they recruited allies in wealthier parts of the city, in Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, and the San Fernando Valley, with a pitch that turned the siting logic around. "If you help us stop this one," they told them, "there will be no LANCER 2 in your neighborhood" (Giraffe Heroes Project; National Wildlife). Greenpeace and several public-interest law groups joined in (Di Chiro, 1996, as quoted in Sandler & Pezzullo, eds.). A team of UCLA planning students produced a 425-page analysis concluding the plant would cost at least $105.38 a ton to run, not the $27.43 the city had estimated (Rachel's Hazardous Waste News #55, 1987).

In June 1987, Mayor Tom Bradley killed LANCER, after the city had already spent $12 million on it (Rachel's). Two council members who had backed it lost their seats (National Wildlife). That same year, according to a 1992 magazine account, an opponent of LANCER "unearthed" the Cerrell report and brought it into public view (Betsy Swart, On The Issues, 1992).

Here is where I have to be careful, because the popular version of this story goes further than the evidence does.

First, the Cerrell report never mentions race. The words "race," "minority," "Black," and "Hispanic" do not appear in it. Its criteria are class, education, age, religion, politics, and size. The racial pattern came from how those criteria overlapped with where people of color lived, not from the text itself (Tracy Perkins, Boom California, 2022).

Second, I found no evidence that anyone chose the LANCER site because of the report. The city's environmental filing for LANCER was opened in 1984, the same year the report appeared (CEQAnet). The report reads less like the cause of LANCER than like a description of the thinking that produced it.

Third, the claim behind this issue says the report "told industry" where to build. It was written for a state board, paid for with public money, and addressed to the local governments and companies proposing plants. That makes it worse, not better. It was public policy advice.

Does the "path of least resistance" actually describe how facilities get placed? The best research says mostly yes. The economist James T. Hamilton found that commercial hazardous-waste firms planning expansions between 1987 and 1992 were more likely to target areas with less capacity for collective action, the ability of residents to organize and raise a company's costs, and that this explained the racial pattern better than prejudice alone (Hamilton, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 1995). In Michigan, Robin Saha and Paul Mohai found that hazardous-waste facility siting became more unequal over the decades when local opposition was rising, and they cite the Cerrell report as evidence of the logic (Saha & Mohai, Social Problems, 2005, p. 626). In Los Angeles County, Manuel Pastor and colleagues found that toxic facilities went into minority neighborhoods, rather than minorities moving in afterward (Pastor, Sadd & Hipp, Journal of Urban Affairs, 2001, as summarized by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights).

The counterevidence is real, too. Some national studies of hazardous-waste facilities found no consistent racial difference at the time facilities were sited (Anderton et al., Demography, 1994; Oakes, Anderton & Anderson, 1996). Later work argues those studies drew their comparison areas too crudely, and that finer methods show the disparity clearly (Mohai & Saha, 2015). The strong version of the finding is not that every siting targets the powerless. It's that, over many decisions, facilities tend to end up where opposition is cheapest to overcome.

The Digital Mind claim holds, with a correction: the Cerrell report advised proponents to weigh how hard a community would fight, and to steer clear of middle- and upper-income neighborhoods. It did not name race, and there's no record that it picked a particular site.

What stays with me is that page-26 sentence. The report measured the wrong thing about South Central, and it measured the right thing. It was wrong that the neighborhood wouldn't fight. It was right that fighting costs something. Sheila Cannon paid it: "For two years I lived and breathed LANCER," she said, working as a nurse and raising four kids while the phone rang from six in the morning until midnight (National Wildlife).

The memo was a prediction about who can afford to say no. The people of South Central didn't prove they cared. They proved the price could be paid, and then they made the city pay it.