A Thousand Pages in English: The Kettleman City case that tied translation to a fair environmental review

As part of the permitting process for the incinerator, Kings County issued an Environmental Impact Report (EIR). The Environmental Impact Report was about 300 pages long, with another 700 pages of appendices, for a total of about 1,000 pages. Kettleman City residents, 40 percent monolingual Spanish speakers, 95 percent Latino, said to Kings County, “Look, to include us in this decision, you need to translate these documents into Spanish.” Kings County was unresponsive. The County decision makers likely did not want to set a precedent; if they translated the EIR, they would have to translate documents in other situations, which is something the people of Kettleman City thought would probably be a good idea. Chem Waste, in a generous offer, translated a five-page executive summary and distributed that to every household in Kettleman City. English speakers in Kings County thus had about 1,000 pages of data to pore over, while Spanish speakers had five pages.
Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 72

My reflection One afternoon in January 1988, the sheriff of Kings County, California, called a Greenpeace organizer named Bradley Angel in San Francisco. Was Greenpeace planning to demonstrate, the sheriff wanted to know, at that night's hearing in Kettleman City? Angel hadn't heard of any hearing. He called a woman he knew there, Esperanza "Espy" Maya, and asked whether she knew her town was about to discuss a toxic-waste incinerator. She didn't. She grabbed a few neighbors and went (Luke Cole & Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up, 2001, p. 2).

Kettleman City is a farmworker town of about 1,100 people in the San Joaquin Valley. At the time, about 95 percent of residents were Latino, and roughly 40 percent spoke only Spanish (Cole & Foster, p. 1). About three and a half miles away, behind low hills, sat one of the largest hazardous-waste landfills in the West, run by Chemical Waste Management. Now the company wanted to add an incinerator that could burn up to 108,000 tons of toxic waste a year (p. 2).

The residents formed a group, El Pueblo para el Aire y Agua Limpio, People for Clean Air and Water. They did what the law invites citizens to do. Under the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, a project like this needs an environmental impact report, a public study of its effects, and the public gets to comment. El Pueblo's members wrote almost 120 letters, more than two-thirds of the individual comments the county received (p. 6).

But the report they were commenting on ran about 300 pages, plus 700 pages of appendices, about 1,000 pages in all. It was in English. What Spanish speakers got was a five-page executive summary, translated and distributed by the company itself (p. 6). Residents asked the county to translate the documents. According to Cole and Foster, the county didn't respond. I could not find a record of the county's reasons.

Then came the hearing, 40 miles away in the county seat of Hanford. About 200 residents came by bus and carpool and brought their own interpreter. When they asked for the testimony to be translated at the front of the room, the chair of the Planning Commission refused. "That request has been denied," he said. "The translation is taking place in the back of the room and it won't happen up here" (pp. 6–7). The residents stood up, chanted "Adelante, adelante," forward, forward, and moved to the front. The commission approved the incinerator anyway. So did the county board of supervisors (pp. 7–8). Kings County was collecting about $7 million a year from the existing dump, about 8 percent of its budget, and the incinerator would have nearly doubled that (p. 8).

Along the way, El Pueblo found the 1984 Cerrell report, the state-funded study from our last issue that described the communities "least likely to resist." Rural, poor, small, Catholic, low education, farm work. "The Cerell report fit us to a T," Mary Lou Mares said (p. 3, the book's spelling).

The residents sued. On December 30, 1991, Judge Jeffrey L. Gunther of the Sacramento Superior Court threw out the county's approval. Part of his reasoning concerned air pollution and crop damage the report hadn't properly analyzed. But the other part is why this case is still taught. The residents, he wrote, had shown "continuous and strong interest" in the review, and "their meaningful involvement in the CEQA review process was effectively precluded by the absence of the Spanish translation" (El Pueblo para el Aire y Agua Limpio v. County of Kings, 22 ELR 20357).

Notice what the judge did and didn't say. He didn't find that anyone intended to exclude Spanish speakers. He didn't say the law explicitly required translation. He said CEQA's emphasis on informing the public "would have justified" translating an extended summary, the notices, and the hearing testimony, and that without it, participation was open on paper and closed in practice. Chem Waste appealed. On September 7, 1993, it withdrew the application, citing economic conditions and a policy turn away from incineration (Cole & Foster, p. 9). "I don't care how they word it," Espy Maya said. "We won" (p. 9).

The Digital Mind claim behind this issue holds, and the court record is its strongest support: Spanish-speaking residents were effectively excluded by an untranslated review. One qualification. The exclusion wasn't total. They organized, wrote letters, and marched to the front of the room. What the translation gap did was make participation expensive, which is exactly the lever the Cerrell report had described.

The story didn't end in 1993. The landfill stayed. In 2007 and 2008, a cluster of birth defects in Kettleman City drew statewide attention; a 2010 state investigation found no exposure it could link to them (Wikipedia summary of state findings). In 2014 the state approved a landfill expansion. In 2015, El Pueblo and Greenaction filed a civil-rights complaint that again included refusals to translate; the 2016 settlement led to California language-access policies (Center for Public Integrity, 2024).