St. James environmental advocates feel ‘left'out' after recent pro-industry votes

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06-05-2025

Sharon Lavigne, founder of the environmental justice group Rise St. James, holds a sign while pointing out where her property was damaged by high wind during Hurricane Francine. (Drew Costley/ Verite News)
As a resident of St. James Parish, Barbara Washington is already surrounded by plastics manufacturers, chemical companies and natural gas refineries that populate the parish. But the local government is looking to pave the way for more industry — at the expense of her community's health, she told Verite News.
Washington, a co-founder of environmental justice group Inclusive Louisiana, spoke with Verite days after the parish council voted to approve two motions that showed their support for growing the presence of the petrochemical industry in town last month.
The council approved at its April 2 meeting property tax exemptions for Air Products and Chemicals, along with a resolution expressing support for Formosa's efforts to bring a plastics plant to the parish. The developments come as the Trump administration pulls support for environmental justice communities around the United States and threatens to roll back environmental regulations that could protect communities like the one Washington lives in.
Despite a federal court reopening a lawsuit brought by Inclusive Louisiana and other local environmentalists that could pause new industrial development, Washington said it feels 'overwhelming' to fight against various industrial projects at once. That it doesn't slow her down, though.
'We've been here before the plants ever came here,' Washington said. 'And we know something is wrong, and we keep saying it's wrong, and they keep ignoring us.'
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St. James Parish is located in an area known as 'Cancer Alley' for its disproportionately high cancer rates. Elevated cancer rates in parishes in the industrial corridor that stretches from New Orleans to Baton Rouge have been attributed to high levels of toxic air pollution from nearby facilities by researchers from Tulane University. Most of those facilities are located in predominantly-Black neighborhoods, which environmental justice activists have argued violates residents' civil rights.
'The segregated and racialized land use system of St. James Parish is directly traceable to land use methods necessary to the system of chattel slavery and the subsequent periods of violence, dispossession, and residential segregation white people carried out during the post-Reconstruction periods of neo-slavery and Jim Crow,' the lawsuit reads.
Washington said the recent council votes came at the expense of the parish's public health and infrastructure. The council unanimously voted to grant Air Products & Chemicals, a petrochemical company in Convent, property tax breaks through the Industrial Tax Exemption program for the next decade. Washington said she was dissatisfied with the parish council's decision.
'And here we see that our highways are really in need of fixing,' Washington said. 'The burden of all of this falls on the community when they don't pay their fair share of taxes.'
Air Products has resumed use of machinery that converts methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the cleaner fuel hydrogen, which had been sitting idle since 2020, said Art George, a spokesman for the company. The plant where the machinery, called a natural gas reformer, is located is a part of the company's Gulf Coast hydrogen gas pipeline system, according to a state database.
The pipeline delivers refined hydrogen gas across the coast, making it the largest hydrogen pipeline system in the world, George said. But the reformer in Convent also produces gases that speed up climate change such as carbon dioxide and pose dangers to human health such as carbon monoxide.
'We feel left out, because every time we go to the council meeting or the planning commission, it seems like their minds have already been made up [to be] pro-industry,' Washington said. 'They tell us that they're looking at the economic impact, but they're looking at wealth, and we are looking at health.'
The St. James Parish Council also voted to symbolically voice support for a controversial petrochemical complex that would be one of the largest in the world if completed. Formosa's 'Sunshine Project' would manufacture plastic items and emit known carcinogens like ethylene oxide, benzene and formaldehyde into the nearby community, a predominantly Black residential neighborhood in St. James' Fifth District. The project has faced several delays due to lawsuits and permitting issues.
Anthony 'AJ' Jasmin, the council parish representative for 5th district, introduced the resolution reaffirming the parish government's support for Formosa with the support of Parish President Pete Dufresne. All but one parish councilmember — Donald Nash, who represents the 7th district — voted yes on the resolution.
Sharon Lavigne, the founder of environmental justice organization RISE St. James, is one of Jasmin's constituents. She said she was disappointed by the resolution he introduced.
'It felt like a betrayal,' she said. 'I feel like he let us down.'
St. James Parish Council members did not respond to requests for comment.
The communities around the proposed Formosa plant are already at high risk of exposure to toxic air releases, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's EJScreen, an environmental justice mapping tool that was taken down by the Trump administration in February.
'As a citizen of St. James Parish, naturally, me being here with all of the toxic pollution that we are breathing and getting sick from and dying from cancer, I'm very disappointed in them passing a resolution that will continue to harm our air, our water and our land,' Washington said.
The parish council passed the resolution despite the troubled economic outlook for plastic production. An April report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analytics recommended that Formosa abandon its project in St. James. Oversaturation in the plastics market, slow industrial growth and shifts to sustainable goods contribute to the poor projections for the project and the polyethylene sector as a whole, the report reads, and the company's performance has declined over the past four years.
Despite the bleak picture painted by the report, a Formosa spokesperson, Janile Parks, reaffirmed the company's commitment to the project.
'FG is disappointed by the delays the project has faced, but remains confident that all permits were properly issued,' Parks said in a statement. 'We do not intend to give up the fight for this important economic development project that will benefit the people of St. James Parish and Louisiana.'
But Formosa's claim that it has all the permits necessary for construction is 'misleading,' said Mike Brown, an Earthjustice attorney. Earthjustice represents Rise St. James in their lawsuit against Formosa.
Brown said Formosa can't meet the newer and stricter standards for fine particulate matter and ethylene oxide emissions, which means that the company might not be able to renew expired permits. And although the Trump administration announced last month that the EPA is working to roll back standards for particulate matter, Brown said that effort might take years.
Formosa also cannot begin construction until it receive a wetlands permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 2021, the Army Corps ordered Formosa to complete a full environmental review of the project, a complex process that takes years to complete.
Parks did not respond to questions about whether or not the environmental review process had even begun, or when it is set to finish. She said the project has been paused for the past four years while Formosa works with the Army Corps.
Lavigne said Rise St. James will do everything in its power to stop Formosa from completing the plans, including calling on other organizations and activists to join.
'We're not gonna roll over and say, 'Oh no, we lost,'' Lavigne said. 'We will still fight. If we lose, we will continue to fight.'
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This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.