SAN FRANCISCO / D.A. creates environmental unit / 3-staff team takes on crime mostly affecting the poor

To tackle environmental crime, which disproportionately affects the city's poorest communities, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris plans to announce that her office has a new environmental justice unit.

With two staff attorneys and a dedicated investigator, the unit will address such cases as a community newspaper's alleged dumping of hundreds of gallons of printer's ink, black marketeers' abalone sales and a bakery that operated while littered with rat and bird droppings.

"Crimes against the environment are crimes against communities, people who are often poor and disenfranchised," said Harris. "The people who live in those communities often have no other choice but to live there."

Harris will outline the unit's creation at a news conference today as mayors from around the world gather in San Francisco for United Nations World Environment Day.

Local activists called on the new unit to get tough on illegal trash dumping, to stage unannounced inspections of worksites, and to improve communications between city officials and the public.

State Attorney General Bill Lockyer spokesman Teresa Schilling said Lockyer believes state and local law enforcement are being forced to take up environmental law enforcement that used to be handled by federal authorities.

"As we deal with a Bush administration that's more focused on rolling back the protections that we've fought for, it's more and more important that we at the state and local level step up our efforts," said Schilling.

Lockyer's office filed criminal charges last month against Kinder Morgan Energy Partners of Houston over a 103,000-gallon diesel fuel spill in Suisun Marsh near Fairfield. The company paid a $5 million fine and agreed to a series of measures to repair their aging pipeline system and improve their reporting procedures.

"One of the best tools out there to go after polluters is to go after them on a criminal basis," said Schilling.

Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice plans to hold a rally Saturday in front of San Francisco City Hall to highlight health problems in Bayview-Hunters Point. That district has the largest number of families living below the poverty level of any San Francisco neighborhood.

Executive Director Bradley Angel said Harris should push other city agencies also to cite polluting businesses, which unit leader Davina Pukari said she plans to do.

Pukari plans to coordinate with the Bayview Neighborhood Rescue Team, run by the city attorney's office, and with a federal regulatory task force that includes representatives of local police, the sheriff's office, the city Health Department, toxics control officials, Cal/OSHA, and the state environmental protection agency.

Dana Lanza, executive director of Literacy for Environmental Justice, a Bayview-Hunters Point nonprofit, said Harris should focus on individuals and businesses that dump refuse in vacant lots, on train tracks and around the Third Street Caltrain station.

"There are places where you come out and people dump their couches and trash on the sidewalk," said Lanza. "(It) creates an air of unsafety and degrades the quality of life."

The Bayview, home to 34,000 residents, has two power plants, a city diesel bus maintenance shop, San Francisco's main sewage treatment plant, lots of private industry and the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a Superfund cleanup site.

The impact of those industries has been a matter of debate for decades. Maurice Campbell, a founder of the Community First Coalition and co-chair of the community advisory board for restoration of the former naval shipyard at Hunters Point, said residents live in a "toxic soup" of environmental pollution.

"The community has been exposed for years to various toxins," said Campbell.

But the unit was formed to go after law-breakers and will not pursue law- abiding industrial concerns, said Pukari, whom Harris recruited from the San Francisco U.S. attorney's office last April. A specialist in environmental law, Pukari began her career in 1992 in Washington with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Pukari said her unit will work closely with community groups to identify sources of criminal activity.

Lanza said residents also would benefit from learning how to report polluters.

"I think part of the problem is that people don't know who to call."

The environmental justice movement began in the late 1980s and has grown in response to the Bush administration's rollback of Clinton presidential directives and its bid to rewrite air pollution laws with the Clear Skies initiative.

While prosecutors in Alameda, Solano and Los Angeles counties have established separate units to handle environmental cases, many other district attorneys assign the work to their white-collar crime divisions. But a team in Los Angeles focuses on pollution in communities that are most affected by businesses that break the law, Schilling said.

Many smaller counties that don't have the resources to aggressively target environmental polluters rely on a nine-member team of prosecutors sponsored by the California District Attorney's Association. The Circuit Prosecutor team covers 30 counties, mostly in Northern California, said Gloria Mas, one of its senior prosecutors. The team, which formed about a decade ago, handles an average of 100 cases a year.