BOONE COUNTY, Ark. — A man from Carencro, Louisiana has died after a crash between a motorcycle and a pickup truck in Burlington, Arkansas on Tuesday, August 27.

At 2:15 p.m., 62-year-old Richard Zaunbrecher was driving a 2002 Yamaha Road Star motorcycle north on U.S. Highway 65 in Burlington behind a 2020 Ford F-150 in the inside lane.

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According to the Arkansas State Police, the motorcycle did not obey flashing traffic control signals and change lanes, causing the motorcycle to rear-end the Ford. The crash forced Zaunbrecher off the vehicle and he landed in the inside lane of U.S. 65.

Zaunbrecher was transported to the North Arkansas Regional Medical Center in Harrison, Arkansas, where he later died from his injuries.

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Programs for medically vulnerable children, seniors and people with disabilities could be eliminated next year as a result of Louisiana’s looming budget deficit, officials with Gov. Jeff Landry’s administration said Friday.

Louisiana Health Secretary Michael Harrington laid out services he might be forced to cut if the governor and lawmakers reduce the state health care budget by $105.1 million to deal with a financial gap in the next fiscal year. He’s been told to expect a large cut as the state tries to figure out how it will cope with an automatic tax reductions scheduled for mid-2025. 

Harrington said that $105.1 million cut to state health care services would balloon to an overall loss of $332.4 million with resulting federal funding reductions. The state would no longer be able to put up the money needed to draw down more dollars from the federal government for health care services. 

Given the size of the cut the state health department anticipates, Harrington said there are few options for absorbing the budget reduction that don’t involve eliminating programs considered crucial for seniors, children or people with disabilities.

“Any of these kinds of cuts is going to naturally impact the most vulnerable,” Harrington said at a Louisiana House budget hearing Friday. “That’s what we [the health department] do. We take care of seniors and children.”

More than 90% of Louisiana’s $19.9 billion health care budget is spent on Medicaid programs, which pays for health care for people who are pregnant, low-income or disabled, according to Harrington. The bulk of that money, 71%, comes from the federal government, but the state is required to contribute funds in order to receive the federal support. 

If forced to make a $105.1 million reduction, Harrington said the Landry administration would eliminate pediatric day care centers ($26.4 million) for families with medically fragile children. Money for a program that helps children with behavioral challenges, called the coordinated system of care, would also be reduced by $5.9 million.

The state would also scrap its Program for All Inclusive Care for the Elderly ($20.4 million), known as PACE, that assists older people so they can continue to live at home instead of going into nursing homes. Money for daytime supervision for seniors and adults with disabilities who cannot take care of themselves would also be lost ($9.1 million).

Transportation reimbursements for people with disabilities would also be scrapped ($1.8 million). Funding for medical residents who train to be doctors in Louisiana would also be reduced ($23.1 million). 

Caregivers who help adults with disabilities and intellectual challenges would also see their reimbursement rates lowered again. Most of these rates have only been raised in the past couple of years after program directors long complained they weren’t able to hire staff at the low wages the state previously provided. 

The state budget deficit plan also calls for reducing supplemental payments to hospitals for treating Medicaid patients by $69.4 million and eliminating an expected increase in funding for nursing homes that would have cost $67.8 million.

Republicans and Democratic lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee said they would be unwilling to make such cuts.

Rep. Jason Hughes, D-New Orleans, described the plan as inhumane, and Rep. Larry Bagley, R-Stonewall, said families would be unable to care for their loved ones without these programs.

“These are people that depend on us for their life,” Bagley said.

Other legislators questioned whether health officials under Landry, a Republican, had looked deep enough at its nearly $20 billion budget to find alternative ways to save money. Many of the programs put on the chopping block were also proposed for elimination when Landry’s predecessor, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, faced a budget deficit eight years ago.

Rep. Tony Bacala, R-Prairieville, said the health department has never fully accounted for the hundreds of thousands of people removed from Medicaid following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that the program has significantly fewer people in it, the health agency should have some spare money in its budget that could be used to keep these programs whole, he said.

Bacala also alleged the health department ended fiscal year 2023-24 in June with $75 million in leftover state funding, which means some of that money should be available to cover the $105.1 million cut.

“You continue to say we need more money to cover 300,000 less people [in the Medicaid program],” Bacala said.

Louisiana is facing a budget deficit of $587 million next year largely because of a planned cut to the state sales tax from 4.45% to 4%. State lawmakers could avoid major budget reductions if they voted to keep the sales tax rate at the current level, but legislative leaders have said the conservative anti-tax Louisiana House of Representatives is unlikely to do so.

Lawmakers are more likely to look at expanding the sales tax to new items and services as well as eliminating other tax exemptions to make up some of the revenue. Louisiana Revenue Secretary Richard Nelson has proposed a tax on streaming services such as Netflix as well as services like auto detailing for the first time.

If the Legislature chooses to keep a 2% tax on business utilities that is supposed to expire July 1, 2025, it would also generate $220 million and lessen the deficit. Moving $320 million the state generates through a vehicle sales tax from transportation projects into health care services, higher education and other programs could also help close the budget gap. 

When she was told that a federal judge’s ruling will effectively prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from pursuing civil rights claims against chemical manufacturers in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” local activist Tisha Taylor immediately thought of the Fifth Ward Elementary School.

The 300-student school in Reserve, Louisiana, sits about the length of a football field away from the only industrial plant in the nation that emits chloroprene. Chloroprene, a suspected carcinogen, is a substance used in the production of the synthetic rubber, Neoprene. The students, virtually all of whom are Black or Latino, attend class in an area with the nation’s highest cancer risk from air pollution.

“It makes it really difficult for me to understand how we can fight,” said Taylor, 60. “When it comes down to environmental racism, racism in general—and how we can leave children to die, and say it’s OK to die—we don’t have an option.”

In the days since the ruling was handed down last week, environmental justice advocates across Louisiana have wondered precisely how they might begin to move forward without the ability to use one of the EPA’s most potentially potent legal weapons to affect change.

“The area needs to be cleansed,” said Mary Hampton, 85, an environmental advocate who, like Taylor, does not live far from the Fifth Ward school. “We need clean air, clean water, clean soil.”

The ruling, issued earlier this month by the U.S. District Court in Western Louisiana, dealt a blow to the EPA’s use of the “disparate impact” provision of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars racial discrimination by people and organizations that receive federal funding.

The EPA had used the disparate impact standard as the foundation to allege that agencies in multiple states were violating civil rights with policies that worsened environmental harms in already overburdened communities of color.

In April 2022, the EPA announced that agency officials would investigate a civil rights complaint in the Reserve area. Jeff Landry, then Louisiana’s attorney general, filed suit against the EPA last year, alleging that the agency exceeded its authority by working to assess discrimination claims involving disparate impact rather than “intentional discrimination.” (Landry has since been elected Louisiana’s governor.)

“EPA officials have lost sight of the agency’s actual environmental mission, and instead decided to moonlight as a social justice warriors fixated on race,” the suit read, noting that federal officials had developed “increasingly warped vision of ‘environmental justice’ and ‘equity.’”

Earlier this summer, U.S. District Judge James D. Cain issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily prevented the EPA from pursuing civil rights cases involving disparate impact while Louisiana’s suit was pending in the courts.

On Aug. 22, Cain made that injunction permanent.

Patrice Simms, vice president of litigation for healthy communities at the environmental law organization Earthjustice, which filed a complaint in January 2022 asking the EPA to investigate potential civil rights violations in the vicinity of the chloroprene plant, warned the ruling might have a “chilling effect” on efforts to address environmental problems in communities of color around the country.

“Louisiana has given industrial polluters open license to poison Black and brown communities for generations, only to now have one court give it a permanent free pass to abandon its responsibilities,” Simms said in a statement. “Louisiana’s residents, its environmental justice communities, deserve the same Title VI protections as the rest of the nation.”

Debbie Chizewer, the managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Chicago office, said after the ruling that attorneys will be “considering all the strategies available to us” to protect the health and continue the fight of community members.

“We’re not giving up,” she said, “just pivoting.” 

“Louisiana’s residents, its environmental justice communities, deserve the same Title VI protections as the rest of the nation.”

On the same day that Cain issued his ruling, the EPA announced a set of new standards for pursuing civil rights cases and “best practices for building strong and effective civil rights programs.”

Paul Nathanson, a spokesperson for Denka Performance Elastomers, the company that operates the chloroprene plant and which has been sued by the EPA over its toxic air emissions, said as the agency “continues to extend its policy objectives beyond its legal authority, the courts continue to push back.” 

In its “politicized crusade” against Denka, “EPA has spent considerable taxpayer resources ignoring sound science and needlessly fomenting fears in the community,” said Nathanson, lauding Cain’s ruling. “For EPA, its overly-aggressive actions resulted in creating law that’s unfavorable to the agency for the long term. Louisiana’s governor and attorney general were right to advance these arguments in defense of the regulated community.”

Even before last week’s decision, the EPA had begun scaling back some of its Title VI investigations.

After Cain handed down the preliminary injunction in January, EPA civil rights compliance officials posted a disclaimer on the agency’s website that read: “Pursuant to a preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana on January 23, 2024, EPA will not impose or enforce any disparate-impact or cumulative-impact-analysis requirements under Title VI against the State of Louisiana or its state agencies.”

In recent months, the agency closed a civil rights probe in Texas and dismissed another investigation about the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi.  

In April, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody announced that she was leading a 23-state coalition in filing litigation against the EPA’s Title VI regulations, seeking to block them nationally. At the time, Moody said in a written statement that “EPA should be focusing on enforcing the environmental laws passed by Congress, not so-called environmental justice, which is a euphemism for Biden’s extreme agenda.” 

Moody’s press office did not respond to email and telephone message requests for comment about the Louisiana federal court ruling.

Despite the setback, Taylor said she and her fellow southern Louisiana activists would continue to seek remedies to the environmental damage that has been done in their communities—even if they were still uncertain of what avenues they might use to do so.

“We’re going to fight until the end,” said Taylor. The EPA’s 2022 letter of concern about the environmental harms in the communities around the plant said that racial discrimination was likely to blame. “And Title VI should be used,” Taylor added.

Taylor said she was struck by Landry’s comments at a recent news conference in which he said that part of his opposition to the EPA’s attempts to hold the rubber plant accountable under Title VI guidelines was that he wanted to preserve the jobs of the roughly 250 employees at the facility.

Why, Taylor said, didn’t Landry mention the children at the Fifth Ward School?

“He overlooked those children to talk about the people who are poisoning the whole community,” Taylor said.

She continued: “There is just a heaviness in my heart right now. But it will not stop my feet from marching. We are fighting until the end, and this racist state and racist government are going to have to deal with us.”

Inside Climate News reporter James Bruggers contributed to this report.