The East Colfax neighborhood in Aurora will be the first community in Colorado to receive a state-sponsored grant to study how pollution, extreme heat and other environmental factors affect people’s health and quality of life.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment announced Friday that East Colfax would be its first-ever Environmental Equity and Cumulative Impact Analysis recipient.

The department’s Office of Environmental Justice will work with the grassroots nonprofit Black Parents United Foundation to collect data, listen to residents’ experiences and explore ways to improve environmental quality.

Black Parents United will receive $125,000 for its work, and the state health department will hire a third-party researcher, who will be paid up to $900,000 to conduct the analysis and write the report, said Meghan Guevara, director of the Office of Environmental Justice.

“This is really a chance to look holistically at the environmental stressors and health impacts that one community is facing,” Guevara said.

The findings will be applied to future state and local decisions on permitting, planning and public health.

For years, state regulators, businesses, environmentalists and people who live in polluted neighborhoods have been at an impasse on how to define cumulative impacts and how to measure their impact on people’s health.

Many people who live in polluted neighborhoods argue that multiple factors, such as companies that spew toxic chemicals into the air, heavy traffic, extreme heat and lack of health care options, can combine to compound health problems.

Those neighborhoods often are home to people who are Latino, Indigeneous or Black and who earn less money than the state average.

The East Colfax neighborhood is a neighborhood that fits that profile, Guevara said.

Policymakers often address one issue at a time, rarely considering how all of those stressors work together to affect people’s health, she said.

“Cumulative impact really tries to understand how we can take all of those factors together and look at a geographical area and say, ‘What does the full picture look like?” Guevara said.

The analysis is part of a 2024 Colorado law, HB24-1338, that requires the state to address cumulative impacts and environmental justice.

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