When the Maryland Department of the Environment recently updated how it calculates communities’ environmental justice rankings, the agency removed several indicators from its formula, including race and ethnicity.

Some advocates are crying foul, accusing Democratic Gov. Wes Moore’s administration of bending to the Trump administration’s “anti-woke” agenda and a conservative Supreme Court that has often struck down race-conscious government policies.

Nixing race from the calculus behind the state’s “EJ Score” blunts the usefulness of the online tool, said Sacoby Wilson, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health.

“Race is the single most important indicator of environmental hazards,” Wilson said, adding that the EJ Score is “less robust” without it. “Some parts of the state that had higher scores are [now] lower, which means it’s not really capturing the environmental justice experiences happening on that ground.”

Decades of social science research point to race and ethnicity as being associated with poorer health outcomes and greater environmental burdens at a community level, said Rebecca Rehr, director of climate policy and justice at the Maryland League of Conservation Voters. That is true as well of English language proficiency, which also was taken out, she said.

“I think there’s ample evidence to show that we’re justified in including race in decisions about environmental pollution,” Rehr added.

But she said she understands that Maryland is in a tough position. Recent Supreme Court rulings on using affirmative action in college admissions and the Voting Rights Act suggest that considering race in Maryland could draw legal scrutiny. And Rehr worries that Trump could retaliate against MDE by delaying or canceling promised federal funding.

“I understand that as a state agency you’re trying to maintain federal funding levels,” Rehr said.

The EJ Score is a major feature of MDEnviroScreen, the state’s official online environmental justice mapping tool. It was forced to go offline earlier this year after the Trump administration took down several online federal datasets involving demographics and the environment. 

MDE took the opportunity to redesign the site and bolster it with new information, including the addition of a climate vulnerability score, agency spokesman Jay Apperson said.

Asked whether the EJ Score changes were made in response to Trump’s anti-DEI pronouncements or recent Supreme Court decisions, Apperson provided no response. But he noted that while race and ethnicity may no longer be individual components of the score, they are represented in the “underserved” mapping layer within the site.

“Applicants for certain permits must include the MDEnviroScreen Report with the EJ Score as part of the permit application, and they are encouraged to include a discussion of the community’s environmental exposures to help determine the best way to engage with the community,” Apperson wrote. “Communities that score high should have more opportunities to participate in the permit process and understand a project’s potential impacts.”

The MDE site describes the EJ Score as a measure of a community’s total exposure to potential sources of pollution, the environmental impacts of that pollution and the population’s sensitivity to being sickened by it.

The EJ Score is displayed as a single number on a scale of 0-100 — the higher the number, the greater the pollution burden for a given community. According to the site, it represents a synthesis of 22 indicators, including lead paint reports, atmospheric particulate matter concentrations, proximity to Superfund sites, asthma prevalence, heart attack rates and the number of low-income households.

The site also includes a section labeled as a “disclaimer.” It explains that the number doesn’t include race/ethnicity, language proficiency or age but that the agency has made that information available “for informational purposes only.”

“MDE cautions [permit seekers] against using the ‘Underserved’ map layer, or its subcategories, in any manner that would be considered discriminatory under applicable law,” the site warns.

For some communities, scores in the new system were significantly lower than those of the old system, sometimes by double digits. In the low-income immigrant community straddling the border of East Riverdale and Bladensburg in Prince George’s County, for example, the EJ score tumbled from 96 to 80.7.

In others, the change is rather small. The Brooklyn Park neighborhood just outside Baltimore has witnessed its score tick down from 99.6 to 97.7.

A Maryland law passed in 2022 requires applicants seeking certain permits to use the MDE map to record in their paperwork the surrounding census tract’s EJ Score. The legislation applies to new construction or permit renewals for, among others, low-level nuclear waste facilities, landfills, sewage sludge storage facilities and any facility that discharges pollutants to state waters.

The law requires MDE regulators to confirm the score and to publish it along with any public notices about the project.

“We consider the overburdened nature of all communities when evaluating the adequacy of permit conditions,” Apperson said. That especially applies, he added, to communities with five or more individual indicators with a score of 75 or higher or those with an overall EJ Score of 75 or higher.

In 2023, only three permits for large-scale industrial facilities were sited in communities with EJ scores of 75 or higher and, therefore, triggered the law’s reporting requirements. All three applications were for wastewater treatment plants.

The mapping tool received a further boost in July when Moore signed an executive order requiring state agencies to use it to identify overburdened communities and work with them to soften the impact of environmental injustices.

But some advocates want to add more teeth to the state’s environmental justice efforts. Over the past two legislative sessions, they have unsuccessfully pushed bills that would, among other actions, give MDE the explicit authority to consider environmental justice in permit decisions.

Rehr of the League of Conservation Voters said her group and other backers plan to reintroduce the legislation in next spring’s session.

Wilson of the University of Maryland said he hopes that the exclusion of race and ethnicity in the state’s EJ Score encourages the agency to develop a more thoughtful measuring system. For too long, he said, policymakers have relied too much on race to identify communities in need of additional help.

“Just because you’re Black doesn’t make it bad,” he said, adding that he has been consulting with the agency on another update to the tool. “It’s a starting place, but to actually get at environmental justice, we have to have indicators that capture racism.”