Chicago's environmental racism: a new deal gives power plants more time to pollute Latino neighborhoods.(NEWS)

OPERATING IN A BASEMENT OFFICE on Chicago's West Side, the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization addresses some of the chief issues facing the city's Latino community--immigrant rights, an inadequate public transportation system and lack of public parks. But one of the most pressing issues is actually the vast amount of pollutants that escape from two massive coal-burning power plants.

Located just four miles apart in the poor, predominantly Mexican neighborhoods of Little Village and Pilsen, the Crawford and Fisk Generating Stations spew more than 17,000 tons of deadly toxins into the air each year. So, the Little Village group has spent years protesting the power plants, in part by giving "toxic tours" where they showed people the companies that pollute their neighborhood. Six years ago, the organization and its allies formed the Chicago Clean Power Coalition to pressure the company to clean the two plants, the only ones within city limits.

In December 2006, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich reached an agreement with Midwest Generation, the company that runs the plants, but it wasn't what advocates and local Latino residents wanted.

Midwest Generation agreed to either install pollution controls or shut down Fisk and Crawford--by 2015 and 2018, respectively. The company also agreed to reduce mercury emissions by 90 percent by July 2009, nitrogen oxide emissions by 68 percent by 2012 and sulfur dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2018 in the six power ...