Talking Headways Podcast: Civil Rights, Civic Transport

This week, we’re joined once again by Laurel Paget-Seekins of Public Advocates to discuss transit agency power dynamics, the loss of public sector capacity, and how the Trump administration is looking to gut civil rights enforcement for transportation projects.

Now, as you know, at Talking Headways, we give you three ways to enjoy our content. You could click here for the automatically generated transcript (with typos!). Or you could click the player below to listen with you own ears. Or you could read the edited transcript below, which we’ve cleaned up nicely.

Jeff Wood: Basically, US DOT has rescinded regulations requiring disparate impact analysis, which is how we challenge programs that harm protected groups. Tell me about the pattern this fits into in terms of getting rid of equity and social justice processes.

Laurel Paget-Seekins: So just one minor correction: They haven’t quite rescinded it yet. Trump issued an executive order last April basically ordering the federal agencies to rescind the regulations for disparate impact and to stop enforcing them in the active cases.

And so that has been working its way through the federal government. The Department of Justice rescinded theirs in December, and then we got a notice that the US DOT is about to rescind theirs and it looked like they were going to do it without even allowing any public comment. So that is what we think is going to happen any day now.

But we worked with Rep. Lateefah Simon’s office, and 13 Congress members wrote a letter to US DOT asking not to rescind them, but if they did, they would do public comment. So we’re hoping that that letter is gonna change their mind and they’re going to release them in the proper standard way that requires notice and comment.

Jeff Wood: Let’s go back a second. Can you explain Title VI and some of like the history and Civil Rights Act and all that stuff?

Laurel Paget-Seekins: Title VI is a shorthand we use for Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation that came out of the Civil Rights Movement. And Title VI is the part that bans discrimination for race, color, national origin for programs that are funded by the federal government.

There are other parts of the law, but this is the part that impacts programs that are funded by the federal government. So that’s how it gets into local transit agencies and transportation departments that receive federal funding, which almost all of them do.

And from that, federal agencies enact regulations that lay out how they’re going to implement a law. So that is what the US DOT has regulations that implement the law. But effectively, what is an issue here is that you can have direct discrimination where it’s very clear that the intent is discriminatory, or you could have what’s called “disparate impact,” which is showing that there’s a disparate impact to a law, even if it looks on the face of it, that it is not have a discriminatory intent.

And there’s a whole body of case law and regulations that are embedded; the Trump administration’s executive order didn’t undo that. So there’s still legal precedent for disparate impact. It still is valid in court. But disparate impact sets up a different sort of legal standard where you can do statistical analysis to ask, “Does this policy have a disparate impact on protected classes?”

And if it does, then you have to check to make sure that there is a legally legitimate business interest to do that. And if there isn’t, then it isn’t allowed. But then if you have a legitimate business interest, you then also have to check that there isn’t a less discriminatory way to achieve that interest. So it’s a sort of series of checks to make sure that there isn’t discrimination in how federal funding is used.