| Summary: | Decades of research has documented that people of color and low-income experience disproportionate environmental burdens, with recent empirical studies showing these burdens are exacerbated by disparities in government regulatory enforcement. Scholars’ attention to enforcement disparities as a source of environmental injustice highlights that government behavior may contribute to ongoing inequities in environmental outcomes. To date, studies analyzing enforcement disparities have employed statistical models to either estimate the probability that a federal or state agency performs an enforcement action or the total number of such actions over some duration of time. In this study, we adopt an alternative approach that analyzes the duration of time it takes for government officials to inspect a facility to determine if there is a difference based on the demographics of the host community. Specifically, we study administrative data from state implementation of the U.S. Clean Water Act (CWA), which we couple with demographic information around large, regulated facilities to analyze the relationship between response time and community characteristics. Estimating event history models, we find that state regulators’ inspection response time is slower toward noncompliant facilities located in communities that have higher percentages of poor and Hispanic citizens. With respect to Black communities, state regulators’ response time to noncompliant facilities is no different than compliant facilities. Collectively, these results indicate that state regulators are not prioritizing CWA facilities that violate performance requirements when they are in environmental justice communities.
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