Interview with Brenda Council
In this interview, conducted on November 21st, 2023, Brenda Council discusses her experiences with lead in North Omaha. Council graduated from Omaha Central High School and received a degree in secondary education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She earned her Juris Doctor degree from the Creighton University School of Law. She started her legal career in 1979 in Kansas City and returned to Omaha in 1980. She began her legal career with Union Pacific where she served as Senior Contracts Counsel, Senior Real Estate Counsel, and Senior Labor Counsel. In 1982, she was elected as a district representative to the Omaha Board of Education for 11 years and served as president for four of those years. She was then elected to serve North Omaha as a city councilwoman in 1993. In 2008 she and Tanya Cook became the first African American women elected to the Nebraska legislature. She later created the Omaha Lead Site Community Advisory Group and served as chair for six years.
Brenda Council has had political, legal, and personal experiences with lead in North Omaha. After serving as legal counsel for Union Pacific, she created and became chair of the Omaha Lead Site Community Advisory Group (CAG) for the next six years. This committee was created for many reasons, but an important mandate was to build trust between the community and the Environmental Protection Agency in order to promote the Superfund remediation processes.
The CAG took on the role of educator for community members, especially in North Omaha, which "had significant percentages of young people...with elevated blood lead levels.” This concern for the future of their community motivated the CAG's work, despite a general mistrust between the community and government officials and organizations. “One of the things that the community advisory group and me personally wanted to ensure was that remedies were going to have a meaningful and lasting impact on the residents of North Omaha.” Remediation efforts, she noted, were generally successful in achieving short-term lead removal such as yard replacement, but there are bigger issues at play. For example, paint chippings and dust could fall back into the soil and recontaminate it. At the same time, the committee was very successful in lobbying efforts directed at the EPA. Their advocacy eventually motivated the EPA to include lead paint remediation, which was not in their original plans. This emphasized the importance of working with a community during remediation efforts.
Education directed at individuals became crucial because few community members had experience dealing with the federal government. “They really weren’t aware of what this entailed when they’d get a letter from the EPA…There were a lot of people who were fearful of government intervention and government intrusion,” Council said. This barrier to solving environmental injustices persists even today. Remediation efforts are ineffective if the population that they serve do not participate.
One of the reasons for the distrust between the community and the government is because lead exposure has historically affected communities unevenly. North Omaha experienced the impacts of industrial pollutants from ASARCO, but also from lead paint in older housing stock, the construction of the north freeway, and a lead battery plant. This was not a coincidence. The conjuncture of each of these point sources of lead was a direct consequences of Omaha's long history of racial segregation, metropolitan development, and unequal access to services. All of these sources have contributed to intergenerational effects that continue to influence communities today. Because of this “we also work with the community about how to protect themselves,” whether that be through safe gardening techniques or the spreading of even more awareness.
Overall, building trust between citizens and experts was critical. “We had community forums, we brought experts into the community from other cities that had dealt with lead issues like Flint, Michigan," noted Council. Events such as this eventually lead to the formation of the Omaha Healthy Kids Alliance, which became a huge part of lead remediation efforts within the Omaha Superfund Site.