If developers and planners decide to site an industrial chemical plant next door to your home, you’d want the chance to speak up about it. Soliciting input from the communities and individuals affected by pollution is an essential part of how environmental and public health laws are enforced. Under the federal Clean Air Act, large polluting facilities like power plants, chemical manufacturers, and refineries need to have a building permit, and every permitting decision must go through a “notice and comment” process. Although this is a federal law, it’s largely implemented by state, regional, and local agencies. And as a new UCS analysis shows, how much influence people have on the air permitting process varies greatly depending on where they live.
Darya Minovi leads fair access research for the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS. She is the lead author of Community Access to Clean Air Decisionmaking: Analysis of State Engagement in Title V Permitting, a new report that looks state-by-state at how people can make their voices heard.
AAS: What inspired you to do this analysis?
Darya Minovi: Last year, our team did an analysis of how the Trump administration is limiting public input on regulations, and also developed a set of recommendations for how government agencies should ensure the public gets to participate. With the administration very clearly side-stepping or ignoring these public processes, we did not, to put it lightly, expect the federal government to be a willing recipient of our research and guidance.
During the Biden administration, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) did a lot of work to assess and expand meaningful public participation in government decisions. That was essentially all thrown away when President Trump was inaugurated. After consulting with colleagues and partners, we wanted to know: in this vacuum where the federal government isn’t interested in making progress, could we work with states to advance the public’s ability to participate in environmental policies?
AAS: Why does this participation matter, and how did you end up focusing on the air pollution permitting process?
DM: When you look at the core principles of environmental justice, meaningful engagement is central. People have the right to understand what’s happening in their communities, and ideally be part of shaping those decisions. They need the opportunity to speak out and be respectfully listened to. People’s lived experience is expertise that can and should inform policy decisions. That’s democracy in action. At the federal level, environmental justice has been targeted and dismantled, but some states still value these principles.
One specific environmental program where public participation is relevant is in Title V of the federal Clean Air Act (CAA), which covers operating permits for facilities that generate air pollution. This includes power plants, refineries, trash incinerators, and factories that manufacture chemicals—under the law, these are often called “major sources,” and there are very specific legal requirements about public participation. It’s one of the main ways air pollution gets regulated. But even though CAA is a federal law, it’s largely state and local agencies that carry out this permit process.
When a facility owner or company wants to apply for a permit to operate, they must submit a permit application to the relevant state, regional or local agency. The agency writes a draft permit, which must be posted publicly in some way. The CAA requires agencies to accept public comments on the draft permit for at least 30 days and, if requested by the public, hold a hearing. Agencies also have a legal obligation to respond to substantive comments. These are very clear steps laid out in the law. It’s a high bar for participation, but we wanted to better understand how it works in practice.
What we found in our analysis is that the agencies with the authority to issue permits will approve Title V air permits unless there’s some clear problem with legal compliance. But the public can use that “notice and comment” process to slow down and influence what the facility will actually be permitted to do.
However, some agencies treat the public comment process as a set of boxes to check off. The law isn’t specific about meaningful engagement practices beyond public comment, so our analysis also looked at practices, programs, guidance, and laws at the state level, beyond what’s required by the federal government to enhance public participation in air permitting.
AAS: How did you do this analysis, and what did you find?
DM: We wanted to get the answers to three big questions.
- How easy is it to find information about permitting and the process to provide input?
- Are there any rules, practices or guidance the agency uses to enhance participation? Do the agencies have, for instance, formal advisory committees or laws that require enhanced public participation in permitting?
- What’s the agency’s capacity to administer these processes? Do they have the personnel and the funding to give this the attention it needs?
We started with what I’ll call “desktop research”—reviewing agency websites and laws as though we were residents looking to navigate the process. All 50 states do have at least a website with some information. In general, agencies are posting draft permits and accepting public comments, as the CAA requires. But there are big differences in how that happens.
Public hearings aren’t very frequent and usually happen only if there’s a critical mass of people demanding them. We also reviewed nearly 90 permits from 35 different states—the public notices are often very technical, not easily readable by a layperson, and they’ll say things like “comments are due 30 days from posting date” instead of giving the actual dated deadline.
Very few states translate these notices into languages other than English. And we assessed whether the notices use “plain language” best practices—defining scientific terms, using white space and bullet points—and found that most states aren’t integrating these effectively. Minnesota and Michigan stand out as providing clear, readable information, and that’s largely the result of advocacy by local groups there.
We found that while 42 states had some resources describing how people can participate in permitting, the quality varied significantly. By and large permitting webpages and resources seem better designed for regulated industries, not the general public.
Ultimately, a public notice is only useful if you can find it, read it, and understand what it means and what you’re supposed to do to get involved!
We also wanted to know: do the comments make a difference? If they’re just going to get collected and sit on a shelf, that’s less meaningful than if agencies answer them or make actual changes to the permit in response. It’s very rare for agencies to deny a permit but there are ways for public comments to have an impact—correcting errors, adding monitoring requirements, strengthening enforcement.
AAS: You reached out to states to learn more. What did you find?
DM: Talking directly to these state agencies was an important part of our research. We built an 88-question survey, based on our September 2025 guidance, to ask agencies how they provide information, what they do to encourage participation, and what resources they have to carry the work out.
While we sent that survey to every state, only half the states responded in full, with 3 more responding partially. A few states said they intended to respond but didn’t, while others declined to participate or failed to respond entirely. That itself speaks to the capacity and, perhaps, interest these agencies have.
The states’ answers varied. Of the 28 states we heard back from, only 18 said they post responses to comments online, and only 13 could give us an example of when public comments resulted in a change to a permit.
At least 11 states have laws that go beyond what’s required in the CAA, and those laws often center environmental justice or cumulative impacts. States with these laws tended to have more readily available information on how to participate, as well as more resources and funding devoted to public outreach. Having these laws—or at least guidelines—in place does seem to create agency-wide changes to enhance public engagement.
Meaningful engagement takes time, money, and actual staff to manage the process. Only 20 of the agencies we spoke to provide training on public participation or environmental justice for staff, and only 16 have actual full-time staff dedicated to the process.
Unfortunately, the federal government is pushing in the opposite direction. Aaron Szabo, the (now former) director of the air-quality office at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, issued a memo urging states to expedite the Title V permitting process and rapidly review permits—saying, explicitly, that agencies don’t get many comments, so they don’t really matter.
AAS: Which states were the standouts?
DM: I was surprised by how much variability there was between and even within states. Some might have a lot of resources explaining how to participate in air permitting, but a confusing website. Others might translate public notices in other languages, but have no other information about how to participate.
While there’s a lot of room for improvement, there are some instructive examples too. For example, North Dakota has explicit guidance on how to write an effective public comment, with examples of common mistakes to avoid. Connecticut and Wisconsin have specific “how to” webpages to help people make comments or request a hearing. South Carolina has a webpage specifically entitled “Air Quality Decisions” that lays out what decision was made and posts the comments made in response to the draft permit. Ohio was the only state that got an “A” grade for readability of a public notice, with most states falling in the B/C range.
Every state can do better, of course, and we have a set of recommendations for how these agencies can improve. Governors, state lawmakers, and agency heads have a role to play here—certainly with funding for agencies and laws, but also in how they direct their agencies to carry this process out. Using public health data, translating notices into culturally appropriate languages and presenting them in plain language, making sure there’s fulltime staff devoted to public participation—these are just some of the steps to make participating in the air permitting process more meaningful, so that people not only have their voices heard, but actually have influence on decisions that shape air quality in their communities.