West Reminds African American Community Cornyn Let TOXNET Disappear

DALLAS— Sen. Royce West on Tuesday reminded African American voters in Texas that U.S. Senator John Cornyn was asleep at the switch while the Trump Administration quietly killed the National Library of Medicine’s TOXNET database–a key tool for minority communities to help understand pollution and environmental hazards around them–late last month.

TOXNET (TOXicology Data NETwork) was a NLM tool that allowed the public to easily track federally-identified pollution sites, including Superfund sites and polluting factories, using a variety of government data.

“There is no valid reason for discontinuing this database,” West said. “It was a valuable tool the public was able to use to identify how close they were to environmental hazards and Superfund sites,” West said, noting Texas has 53 Superfund sites.

“We all know that minority communities are disproportionately impacted by pollution, superfund sites, brownfields, toxic chemicals, and more,” West said. “For John Cornyn to remain silent and sit on the sidelines while the best tool available to the African American community to track pollution in their neighborhoods was quietly taken down just shows how out of touch he is with Texas,” West said.

“Sites like this are a prime reason citizens need access to databases like this. They need to know what, from an environmental calamity standpoint, has happened in their neighborhood and the process to clean it up,” West said.

“Our black communities along the Gulf Coast especially need to be aware of the factories around them that are polluting,” West said. “The removal of the database makes it harder to track,” West said.

“Federal regulations need to be changed to bring this database back and even enhance it,” West said. “But John Cornyn is more concerned about carrying President Trump’s water in the Senate than looking out for everyday Texans,” West said.

“When I’m in the U.S. Senate, I’ll continue the environmental justice work I’ve done for communities of color on a larger scale, and for our entire state,” West said.