Eddie Bautista

Eddie Bautista is an award-winning community organizer and urban planner who serves as Executive Director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA). NYC-EJA is a network of community-based organizations in low-income communities of color throughout the City. Founded in 1991, NYC-EJA organizes its member groups to advocate for the empowerment and just treatment of environmentally overburdened neighborhoods. Through NYC-EJA’s efforts, member organizations coalesce around City and State-wide issues that threaten the ability of low income communities of color to thrive. In 2011, Eddie was invited by Governor Cuomo’s Office and the State legislature to provide advice over the reauthorization of NYS’s power plant siting law to protect over-burdened communities from increases in local air pollution. Eddie also directed a 2010 voter referendum campaign amending the City Charter to include private infrastructure facilities on the City’s “Fair Share” map. He also spoke at the White House’s first Forum on Environmental Justice. Eddie is the convenor of the Sandy Regional Assembly, an association of environmental justice and community-based groups, and labor allies from Superstorm Sandy-impacted and storm surge-vulnerable areas throughout NYC, New Jersey and Long Island gathered to propose resiliency and rebuilding priorities for government review during the Sandy Recovery process. Eddie also leads NYC-EJA’s Waterfront Justice Project, a campaign to increase community resilience and climate adaptation along NYC’s Significant Maritime Industrial Areas, which encourage the clustering of polluting infrastructure, heavy manufacturing and industries in waterfront communities of color vulnerable to storm surges. From 2006 to 2010, Eddie served as Director of the NYC Mayor’s Office of City Legislative Affairs. The Mayor’s Office of City Legislative Affairs is the Mayor’s local lobbying office representing the Mayor and City agencies at the City Council, and serving as liaison between the Bloomberg Administration and the Comptroller, Public Advocate and Borough Presidents. As Director, Eddie spearheaded efforts to pass several major legislative initiatives, including: the City’s 20-year landmark Solid Waste Management Plan (which relies for the first time on environmental justice and borough equity principles); the creation of the first municipal brownfields remediation office in the nation; the required retrofit of all diesel-powered school buses to reduce air pollution in bus cabins; and the Greater Greener Buildings Plan, the nation’s first comprehensive package of legislation aimed at improving energy efficiency for large scale buildings. Eddie also facilitated meetings for policy advocates with Administration officials on a range of legislative and regulatory initiatives such as PlaNYC 2030 (NYC’s environmental sustainability plan, which has become an international model for large cities) and Mayoral Executive Order 120 of 2008, which for the first time called for all City agencies to make services and documents available to immigrant New Yorkers in the top six languages spoken in the City. Previously, Eddie was Director of Community Planning for NY Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), where he served as the lobbying/communications/community organizing director. At NYLPI, Eddie organized coalitions and campaigns blocking the siting of waste transfer stations, power plants, incinerators and sludge plants in environmentally-burdened communities of color, while changing public solid waste and energy policies. Eddie has a B.A. from N.Y.U., an M.S. in City/Regional Planning from Pratt Institute and was a Revson Fellow at Columbia University. In 2003, Eddie was among 17 national winners of the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World awards (http://www.leadershipforchange.org/). Eight books feature or mention Eddie’s work, including: Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, by Julie Sze (2006); The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs by Roberta Brandes Gratz (2010); and Environmental Health and Racial Equity in the United States: Building Environmentally Just, Sustainable and Livable Communities, by Robert Bullard, Glenn Johnson and Angel Torres, (2011). Eddie is also a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute’s Graduate Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development.