Tag: Michelle Taylor

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Southern Environmental Law Center Threatens Lawsuit Against xAI Data Center

Photo: Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Environmental justice advocates are demanding xAI officials be held accountable for the operation of gas turbines at the Memphis data center.

Today, the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) sent a letter to xAI notifying the company of their intent to sue over the data center’s permitless gas turbines. The letter was sent on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Both organizations have been vocal about their concern for the facility, as well as the harm it poses to the community — specifically those in South Memphis. 

The NAACP sent a letter to the Shelby County Health Department and Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) requesting they cease operations on the facility.

SELC has long monitored the project, sending a letter in April to Dr. Michelle Taylor, director and health officer for the Shelby County Health Department. The organization said they obtained aerial images in March that showed that xAI has 35 gas turbines.

“xAI’s decision to install and operate dozens of polluting gas turbines without any permits or public oversight is a clear violation of the Clean Air Act,” SELC senior attorney Patrick Anderson said. “Over the last year, these turbines have pumped out pollution that threatens the health of Memphis families. This notice paves the way for a lawsuit that can hold xAI accountable for its unlawful refusal to get permits for its gas turbines.”

Officials sent a 60-day notice of intent to sue to xAI saying the gas turbines violate federal guidelines, stating the project is required to “obtain appropriate air permits before operating its polluting gas turbines.”

They say the company also hasn’t confirmed if they would be installing more turbines to power the facility.  The letter noted the environmental impact, saying the turbines emit formaldehyde and other chemicals linked to respiratory diseases.

“xAI’s South Memphis data center is located near predominantly Black communities that are already overburdened with industrial pollution from dozens of industrial facilities, including an oil refinery, a steel mill, and a TVA gas plant,” the SELC said.

NAACP president Derrick Johnson said xAI is taking advantage of communities and families in order to advance its corporate interests.

“We cannot afford to normalize this kind of environmental injustice — where billion-dollar companies set up polluting operations in Black neighborhoods without any permits and think they’ll get away with it because the people don’t have the power to fight back,” Johnson said.

Other local leaders have promised to push back against xAI by activating people power.

On Monday, Representative Justin J. Pearson and Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP) hosted an environmental justice “dinner and learn” at Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church. Organizers said this event was to keep the public updated on xAI’s while also empowering people to get involved in the environmental justice movement.

“Facts matter and it’s time for the fictions of elected leaders and the chamber to be made clear so we can coordinate our fight even better,” Pearson said prior to the event.

On his social media platforms, the representative recently called out the Greater Memphis Chamber for sending out “misinformation and disinformation” about xAI. He referenced informational sheets from the Chamber, along with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA); Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW); and more.

“We feel that it is important to share with you that xAI — and the supercomputer launched in Memphis in the spring of 2024 — has operated in full compliance with all applicable federal, state, and local regulations and oversight,” a screenshot of the sheet read.

Pearson called this “propaganda,” said the project had not followed federal regulations, and referenced violations of the Clean Air Act.

“We have a responsibility as elected officials — as people — to tell the truth,” Pearson said. “We have to have a baseline of information by which we can be activated and advocates.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Bonfire!

Official portrait of President Donald J. Trump, Friday, October 6, 2017. (Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead)

It’s been a matter of weeks since President Donald Trump single-handedly deprived the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) board of its quorum, and the giant semi-public utility may come to figure in crucial decisions regarding Elon Musk’s controversial Colossus xAI project in Memphis.

When Trump issued walking papers to two members of an already truncated TVA board, he effectively deprived the board of its ability to vote on policy shifts and other matters of consequence. 

The utility’s rules require the presence of five active and voting members to constitute a quorum. At full strength, the board would number nine directors, but attrition of various kinds over the years had previously reduced the board’s membership to five.

That membership now stands at only four after Trump, in successive acts, fired both Michelle Moore, a well-known “clean power” advocate, and Board Chairman Joe Ritch. The president gave no reasons for either firing, but coincidentally or not, his actions came in the immediate wake of public prodding from Tennessee’s two Republican senators for changes in the Authority’s leadership.

In an op-ed that appeared in the industry periodical Power magazine on March 24th, senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty had expressed doubt that the TVA leadership, as then constituted, was up to the need, as they saw it, of jump-starting a new era of reinvigorated nuclear power.  

“With the right courageous leadership, TVA could lead the way in our nation’s nuclear energy revival, empower us to dominate the 21st century’s global technology competition, and cement President Trump’s legacy as ‘America’s Nuclear President,’” the senators wrote. 

Within days of the op-ed’s publication, the TVA board, then still at quorum strength, if only barely, named the utility’s chief operating officer, Don Moul, to serve as the CEO of TVA. (For what it’s worth, the two senators had wanted a new CEO from outside the Authority’s ranks.) Almost immediately after Moul’s appointment, Trump would fire the two board members, thereby stalling any immediate initiatives on TVA’s part beyond matters of basic maintenance. That would include oversight activity vis-à-vis the energy situation of Memphis.

Ultimately Trump will have the prerogative of restocking the board to quorum strength, with his nominations in theory drawn from all reaches of the Authority’s operating area, which comprises all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. Members, subject to confirmation by the U.S. Senate, serve five-year terms. 

Created under FDR, TVA is no longer taxpayer-funded but is still federally owned. One way or another, politics plays a major role in its operation, and critics of Musk are increasingly conscious that the contours of the Trump ally’s giant xAI program are rapidly expanding, with its demands on available energy from MLGW mounting well beyond what the original estimates were when Musk acquired the vacant Electrolux property to house the supercomputer last year.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young is now finding himself under fire for his apparent acquiescence with the Musk project. In a blistering letter to Young, Shelby County Health Department Director Michelle Taylor criticized the mayor for not imposing stricter air-quality controls on the Colossus project, which is requiring the use of even more gas turbines — potentially as many as 35.

Amid an upsurge in various forums and ad hoc opposition groups, one leader of a burgeoning citizen revolt is Representative Justin Pearson, immersing himself in anti-xAI activities in the manner of his successful 2021 opposition to a gas pipeline. 

More and more obviously, the xAI matter is rising to a potentially dominant status politically, almost on a scale with the city’s No. 1 bugaboo, crime. And uneasiness about the Trump-Musk alliance could be a major part of that concern. 

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Report: No Cancer Clusters Found Around Sterilization Services

Credit: Shelby County Health Department

No clusters of major cancers were found in a government investigation of the area around Sterilization Services in South Memphis after health alerts were raised on emissions from the company last year.

The company uses ethylene oxide (EtO) in its Florida Street facility to sterilize medical equipment. The gas is odorless and colorless and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wasn’t aware emissions could raise cancer rates until 2016.

Now, the EPA says EtO emissions from the facility could pose a risk to those living in the neighborhood around it. The agency held public meetings in Memphis last year to warn the residents but said there was little they could do. 

Since that meeting, officials with the Shelby County Health Department (SCHD) and the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) reviewed areas around the company’s facility. Specifically, they were looking for heightened cases of leukemia, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, stomach cancer, and breast cancer.  

”This cancer cluster investigation did not provide evidence of increased amounts of leukemia, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, stomach, or breast cancers clustered near the Sterilization Services of Tennessee facility compared to a group of residents away from the facility,” reads the report. “Just because we cannot find evidence of increased rates of cancer that are associated with EtO does not mean there may not be increased risk.”

For the study, health officials compared the area around Sterilization Services to another area far from the facility, basically from Cordova to Eads in eastern Shelby County. To get a better context of any population shifts that may have happened, they also compared data from 2000-2009 and from 2010-2019. 

SCHD officials announced the findings of the study this week in a public meeting. SCHD director Dr. Michelle Taylor fielded questions from the a audience and from those watching a live-stream of the meeting. Taylor said the company has been “very cooperative” during the investigation process.  

“We’ve never had a problem with them, with our inspectors going in, asking questions, getting information for from them, none of that,” Taylor said. “So, really it is about finding out what the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] is expecting in the way of additional controls and then figuring out and negotiating how quickly that can happen.” 

The company has used EtO here since the 1970s. The SCHD has permitted the facility since 1985. The EPA did not begin regulating emissions of EtO until 1994. 

The company is now in compliance with all local, state, and federal regulations on emissions. The EPA is working on some rule changes to limit EtO emissions at places like Sterilization Services. 

Until then, the company can only be asked to make changes voluntarily, which is what the Memphis City Council asked them to do in a resolution in January. At the time, council member Dr. Jeff Warren said Sterilization Services has facilities across the U.S. and has already enacted emission interventions at some of them. 

Citizens asked Taylor this week if the health department could intervene and demand the company to act, even to get them to move. 

“If we learned anything from Covid, we know that our authority is limited at the health department,” Taylor said. “Industry is not just regulated by us, it’s regulated by code enforcement, it’s regulated by zoning, it’s regulated by many other divisions that are not the health department. So, when you’re talking about asking an industry to move somewhere else, the short answer is, we as a health department, as a single entity — we just cannot do that alone.” 

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Mask Mandate Likely to Continue in Next Directive

Hang on to your mask.

Clues dropped about the next Shelby County Health Department (SCHD) directive indicate citizens will be wearing face masks for a little while longer. Dr. Michelle Taylor, the SCHD director, would not divulge specifics about the new directive — or give a direct answer on face masks here — but said her department will use data to make the decision and “we’re not there yet.”

Taylor said about 13,000 Shelby County citizens have not had Covid or the Covid shot and are still vulnerable to infection. Also, about 92,000 children aged 5 to 11 here are not yet eligible for a vaccine. Add them together, and she said about 25 percent — one in four — of the county’s population could still get the virus. 

We are asking people to be patient with us.

Dr. Michelle Taylor, Shelby County Health Department director

“With that in mind,” she said, “we are asking people to be patient with us. We want to protect everyone in the county. We know people are tired of the 19-month marathon but if we keep those mitigation efforts in place a little longer, especially for the upcoming holiday season and we get that 5 to 11 year old age group vaccinated, then we can start to talk about easing restrictions.”    

The clues about a further mask mandate come at a time of a weeks-long fall of just about every Covid data point in Shelby County. The seven-day rolling average of new cases, the reproductive rate of the virus, hospitalizations, and the number of new cases are all falling routinely from the Delta-variant surge this summer. One figure — the weekly positivity rate of new tests — rose this week, Taylor said, but the figure was pushed higher on lower testing volumes. 

The new health directive is expected late next week as the current directive is set to expire.

Taylor said her department is readying for the arrival of vaccine doses for kids aged 5 to 11. SCHD is in constant communication with the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) on a distribution plan. Just as with the early roll out of the adult vaccine, Tennessee will get an allotment of pediatric doses just like other states. SCHD will be able to pre-order doses “very soon,” Taylor said.

The SCHD has also been working with local businesses in preparation of a proposed federal rule on vaccine mandates. The Occupational Health and Safety Adminstration (OSHA) has proposed a vaccine mandate for all companies with more than 100 employees. She said she’s urged businesses here to talk with their lawyers on the best way to comply with the proposal.  

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‘Keeping Ourselves Safe’: A Q&A with Michelle Taylor

Dr. Michelle Taylor (Credit: Linda Moore)

Dr. Michelle Taylor was nominated last week by County Mayor Lee Harris to be Shelby County’s new Health Department director. Pending a favorable vote from the Shelby County Commission, she will succeed longtime director Dr. Alisa Haushalter and interim director Dr. LaSonya Harris Hall. Here she discusses taking the reins.

Memphis Flyer: Obviously, you’re taking over at a very strategic time when the pressure from the state government is overwhelming. 

Michelle Taylor: But we are more independent than some of the more rural county health departments that are under the state health department umbrella. I believe that Shelby County Health Department has already put out a statement that we intend to continue to push vaccines, in the safety of vaccines, and the importance of vaccines to our county residents and their families. So there’s no pressure to follow the state model. And that’s the nice thing about being a metro health department — we can set our own tone about how we want to message to the population here in Shelby County. We’ll let the state take care of the state, but we’re going to continue to practice good public health, which we’ve been doing for a long time.

What do you recommend about continuing to wear masks?

I like to use myself as an example. When you see me wearing a mask, it doesn’t mean that I haven’t been vaccinated. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m immuno-compromised. I wear a mask because I have a daughter who is seven and doesn’t have the opportunity to be vaccinated. And if I am exposed to someone who may have COVID, I don’t want to take the chance of bringing that home. So I mask whether I’m going to the store, whether I’m coming into the county building, when I go to the restroom. I wear my mask. But do I still go out to restaurants? Yes. Do I still go out to walk with my mom? Yes. But every encounter is an opportunity for me to possibly bring something back to my daughter, and so I have to deal with the risk of that. And I wear my mask appropriately, thinking about that. That is a personal decision right now. So you may decide to take a different approach. But for me, in my family, I feel like my approach works best.

But it seems clear to me that if you’re not going to be vaccinated, at least you should wear a mask, right?

I believe so. And that’s what the CDC says. 

Why is there so much resistance to the idea of taking the vaccine?

Well, I will tell you that, you know, even when I was training at East Tennessee State, we had parents that came in that didn’t believe in vaccines. This is not a new issue. This is not new for people. A segment of the population believes that you shouldn’t be taking vaccines. I could go through a week in clinic and have at least one or two sets of parents come in and say, “Well, we’re coming in for a checkup. We’re not coming in for any shots.” So this is not new. I think that with many things, the presence of COVID-19 has magnified what we see but what some people were calling an antivax movement. You know, there are some people who just don’t believe in vaccinations, there are people who don’t believe in all kinds of modern advances in medicine. That’s not a new thing.

Is there any likelihood that the Delta variant can build to the proportions that we had last year?

Well, I hope not, but the Delta variant is very much with us, and it’s very much a risk. And what we can see from the numbers right now is that most of the people who are being hospitalized with COVID, right now, more than likely have the Delta variant, and more than likely have not been vaccinated. And so I think what is going to be important to do, from the health department standpoint, is to make sure that we are messaging what the risks are to the community, so that folks can make decisions about how best to protect themselves, their families, and the community at large.

How important in the chain of  possible infection are teenagers as a group?

Oh, wow. That’s a great question. So teenagers, as we know, are very social human beings. So it is good that the FDA has approved kids 12 and up to be able to get COVID vaccinations, in consultation with their families, if they feel like that’s the right choice for their families. But we know that teenagers, speaking as a pediatrician, tend to their bodies, and their immunities start to act more like adults than children. So at the beginning of COVID, we knew that children were less likely to become infected. And when they did become infected, they were less likely to have severe symptoms. But now that we know COVID has mutated, that maybe that landscape may be changing a bit. And so we really do need to know what’s going on in our teenagers going forward. I do think that that’s going to be important to know what the landscape with COVID is going to look like going forward.

You’re aware of the the campaigns were directed against vaccine chief Dr. Michelle Fiscus, who, of course, lost her job, and state Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey, for that matter, who’s under a great deal of pressure. Can you foresee that kind of pressure being directed at you?

I cannot foresee that. But I would say that if you interviewed public health professionals across the country, and really across the world, none of them foresaw what we have seen with COVID-19. So if it comes, it comes. it’s not something that would deter me from wanting to step into this role. In fact, that motivates me.

How important a factor in the current state of things is politics ?

Well, politics is quite important. Right now, we know that we’ve seen that over the last 12 to 15 months. A lot of the debate about whether to get vaccinated or not get vaccinated has been driven by politics. But we also know that at the end of the day, for most people, most families, most communities want to be safe. And they’re trying to figure out the best way to be safe, given what they see on the news, given what they see is happening in their own families. So yes, politics plays a part. But I believe that it doesn’t have to be the whole ballgame if we message the people how to protect themselves.

You know, we’ve had enough folks finger pointing. Now let’s get back to some civil conversations about things that we have in common — like how to keep ourselves safe. You know, I tend to look at a community as really a mixed bag of folks. So whether you’re talking about, you know, right versus left, conservative versus progressive, however, you want to turn the population once again, at the end of the day, everybody within the community most of the time, down to a person is really trying to figure out how to keep themselves safe, how to keep their family safe, how to be safe when they go to work. How to be safe when they go to pray, how to be safe when they go out to play. And we have people in this community who like to do that. So no matter what their ideology is, or any contradictions that you may see, that folks may perceive in an ideology, that’s the bottom line. Public health works best when people don’t even know that it’s happening.

I believe most of the people in this community in Shelby County want to get back to that, no matter what their ideology is.

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Taylor Tapped to Lead Health Department

Credit: Shelby County government

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris nominated Dr. Michelle Taylor to be the next director of the Shelby County Health Department.

The nomination comes after the March resignation of former director Alisa Haushalter amid a state investigation of wasted COVID-19 doses and untidy vaccine record-keeping. Dr. LaSonya Hall has been serving as interim director.

Taylor is a graduate of White Station High School. She has a B.S. from Howard University, an M.D. from East Tennessee State University, and an M.S. the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. She also earned a Doctor of Public Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, and a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University.

“I believe Dr. Taylor is the right person to lead our health department and pull us all toward shared responsibility,” Harris said in a statement. “She will bring to the job a wealth of knowledge and, as important, compassion and commitment to community.”

Taylor said she was a “military brat” and “Memphis was the only place I lived for more than three years.” 

“God didn’t bring me here with all of this expertise not to give back to the community that has nurtured me and helped me to grow up in so many different ways,” she said. 

Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner said “Taylor is exactly what Shelby County needs.”

“She has the academic credentials, professional skills, and knowledge to lead our health department well into the future,” Turner said. “The fact that she is from right here in Shelby County is an added benefit, but even if she weren’t from here, she’d still be an excellent candidate for this job.”

Taylor has served with the department for several years. She also worked as the associate medical director and deputy administrator for the Maternal and Child Health Public Health Emergency Preparedness Program. Most recently, Taylor worked as an aerospace medicine division chief in the Office of the Air National Guard Surgeon General in the Air National Guard Readiness Center. 

Taylor will be presented to the Shelby County Board of Commissioners’ General Government Committee on Wednesday, July 21st. The full commission will vote on her appointment on Monday, July 26th. If approved, she will begin work on August 2nd.