TOWN OF TONAWANDA — While they may be roughly 500 miles apart, the Tonawandas and Louisville, KY, do have at least one thing in common: the air in both communities is polluted with toxins released by industrial facilities.

That’s why the Clean Air Coalition of WNY on Monday brought in two individuals who spearheaded a successful campaign to reduce air toxins in an industrial corridor in Louisville known as “Rubbertown.”

The Coalition hopes to implement the lessons learned from their campaign — the Strategic Toxic Air Reduction, or STAR, program — in the Tonawandas and surrounding communities whose residents’ health has been adversely affected by industrial facilities like Tonawanda Coke and the NRG Huntley plant.

“It’s very similar. It’s a very toxic area due to the industrial facilities,” said Wilma Subra, an environmental scientist from Louisiana who works with communities across the country to compile data on toxic emissions.

The information is then used to generate a report that environmental organizations utilize to lobby decision makers to enact regulations that force industrial polluters to reduce their emissions.

Clean Air Coalition Executive Director Erin Heaney had been working for some time to bring in Subra and Eboni Cochran, a member of Rubbertown Emergency Action, or REACT, a grassroots organization of residents who live near or along the fence lines of a cluster of 11 chemical plants in that section of Louisville.

Subra worked with REACT, which advocated the Strategic Air Toxic Reductions Program of the Louisville Metro Air Pollution Control District.

The regulatory program became the community’s response to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air monitoring study, which found high concentrations of harmful chemicals in the air. In fact, the study showed that Jefferson County had the highest concentration of the more than 700 counties in the eight southeast states.

A similar EPA study in Tonawanda has found similar results.

Subra and Cochran spent the day Monday touring Tonawanda’s industrial area along River Road before sharing with Coalition members how the STAR program worked in Louisville.

Cochrane, of the REACT group, said the program worked because it received strong support from the community. The program requires nearly 170 companies that emit large amounts of chemicals to identify whether their emissions exceed health risk guidelines, and to develop an action plan to reduce harmful emissions over five years.

A desire for success is critical, she told Coalition members. “This is a lifelong fight. This becomes part of your life. ...Either you’re in it or you’re not,” Cochran said, adding that members frequently attended council meetings and educated themselves on terminology chemical plants use.

“The most important thing was, we stayed in the fight,” she added. “It was so discouraging sometimes, you wanted to cry and just give up.”

Both Subra and Cochran said industrial polluters will be quick to push back against a STAR-like program, arguing that increased regulations will force them to close and send jobs elsewhere, or that the list of targeted chemicals is too long.

But Subra countered that the companies’ compliance actually saves money in the form of reduced health care costs to treat diseases caused by air toxics, and that the list is generated by virtue of the chemicals the industrial facilities produce.

Subra became involved with the Louisville organization in the late 1990s, when a pastor said many people in his church’s congregation who lived in Rubbertown were sick and needed help. Tapping into resources where emissions data was available, Subra found that a high concentration of pollutants was present in the air.

“This was like a total revelation about what was going on in this community,” she said.

The STAR program currently targets 18 toxic chemicals that exceed health risk guidelines. Three of those chemicals — benzene, carbon tetrachloride and formaldehyde — are present in Tonawanda, and an additional nine chemicals not on the STAR list show up in air monitoring data, Subra said.

Subra’s efforts garnered praise from the EPA, which said the lessons learned in Louisville would help other communities address toxic air concerns.

Heaney, the Clean Air Coalition’s executive director, said the experiences Subra and Cochran shared will help the group fight for its goal. “We need to be doing a better job of interpreting the data,” Heaney said when asked what she took away from Monday’s presentation.

The meeting seemed to infuse a typically passionate Clean Air Coalition membership with additional vigor, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Today, a group of six Coalition members will depart for a lobbying trip to Albany.

They’ll meet with state representatives whose districts include the Tonawandas, as well as Joseph Martens, the new commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

It’s all in an effort to put the heat on decision makers to enact regulations that will force industrial polluters to reduce their emissions, improving air quality in the Tonawandas and surrounding communities.

To put a more human face on their push, Coalition members snapped head shots after Monday’s meeting of members holding signs that read, “I deserve clean air,” and “my neighbors stink.”

The contingent will meet Wednesday morning with state Sens. Mark Grisanti and Sam Hoyt and Assemblyman Robin Schimminger, before an afternoon meeting with Martens, the DEC commissioner.

“We’re hoping he’ll be open to this,” Heaney said of the new initiative.