The environment is not far away. It is the air on the walk to school, the truck route past the playground, the smell that means a window has to stay shut. Where you live decides how much of it you breathe, and the ballot helps decide where you live.
The June 2 ballot does not have a sweeping climate measure on it, and that can make the environment feel like someone else's fight. It is not. The environment is mostly a land-use question, who decides where a warehouse, a freeway, or a data center goes, and those decisions are made by the offices and the measures on this ballot.
This guide does not tell you how to vote. It shows you where the environment lives on your ballot and what each office controls. The honest part runs through this guide: in Los Angeles County, working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, especially in Southeast LA near the industrial corridor and the freeways, have long carried more than their share of the region's pollution, and that pattern is well documented.
Measure NDC in Monterey Park would prohibit data centers in the city, and it is the clearest environmental and land-use question on the June 2 ballot. Here is the honest frame. Data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, run loud cooling equipment, and create very few local jobs once built. Banning them is a land-use choice a community is allowed to make about what it wants near its homes. The measure asks Monterey Park voters to decide whether that trade is one their city should accept.
The governor sets state climate policy, signs or vetoes air quality and clean energy laws, and appoints the leaders of the state environmental agencies that regulate pollution. A governor cannot clean your block alone, but a governor decides whether the state holds polluters accountable and whether environmental rules are written with frontline neighborhoods in mind or without them.
This is where the environment is decided most directly. A city council controls zoning and land use, which means it decides where warehouses, truck yards, and polluting industry are allowed to go, and how close to homes and schools. It is honest and well documented to say that Southeast LA communities, near the industrial corridor and the freeways, have long carried more pollution than wealthier areas. A city council vote is where that pattern is either continued or changed.
County supervisors oversee environmental health programs and the county agencies that respond to contamination, unsafe sites, and public health threats. They control large budgets that can fund cleanup, monitoring, and parks, or leave those needs unmet. In Los Angeles County a single supervisor represents close to two million people, so the seat carries real power over the air and land where you live.
Environmental burden does not fall evenly. Working-class immigrant neighborhoods in Southeast LA sit closest to the freeways, the rail yards, and the industrial corridor, and decades of research link that proximity to higher rates of asthma and other health harms. Families here often cannot move away from the pollution, and a renter who fears being noticed may not file a complaint about a nearby polluter. The offices and the measures above decide whether the next polluting project lands in the same neighborhoods again, or whether the burden is finally shared more fairly.
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