The highest point in the city of Uniontown, Alabama, is a towering mound in the Arrowhead Landfill made of coal ash. A powdery residue from burning coal at power plants, coal ash contains heavy metals like mercury and arsenic — and it flies everywhere.

When the dump site is active, Uniontown resident Ben Eaton told BuzzFeed News, “Everything out here turns gray or white.”

In 2013, Eaton and other residents of Uniontown filed a complaint with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claiming that the site was harming the largely black city, whose residential neighborhoods began less than a mile away. People reported respiratory troubles, nausea, and nosebleeds. The EPA and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management had approved bringing in this coal ash from the site of a massive spill in Kingston, Tennessee — diverting 4 million tons of this toxic refuse some 300 miles, from a community that’s 90% white to one that’s 90% black.

Uniontown filed this to EPA’s Office for Civil Rights — a team within the agency meant to ensure that federal funds are not being used in a manner that is discriminatory, in accordance with the Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Although the EPA is supposed to investigate complaints within 180 days, three years later Uniontown is still waiting for an answer. It’s one of hundreds of complaints that the EPA has either dismissed or kept pending over the last two decades. And the lead contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan, was yet another example of the agency’s inaction, activists say.

“We want them to know that we are here, and our lives are just as important as others,” Ben Eaton, vice president of the activist group Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice, told BuzzFeed News. “The rich, the majority — it’s just, we don’t feel like we have those rights.”

Now, in a scathing report published on Thursday, the US Commission on Civil Rights, a government watchdog group, is reprimanding the EPA for failing in its duty to protect minority communities from so-called environmental racism.

Although the EPA conducted a cursory environmental assessment of the Uniontown dump site before it was approved, the report alleges, the agency nevertheless decided to dump in Uniontown for economic reasons: because it was easily accessible by rail from Kingston.

“I’m not certain if the Environmental Protection Agency is incompetent or indifferent when it comes to requiring environmental justice from polluters of minority communities, but whatever the case, the result is the same,” commission chairman Martin Castro wrote in the report. “The EPA has failed miserably in its mandate to protect communities of color from environmental hazards.”

The EPA denies that it is failing minorities.

“EPA has a robust and successful national program to protect minority and low-income communities from pollution,” Mustafa Ali, senior advisor to EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, said in a statement emailed to BuzzFeed News.

The agency created an Environmental Justice 2020 Action Agenda to address criticisms of its civil rights record, but that effort “is largely absent” in the new report, Ali noted. The agency hopes to collaborate with the US Commission on Civil Rights going forward, he added.