FLINT, MI — From posting uniformed, armed guards at public hearings to limiting comment time, Michigan environmental officials discriminated against African-Americans in Flint during public hearings on a proposed biomass power plant in Genesee County more than 20 years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in a letter written on President Obama's last full day in office.

The plant, the Genesee Power Station, burns wood waste and other debris, including tire debris. It went on line in 1995 after Michigan Department of Environmental Quality permit hearings from 1992 to 1994. During those hearings, the EPA's External Civil Rights Compliance Office said, "African-Americans were treated less favorably than non-African-Americans." A "preponderance of the evidence in EPA's record would lead a reasonable person to conclude that race discrimination was more likely than not the reason …," Lilian Dorka, the director of the agency's civil rights compliance division, wrote in a Jan. 19 letter to the complainant, Father Phil Schmitter of the St. Francis Prayer Center in Flint.

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, which first reported the agency's finding, Schmittler said that though it is "unbelievable that it took the EPA decades to make his finding," it sends a clear message to the MDEQ that "it needs to change the way it does business." The finding of discrimination is the first by the EPA's Office of Civil Rights Compliance in 22 years, according to the Center for Public Integrity, one of the country's oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations. A 2015 integrity investigation by journalists there found tepid enforcement of Title VI by the EPA of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That section of the landmark act prohibits agencies receiving federal funding from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

In his statement, Schmittler also said: "Communities of color and schoolchildren have had to grow up near this horrible power plant and be subjected to its harmful emissions." Though the EPA said it did not find evidence of adverse health effects from the plant, the agency said in the letter to Schmittler that it found MDEQ officials "deviated from … standard operating procedures (at public hearings) on more than one occasion to the detriment of African Americans."

In one example cited by the EPA, armed state conservation officers were stationed at an October 1994 hearing in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Flint. It was one of two hearings on the permit held outside of Lansing and the last one before the Genesee Power Station was scheduled to begin operations. It was the only hearing in which the MDEQ asked armed officers from its conservation department to attend, the EPA said.

The EPA concluded that the armed guards were asked by their bosses at the MDEQ to attend as an intimidation tactic. At the time, the EPA said, the presence of uniformed, armed police was "uncommon" and assigning such officers seems only to have occurred in communities with high populations of African-Americans.

"There was no strong box to guard at the GPS hearing," the EPA wrote in the letter. "There is no evidence in the record that personnel safety may have been a concern due to the controversial nature of an issue. … In evaluating the use of armed and uniformed officers in this situation, EPA considered the intimidation factor through threat of police force as historically used against African-Americans when attempting to exercise their rights." Also, the letter outlines instances in which Flint residents who wanted to speak weren't allowed to do so because hearings were closed early or comment periods were limited. The EPA also said the MDEQ has done little to change its policies to address complaints about public participation at hearings.