This month, a handful of Latino state lawmakers stood clapping along with a gathering of Angelenos furious about pollution spewing from a plant that smelts lead to make car batteries. The 80-year-old facility, owned by Exide, has operated without a permit on the East Side of L.A. for almost 40 years since passage of landmark federal air-quality laws in 1976. Recent tests find elevated levels of arsenic around the plant and cancer risks for local residents 7 to 15 times higher than in other nearby neighborhoods.

Amid dangers like this, it’s nice to see state legislators such as Senators Kevin De León and Ricardo Lara applauding the crowd and their demands for tighter state regulation. But what many Latino communities in California need most is action.

Environmental priorities for us go beyond wildlife and woodlands. They include stopping toxic pollutants in our air and water and protecting the public health of our families and children right where we live and play, in our yards, parks, surf, and sand.

Strong action on pollution and public health is not what we are seeing in Sacramento, including from some of our Latino officials. This year, the state’s Latino Legislative Caucus grew to its largest in state history, with 25 members serving in the Assembly or Senate. Yet lawmakers missed several opportunities to improve the quality of California’s environment.

In fact, Latino caucus members actually played a role in two of the biggest disappointments on environmental policy this year. Caucus members helped weaken the state bill to limit underground fracking, SB 4, that became law. Even the subject of the bill changed in its closing stages from “hydraulic fracturing” to a confusing, corporate-sounding “well stimulation.” Instead of limiting the practice of pumping toxic chemicals into the ground at high pressure to extract fossil fuels, with potential ground-water and surface contamination, the law as written is causing some observers to worry it will actually expand the practice.

In addition, De León and Lara joined together on the senate floor in May to kill the state bill banning single-use plastic bags, SB 405. Californians discard more than 15 billion such bags each year. Statewide, at least 75 cities and 9 counties, including L.A. city and county, have banned their free distribution by most retailers. Reports shows bag bans work, reducing pollution from non-biodegradable plastic bags in landfills, neighborhoods, rivers, and beaches by 90 percent or more while spurring the growing industry of reusable bags. But somehow this evidence did not sway enough senators.

Our state legislators open themselves to scrutiny through their opposition to common sense environmental initiatives. Lara, as co-chair of the Latino Caucus, led a press conference this spring to denounce the state plastic bag ban. In politics, perception is reality. We cannot simply ignore the $15,000 contribution this year to the Latino Caucus from an out-of-state plastic bag-maker, Hilex Poly. Episodes like this should motivate lawmakers not only to represent the needs of constituents with transparency, but also to recuse themselves from policy decisions that might create the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Lara, like De León, is a protégé of former Speaker Fabian Nuñez. Since being termed out of his East Side seat in the Assembly, Nuñez has made a robust lobbying business with the firm Mercury Public Relations — representing plastic bag-makers. Lara credits Nuñez with his becoming a lawmaker. De León calls him “family.” This cozy relationship and its potential to influence the votes they cast can undermine public confidence, including among Latinos, that state lawmakers we elect will always put the common good first.

It is disheartening to say the least that these gentlemen missed opportunities to safeguard the health of Californians. In the case of the Exide plant, community pressure and county supervisor Gloria Molina have been seeking its shutdown for years, just as local coalitions in Pennsylvania and Texas achieved with their Exide plants. But in California, many pollution problems require state action. We need our state legislators to demonstrate leadership to help us protect the communities where we reside.

We were pleased to see other Latino lawmakers sponsor both the bag bill and the ban on lead bullets, which became law this year. But we need more. When she was a lawmaker in Sacramento, former Labor Secretary Hilda Solís, of La Puente, won a Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library for taking on polluters and passing laws for environmental health. That is the kind of leadership we like to see in our elected officials.

True friends of the environment do not grow on trees. We need to nurture them, develop relationships and, when they’re qualified, elect them into office. No one will look after our health and our interests unless we organize locally, educate our leaders and then hold them accountable. In the end, we must expect more from our Latino elected officials to make our communities safer, cleaner and greener.

Patricia Pérez is an anti-pollution activist on the East Side of Los Angeles. Marce Gutiérrez is the founder and director of Azul, a statewide environmental organization based in San Francisco. They wrote this for this newspaper.