The Justice Department has reached an agreement with the city of Houston to improve trash collection and environmental monitoring following an investigation into widespread dumping of trash, including human bodies, in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.

The pact, announced Tuesday, was the result of a year-long investigation by the department’s civil rights division into dozens of complaints from residents. It includes a commitment from Mayor Sylvester Turner to fund cleanup projects, under the supervision of federal officials for three years.

The agreement, which followed weeks of negotiation between department officials and city leaders in Houston, is part of the Biden administration’s broader environmental justice agenda, which seeks to redress the disproportionate impact of waste, air and water pollution on communities of color across the country.

“No one should have to live next to scrap tires, garbage bags, rotting corpses, infected soil and contaminated groundwater, all caused by illegal dumping,” Alamdar S. Hamdani, US Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said Tuesday. during a press conference in Houston.

“For too long, Houston’s low-income and underserved communities have had to bear the health burdens of inaction and the wrongdoing of others,” he said.

under the agreement, the city said it would provide additional data and information on its efforts to address illegal dumping. Local officials also pledged to beef up enforcement actions against industrial and commercial polluters in a city whose notoriously lax zoning laws have resulted in a mix of industrial sites and residential neighborhoods.

The agreement also requires Houston to develop an online “neighborhood equity dashboard” to analyze whether officials are living up to their commitments, which department officials hope will be a model for subsequent similar agreements.

The Department of Justice opened a broad investigation last July after a local legal aid group filed a federal civil rights complaint on behalf of Houstonians accusing the city of discriminating against residents of a Northeast neighborhood, Trinity/Houston Gardens.

Piles of household trash, industrial waste and other items dumped in low-income neighborhoods in recent years included discarded furniture, mattresses, tires, medical waste, garbage, dead bodies and vandalized ATMs, Justice Department officials said at the time. .

Attorneys at the legal aid group, Lone Star Legal Aid, spent months collecting complaints from people who called Houston’s 311 system to report illegal dumping and other environmental violations only to have their concerns ignored.

At the time, Mr. Turner, a Democrat, criticized the department’s decision to open the investigation as “absurd, baseless and without merit.”

On Tuesday, Turner applauded the agreement, but said it was an extension of initiatives his administration had already undertaken.

He ticked off a list of recent improvements under a plan he unveiled in March, saying the city had reduced response times to illegal dumping complaints from 49 days to 11 days over the past year. He also doubled the deployment of law enforcement officers to punish polluters, increasing the total number of fines imposed from around 50 to more than 200 during the same period, he added.

“Despite everything we’ve done and continue to do, it was a little bit daunting,” Turner, who has been in the job since 2016, said of the Justice Department’s decision to investigate the city.

Federal officials said they were more interested in improving conditions than calling out past failures.

Often, the department’s civil rights division releases the results of the investigation to the public before announcing voluntary agreements or court-approved consent decrees with local authorities.

In this case, Kristen Clarke, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told reporters that the government had “suspended its investigation” into the city’s actions to focus “on remedying the problem.”

While the settlement alluded to the city’s troubled past, it did not include detailed investigative findings or a deeper examination of the origins of some of its most chronic and consequential problems, including the historical patterns of discrimination that led to the construction of 11 of 13 garbage cans. incinerators in Houston’s black and Latino neighborhoods.

That’s the same approach the department took in April, when officials announced a similar settlement, but no investigative report, after examining claims that state and local officials discriminated against black residents in impoverished Lowndes County. , Alabama, by failing to properly repair and maintain sewer and sewer systems.