There has been a steady stream of complaints from residents surrounding the Inglewood Oil Field and similar nearby developments coming out of Los Angeles, and many residents feel their voice is not being heard on the issue.

"My south Los Angeles district is pockmarked with oil fields stretching from the Cheviot Hills, Beverly Hills and Las Cienegas sites to the Inglewood oil field which surrounds much of Kenneth Hahn State Park, the largest urban oil field in the country," wrote State Sen. Holly Mitchell in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Daily News on Friday. "There are a million Angelenos living within a 5-mile radius of the Inglewood oil derricks."

One of the local groups that have tried to seek alleviation for the conditions is Mujeres de la Tierra, a non-profit devoted to environmental issues and family education in the heavily-Latino area of Los Angeles.

The non-profit has repeatedly voiced concerns about the oil field and its effect on the residents living nearby. It was actively involved in the hearings held before the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) was accepted and permission to drill 1,000 wells was given in 2008.

"The Board's approval of the (Final) EIR and (Community Standards District) still fail the community on a number of issues including, among others, failure to revise and re-circulate the EIR and to set the annual cap of wells at 53, instead of the 15-20 (Plains Exploration and Production Company) quoted in their literature," the group wrote on its website following the 2008 decision.

This week, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told NBC that she recognized that "institutional racism" was partly to blame for the fact that projects with negative environmental effects have been disproportionately located near minority neighborhoods. McCarthy said that the agency is going to move forward with a new approach to underserved demographics like Latino communities.

She also noted that she had met with the League of United Latin American Citizens in an effort to increase awareness between her agency and that community.

"We are working hard to look at how we integrate environmental justice more effectively into the every day work of the agency and not make it a last minute consideration," McCarthy told NBC. "It needs to be a priority issue."