PROVIDENCE — Temperatures ran high Thursday night in the Juanita Sanchez Education Complex cafeteria, but not because of the mild autumn weather. Residents of the South Providence and Washington Park neighborhoods were telling planning and Port of Providence officials they were fed up with the city, ProvPort, and other malignant industries that haunt Allens Avenue.

ProvPort, the nonprofit that manages the city-owned land along the waterfront in South Providence, marked its 30th birthday this year, and is in the beginning stages of crafting its own master plan to guide it over the next three decades.

“We don’t want the master plan to sit on a shelf like others in the past,” said Chris Waterson, CEO of Waterson Terminal Services LLC, the private company that oversees day-to-day operations at the port.

But residents expressed concern, and deep exasperation, over the city and port’s inability to bring bad-faith actors and polluting industries, on and off ProvPort property, into compliance. For years, abutting neighborhoods to portside properties have dealt with the state’s ground zero of environmental injustice. Businesses along the waterfront have polluted the air, operated illegal scrapyards, and caused a litany of asthma and respiratory-related illnesses among nearby residents, stemming from their operations.

Local authorities, both city and state, have done little to radically change the material circumstances on the ground for residents. Monica Huertas, executive director of the People’s Port Authority, said the city and port have an accountability problem, and that residents had to force ProvPort to have public input in its planning process for the area.

“We’re not here because they told us,” said Huertas. “They’re here because we told them to show up.”

Huertas also expressed disappointment that Pedro Espinal and Mary Kay Harris, the two City Council members representing the wards and neighborhoods surrounding the Port of Providence, didn’t attend.

ProvPort was originally awarded a 30-year lease by the city in 1994, and the city recently chose to renew the lease for another 30 years, with one of the conditions requiring ProvPort to draw up a master plan with public input. The Sept. 26 meeting was the first of four public outreach hearings on the master plan, with future meetings scheduled for November, February, and April.

GZA, the Norwood, Mass.-based consulting firm leading the development of the master plan, has pledged to include residents’ input into the final draft of the plan, but participants at the public outreach meeting remained strongly and justifiably skeptical of promised changes.

“How much community control of the port is the public going to have in the new plan?” asked Harrison Tuttle, president of the Black Lives Matter RI political action committee (PAC). “And how much community control of the profit being generated by the port is in the new plan?”

Others expressed a greater desire for accountability and transparency and a greater focus on public health impacts from port activities.

Port officials and consultants touted the port as an economic engine, and noted that ProvPort has already pledged, per the city ordinance, that no new fossil fuel companies can lease ProvPort-managed land. The nonprofit has also started contributing to a sustainability fund and community benefits fund, per its renewed lease agreement, each with an annual minimum payment of $120,000. The payments are expected to grow as ProvPort itself grows.

But ultimately any future plan approved by the City Council is only addressing half the problem. The majority of the worst repeat offenders are outside ProvPort’s jurisdiction. Industrial operations such as Sims Metal, Rhode Island Recycled Metals, and others are further north on Allens Avenue, far away from ProvPort’s authority. (ProvPort also counts a small number of fossil fuel companies currently as its lessors, including the Sea 3 terminal that had proposed a new liquefied natural gas facility.)

Only a small component of ProvPort’s plan will include the remaining waterfront areas in South Providence. Researchers at the University of Rhode Island studying climate resilience, how coastal areas can better withstand sea level rise and storms supercharged by climate change, have included much of the Allens Avenue properties, from ProvPort to Collier Point Park, in a wider study area.

For residents, the song still remains the same. “My family has lived here 50 years,” said one local resident. “I know what it looked like when my grandparents lived in the neighborhood. I know what it looks like now. I’m wondering what will change about the port in the future for my daughter.”