It's the Environment!
A Broken Engagement
19 January 2010
Emily Russell
Martha Wingfield
In December 2009, Mathy Stanislaus, Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, released a Community Engagement Initiative Proposed Action Plan for review and public comment. The plan outlines three goals that seek to increase opportunities for citizen participation from the early stages of contaminated site cleanup and to analyze current means of engagement (i.e. Technical Assistance Grants) for areas of improvement. Stanislaus’ plan is correct that “The level of [citizen] participation is influenced by access to information, the skills and resources of the community members, degree and frequency of communication and the nature of the action.” Unfortunately, OSWER’s broad, generalized plan fails to remark on a significant detriment to citizen participation: lack of consistency in EPA outreach and policy. The issue of consistency is a challenge in any government agency. The EPA, which serves communities in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Washington D.C., the Pacific Islands and over 160 tribal nations, is no exception. However, there are noticeable differences in community-agency interactions that have come to light during our experience working with community groups. These differences would not exist if EPA set and enforced consistent standards of community involvement and participation.
Attentiveness is one component of this issue. One formerly used defense site currently being cleaned up under CERCLA is in a wealthy D.C. neighborhood with high-profile residents. This site is arguably one of the best examples of an EPA cleanup in the country. The community outreach activities performed by the potentially responsible party, with oversight from the EPA, extend as far as door-to-door delivery of reports, compensation for removing decades-old landscaping and restoration of damaged driveways to the homeowners’ exact specifications. This attention to detail, care for the impacted residents’ quality of life and “more is better” approach to communication should not be an exception to the norm. Yet, time and time again, the potentially responsible party limits its interaction with the community to the bare minimum. It is also not uncommon for the potentially responsible party to deliberately constrain public involvement by negotiating the funding it is willing to provide for public participation. Such is the case with the recently signed Agreement on Consent between Dow Chemical, the EPA, and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. The agreement stipulates that Dow must only fund a public participation grant until the signing of the Record of Decision (ROD). There are a number of cases where a ROD was signed the 1990s and cleanup work continues to this day. The signing of a ROD can even signal the beginning of the cleanup activities. If a similar scenario were to play out at the Dow Dioxin site, interested citizens’ groups would be excluded from a majority of the cleanup process. Where is EPA’s attention in these cases?
EPA has the power to iron out these inconsistencies when it sit with its lawyers across the table from a potentially responsible party. The Community Engagement Initiative proposed by Mathy Stanislaus would be greatly enhanced with clear, unwavering standards for public participation. These standards should not differ dramatically from one end of the country to the other, as they do now. To improve the Plan, and ultimately the process, the Engagement Initiative should elucidate the point that perpetrators of contamination will not dictate to EPA if and how they choose to fund citizen involvement. More importantly, EPA must recognize that community outreach is literally that, agencies and polluters reaching out to communities to accommodate their concerns, questions, and complaints. A cleanup is a partnership, a true engagement of various stakeholders, but at the end of the day, EPA has the ultimate authority over cleanup sites under CERCLA. It should not be afraid to flex its muscles to ensure that OSWER’s written goals for public engagement become actualities, applied consistently and effectively across America.