RE: Introduction

[Steve Taylor <Steve@miltoxproj.org>]

Hello all.

I work for the Military Toxics Project, a national non-profit organization which is a network of community, veterans, peace, and worker organizations confronting environmental problems caused by the U.S. military and defense-related activities.  I am also involved as a steering committee member for a local environmental "friends of" organization in my town.

I have interacted with EPA regions, national office, and public involvement processes on both the national and local levels.  I have also been involved in Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and U.S. Office of Surface Mining, and various state and local public involvement processes.  Much of my professional work over the past twelve years has concerned public involvement in decision making.

My interest in this process is to help create a PIP that produces real public involvement in decisions, as opposed to simply the appearance of public involvement.

We'll delve into information more in a couple of days, but I'll add a quick note to Jennifer Cranford here.  I appreciate EPA's willingness to make a great variety of information available on-line.  However, Envirofacts is not a very helpful solution.  It is very non-user friendly and slow.  I am reasonably experienced at accessing environmental information on-line, and I find it very time consuming and difficult to get the information I need.  For many people, the database(s) are basically unintelligible.  More on this on the appropriate day.

Steve