RE: Goals (Information/Implementation)

[Rich Puchalsky <rp3453@aol.com>]

Paul Orum writes:

'My "how to thesis" for today is: "To meet the goals of the Public Involvement Policy EPA, States, and the public need a seamless, unified national facility registry that provides basic permit application, renewal, and enforcement information for all EPA and State delegated sites."'

I agree that such a registry would help to inform people who want to comment on permit reviews and the like, as well as those who want some form of community or local oversight.  In order for the public to comment, people need to be able to get a clear and comprehensive understanding of what is going on.  But it has become clear that EPA does not want to do this.  It isn't rocket science; the IRS, for instance, is perfectly capable of tracking individual facilities and companies when it comes to taxes.  But EPA still hasn't gotten a verified and checked EPA ID for each facility into all of its data collections, even though the resources required would be minimal; instead, it has been for a decade shifting the project from one office to another, one acronym to another, from Federal to state control, etc.  At some point institutional failure has to be recognized as stemming from political reality rather than technical problems or resource constraints.

I suggest a modification of the goals section of the draft public involvement policy.  Under the sentence in the goals section reading "To ensure that the Agency communicates to the public how its input affected the Agency's decision", perhaps we should add "To ensure that the Agency does not engage in purely symbolic forms of solitication of public input on questions that have already been decided."