RE: Identifying the public/Feedback/EJ concerns

[Peter Schlesinger <pschles@starband.net>]

Charlie,

I really have to agree with your last statement. EPA has to talk to the public. Groups don't often have a mission of talking to the public, or if they do, they are to their constituency, or the information comes out, flavored by that group's take on the issue.

In our area, I don't believe that EPA does a good job at reaching the public, they rely on the newspapers and the PR dept of the Pentagon's Joint Program Office to blanket the area with appropriate newsletters (but the JPO has made no attempt to truly inform -- in fact they attempt to whitewash, sugar coat the contamination, by telling the public what has not been found). Massachusetts DEP doesn't address the public, except by making statements at public gatherings. EPA is also relying on the Army Corps of Engineers and Massachusetts National Guard to create a good web site to explain the issues. The latter has done an exceptionally poor job of explaining the breadth of its contamination to public, lying by omission. EPA is visible at meetings only here. The idea of SEPs being used to support toll-free telephones is interesting; I don't think anyone has used that here. While we've hired a private investigator to find persons with sprecial knowledge of military related contamination (who has been stopped by the Justice Dept recently), we've relied almost exclusively on people coming forward on their own. There has been little to no 'noise' in the press about getting people to come forward with their private knowledge.  

Our military has done an exceptional job at disinforming our local populace about the extent of contamination at the local military base. It has taken better than a year to get them to produce an updated map of known plumes emanating from our Impact Area. To date, the map is not out, in the public's mind, there are no plumes from the Massachusetts Military Reservation National Guard training activities, when in fact there are several very large plumes with unknown sources identified to date. The EPA has made no attempt to get this information to the public, relying on the local newspapers (1 daily and 2 weeklies) to do the job. This is unacceptable.

Identifying the public:

EPA needs to contact abutters, current and potential users of natural resources, regional special interests. EPA needs to go to the communities and request info from community leaders on potential interested parties, this needs to be an iterative process, not just done from the beginning.

Notifying EPA of interest:

This might be done via letters, email, attending meetings,  telephone calls, web-based message services, but this should be viewed as a two-way activity. That is, EPA needs to seek out interest by continually going to the public, announcing to public in regional newspapers, television, radio. 

Environmental justice:

EPA needs to go to the communities and request info from community leaders on potential interested parties, this needs to be an iterative process, not just done from the beginning. In our region, EPA has only recently been seeking input from the local native American community for participation in our Impact Area Review Team some 4 years after beginning our effort. Its not just organizations, but churches, neighborhoods, and wide area interest groups.