RE: Public Participation

[Rich Puchalsky <rpuchalsky@att.net>]

Amy Swiatek writes:

"But probably most important is that no question should be asked unless the EPA can respond or incorporate the information received/the answer to the question. That is probably the quickest way to lose trust and waste time."

I agree, but this is harder to do than it sounds.  I've never worked as a government employee, but I have worked with a good many EPA employees.  I think that an imaginary trip through the shoes of an EPA employee might help people understand the problems that we are confronting.

Imagine that you are a low-level EPA employee in charge of setting up a public comment meeting on a particular site.  First of all, this public comment meeting was mandated by law.  When the (Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, etc.) was written, the legislators who wrote it were convinced that public meetings were good idea -- now, as a member of the Executive Branch, you must carry out that law whether it is likely to make any difference in this case or not.

Let's assume that you, like most EPA employees, care about the environment and want to do a good job.  Well, your boss doesn't want you to do a good job.  Your boss within the agency, maybe a few levels up, is a political appointee appointed by President Bush.  Word has been passed down not to give industry any trouble as they go on building this great country.  So you are expected to carry out the law in a purely formal sense, but not to do anything that would make waves.

Next you meet up with the people actually in charge of permits, most enforcement, etc., from a state agency.  Lucky you, you've got a facility in one of those states where the state permit apparatus has been captured by industry.  They couldn't care less about public input, and have indicated informally that the permit is already written.  They are even less shielded from the political clout of industry than you are.

So you grimly set up the meeting and show up.  Now, do you announce to the people who show up that the meeting is a sham and that nothing they say will matter?  It's not formally true, people *might* take their comments into account, though you know they really won't.  If you do tell them what's going on, the EPA has a nice job for you -- doing nothing.  They can't fire you, but they can refuse to assign you any duties.  There are real-life people in the EPA who have spent years doing nothing after doing something like this, and they will continue to do nothing for life, or until they get bored out of their skull and quit.

Not wanting to find yourself a new job or resign yourself to residence in bureaucratic Siberia, you decide that you, at least, will listen to their comments, and maybe you can get some of the less troublesome ones implemented somehow.  You salve your conscience with this and conduct the meeting, then do your best to see that at least one of the least difficult to execute, most purely symbolic in effect, requests is taken into account.  It actually happens and you are flushed with victory.  The process works!  You go on to your next meeting.

I exaggerated towards the end of this -- I don't think that any EPA employee has ever really thought "The process works!"  But on the whole, this is why EPA can not really tell people that their comments are worthless.