Politics vs management

[Rich Puchalsky <rpuchalsky@att.net>]

Amy Swiatek writes:
"Thanks Rich for you comments to explain the perspective from the EPA employee perspective of eliciting public input and the position they are put in when it the input is late in the process and doesn't really have the impact they would like or the public would like, but that's sort of what they are stuck with."

That's sort of half of what I was trying to get across.  The other half is that there is a reason why the input comes late in the process and that it doesn't have the impact that some people would like.  That reason is because environmental issues are basically political issues, not managerial ones, and because industry has a lot of political power within the kind of formal structures that EPA exists within.  

A managerial problem is when everyone agrees on a goal and the question is how that goal can best be reached.  A political problem involves the reconciliation of differing interests and people with differing goals.  EPA is biased towards thinking of the process managerially.  That's why you find things happening like congressional staffers being kicked out of community meetings (as was reported in another message here) and why you see comments like Chuck Elkin's earlier about finding the "best possible solution".  The best possible solution for who?

This very dialogue is a managerial process -- it is assumed that the goal is better public participation, and people then set out various means of getting to that goal.  But since there are powerful interests opposed to that goal, the process will be sabotaged.  Low-level staffers can write anything they like in a nonbinding guidance document, and maybe it will have an effect on someone somewhere.  But every EPA staffer has a boss who is one of Bush's political appointees, and the permit writing process has been purposefully set up so that people come in too late to make any difference -- it isn't just an oversight.  
People have been talking about this for a long time, and only the relative newcomer status of some people here makes it appear that oh gee maybe no one has ever thought that the public is being systematically disenfranchised in these meetings and we can fix that by issuing some appropriate guidance.

I'm not suggesting doom and gloom and that nothing we do can make a difference.  On the contrary, I note that Bush's attempted rejection of what protection we do have is currently going down in flames.  The reason for that is because of political action.  By all means get involved -- just remember that, as Frederick Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never has, and it never will."  Concerned citizens getting together can demand change, but no EPA guidance document can give it to them.