RE: Technical/Financial Assistance & Self Educating on Technical Issues

[Peter Schlesinger <pschles@starband.net>]

What needs haven't been met by our TOSC assistance and why not?

    First of all, the TOSC contractor of the Northeast -- NE Hazardous Substance Center, or something like that, was based in New Jersey. Apparently, it is no longer the contractor, but the new contractor hasn't contacted us yet. From the start, the hiring of the TOSC advisors was very slow, when we really needed the support to happen much faster. It took 6-8 months to get the support in place, finding qualified individuals that met the contractor's budget, were nearby, and met our qualification that they were not recently/currently on the payroll of the military. In the end, this qualification was largely dropped, the contractor said we had to go with these local advisors, and that was that. As one of the advisors pointed out, it is hard to get experience working with military explosives without working for the military. 

    In the beginning, that contractor had an administrative assistant/facilitator working to liason between MMR citizens and our MIT-based TOSC advisors. The facilitator left the employ of the contractor within 6 months after the advisors were in place, and a new one has never been hired. This made it difficult for us to contact and communicate with our advisors other than at our monthly meetings. The facilitator worked to handle distribution of documents, and generally help to make sure our needs were met, and without that kind of individual present, we citizens have four advisors to deal with, yet no collective manner to talk with them, no way to set up outside meetings, etc. The TOSC program should make sure that its contractors provide a citizen liason officer to each group getting TOSC assistance.

   The TOSC contractor told us that TOSC advisors cannot work with raw data nor generate new information, but can simply review written materials and advise us on how we ought to offer advice to EPA. This isn't satisfactory, because one real need is to have the TOSC advisors review the digital scientific data collected by the Study, available to us and TOSC advisors only in paper format. Similarly, while our TOSC advisors are amply qualified to offer expert criticism of the USGS' MODFLOW model, the TOSC contractor forbade the advisors from accessing those digital data to make the necessary review. The USGS MODFLOW model determining contmaminant flow and potential source had had no peer review by the time our TOSC contract was in place (and still has none that we are aware of), yet it is being used to direct a major public effort involving millions of public dollars, and help direct where new monitoring wells should be bored. It is crucial that the public review that tool with field data to make sure that its assumptions are adequate for our task. 

   As explained, we are not a citizen group, but a collection of citizens on the same Team. We need a liason officer to help us organize presentations that the TOSC advisors are competent to carry out and have indicated they would do for the citizens to help us better understand soil and contaminant transport issues. 

    I don't believe any citizen member on our Team really understands the TOSC program and how it functions and what it is supposed to and not supposed to do for us, despite our current support. We only have a vague idea about the value of the support, as the budgetting and adminstrative details are carried out by the contractor. We do not know for how long we can have support; this would be useful so we could prioritize our needs accordingly.  We communicate with the contractor through our advisors, when it should be the other way around. We had 4 advisors but only 1 or 2 would attend our meetings for a while (and only one comes now because the other is on maternity leave), thus the breadth of our collaboration and support has grown less fruitful over time. I understand that our TOSC advisors are university professors and that they have students and all that, but we, too, are performing a necessary public function at which we cannot afford to fail. We need contnuous support to understand these complex issues.

   I need to say that we are happy with our TOSC advisors (and any support we are given) and we have told them so, because without them we would still be making a lot of educated lay guesses. We have excelled, as noted earlier, but the soil/water/contaminant breakdown/transport issues are very complex. Indeed our TOSC advisors have been very useful in advising local EPA study personnel on the contaminant transport modeling program, but the most Team citizens have yet to get to a stage where they understand those issues enough to adequately comment on them. We had hoped and expected more from the advisors, and more was supposed to occur (or so we thought), but thus far nothing more has come, and we've had TOSC support for about 18 months now I think.