RE: Hearing Ruses

[Michael Glaab <michaelglaab@worldnet.att.net>]

Hello:

There is some merit to Mr. Glenn Landers' statements.

Perhaps there should be an intial public meeting scheduled for the beginning of any comment period at which information about the topic would be disseminated to the public. The names, addresses, phone numbers and/or web addresses of pertinent contact persons and officials could then be provided to the public. The time, date and location of a second scheduled public meeting should be announced at the end of the preliminary meeting. To sum up, there would actually be 2 meetings. There would be one introductory meeting for information dissemination and one final public meeting at which the public would be afforded an opportunity to directly address the relevant stakeholders in a public forum. A reasonable time interval between meetings should be provided to afford the public adequate time to formulate its concerns and suggestions. Some members of the public would doubtless use this time interval to directly access stakeholders. This would afford stakeholders an opportunity to deal with complex issues prior to the actual comment meeting. Therefor the stakeholders would be better prepared to respond to the public at the final comment meeting. 

This would entail some additional expense to the stakeholders and it would certainly impose an additional burden to their workloads. However, the extra cost would tend to be minimal in comparison to the gains of reassuring the public, of insuring additional input of potentially useful information and of facilitating the entire environmental remediation / preservation process. 

Michael