RE: Lessons from Dialogue for EPA

[Rich Puchalsky <rpuchalsky@att.net>]

Eric Marsh writes:
"One lesson is that "the Public is talking", and people are continuing to show that they are more than ready to provide instructive, helpful commentary on how to make improvements in EPA public involvement activities, especially when given time and opportunity to do so. These discussions involving persons from around the country representing a variety of different backgrounds provide a rich source of varied viewpoints and information and serve as a great way to "check-in" on what the public is thinking."

That's an -- unusual, let's say -- way to put it.  Sure, the public is talking.  What are they talking about?  Most of the messages here come from three broad classes of people.  The first is the technocrat class -- EPA employees, state employees, members of various quasi-governmental boards, and so on.  Sure, they are full of "instructive, helpful commentary" since their jobs mostly involve public participation efforts and they are fully committed to the system.  The second group is the novices -- people with some environmental interest, but not much experience.  They mainly confine themselves to thanking everyone for the forum and to suggesting a few good things that should have been implemented a long time ago if the process had ever actually worked.  The third class is the experienced public.  They are the ones who produced those 130 pages of worst practices stories mentioned in an earlier response.  It turns out that when you "'check-in' on what the public is thinking", you find them thinking - well, here are a few quotes grabbed at random from other people's messages in just the 12th page of the list of messages by date:

"EPA is so inept, they have yet to force BP/AMOCO to come up with a cleanup plan"

"This situation sends the Orwellian message that we may all be equal but some are more equal than others."

"This means that letters to the PRPs have to my knowledge never been sent to this date. I think that this is appalling."

"We have discussed all of the things that EPA needs to do to follow the intent of the law, but if the head of EPA does not also follow the intent of the law, the dedicated EPA employees on the front lines are lost."

"why have relatively few identified sites been cleaned up? Isn't that what the Superfund was intended to do?" 

Yes, the public is talking.  But what are they talking about?  I guess I have to admire the ability to listen to this litany of failure and describe it as "Well, they are talking!"