Discussion Summary: July 14, 2001

Dialogue Day 5 Agenda: The Catch-up Day

Dialogue moderator Bob Carlitz invited participants to review the previous four days' discussions and look for common themes and comment on the dialogue process.

Patricia Bonner, EPA's lead staff person for the Agency's Draft Public Involvement Policy, suggested that participants look at what has happened the previous four days and catch up on unread messages. To that end, she suggested they read the daily summaries and look at the subjects and threads that interest them.

Today's discussion summary is organized by daily agenda topics.

Outreach - Identifying the Interested Public

• Interviewing community leaders at the beginning of a process, combined with the linked chain technique (i.e., asking people you interview to identify other potentially interested people), is the best way to identify the interested public.

• To engage a seemingly disinterested public, EPA should to talk to the people in the community and determine why they might be disinterested. Discussions must be at a level the non-technical public can understand.

• Two published resources that address public participation were presented: (1) "Public Participation in Contaminated Communities" by Nicholas Ashford, MIT, 1999, and (2) "Improving Dialogue with Communities by Caron Chess and Peter Sandman, Rutgers University, 1988. The latter would have been in the Briefing Book had it been available on the Rutgers web site.

• EPA can learn to enable underserved populations to participate more effectively by reading How to Succeed in Ethnic and Minority Outreach by Really Trying by Julie Hoover.

Getting Information Out

• EPA needs to make information more accessible to the public, bearing in mind that the public consists of busy people who want to be involved but do not have a lot of time. Summaries of relevant information with links to full documents would be an effective alternative to providing too much material.

• Two ways to inform people are the Internet and small newspapers that have no ties to corporate entities.

• The public has a strong commitment to the environment; however, lack of basic science knowledge related to the issues causes misunderstanding and mistrust. Education is critical to combat scientific illiteracy.

• Study Circles are a means of getting information out. They are multi-session meetings of self-selected citizens who engage in a democratic adult self-education process.

Providing Assistance to Promote Public Involvement

• Local government boards, which advise local elected officials on potential impacts of a situation, are a tool to foster citizen participation. To gain trust of rural residents and interest groups, EPA should keep them informed from the beginning and deliver information they can verify in a language they understand.

• One participant described a situation in which EPA did not force state regulators to remove ground water contaminants from a community of low-income Hispanic residents. He cited examples of discrimination and non-public involvement. Suggestions for increasing public involvement included newspaper ads, toll-free phone lines, citizen review committees, distributing information remembering the sole mission of EPA is to protect the environment and people's health, listening to people, eliminating answering machines, listening to taxpayers not polluters, not withholding information through delay tactics, a more user-friendly web site, and working around the public's daily work schedule.

• Stakeholders and the public need financial assistance for grants for technical advisors and health advisors.

• For individuals and groups without computer access, EPA can conduct town hall meetings and environmental justice forums, as well as talk to local neighborhood groups, rather than to the polluters.

• The Agency needs to utilize the EPA National Library Network, which already interacts with academic, public, school, special libraries, and professional library associations.

• EPA needs to remember its role: to protect human health and the environment by regulating toxic wastes. One participant noted concern about relevant information about a toxic substance not being available to the public. In this case, the "industry versus public" issue affected EPA decisions.

• EPA should look beyond the USA to see how other countries deal with problems similar to those found in the USA.

Each day's summary is intended to capture the essence of the conversation. While this summary contains the highlights of participants' contributions relating to today's topics, more comprehensive information may be found in the individual postings.

Today is my last day as reporter for the EPA Dialogue. I appreciate the dedication and commitment you bring to this process and hope you have found that these summaries represent your opinions accurately and fairly.

Sally Hedman, Reporter