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Measuring Progress
EPA has developed measures to help manage and track the performance of its offices and programs working to integrate land revitalization into the cleanup process. Specifically, the Superfund and Brownfields Programs have already implemented performance measures to report accomplishments in cleaning up and revitalizing contaminated land. Additionally, OSWER has issued new interim guidance to promote greater consistency in measuring acres-based cleanup and revitalization activities across all its cleanup programs.
Cross Program Revitalization Measures
Six OSWER programs address contaminated land: Brownfields, Emergency Response, Federal Facility Response, RCRA Corrective Action, Superfund, and Underground Storage Tanks. Until recently, there was no way to know exactly how much land these programs had combined to revitalize. However, in October 2006, OSWER issued the Interim Guidance for OSWER Cross-Program Revitalization Measures (PDF) (34 pp, 501K, About PDF) to help track land revitalization at the national level. Some of the new measures to be implemented by EPA cleanup programs include:
- Universe Indicator - the total number of sites and acres being addressed by all OSWER's cleanup programs.
- Protective for People Performance Measure - the number of acres at which there is no complete pathway for human exposures to unacceptable levels of contamination based on current site conditions.
- Ready for Anticipated Uses Performance Measure - the number of acres at which cleanup goals have been achieved for media that may affect current as well as reasonably expected future land uses so there are no unacceptable risks, and institutional controls identified as part of the remedy to help ensure long-term protection have been put in place.
The new guidance also includes "status of use" and "type of use" indicators that can be used to provide a more complete description of cleanup and revitalization. The "status of use" indicator could be used to describe how many acres of land are actually being used or not. The "type of use" indicator could be used to describe how many acres of land are being used for particular purposes – commercial, residential, industrial, ecologic, etc.
* Note, the pdf file found at the previous link to the Interim Guidance for OSWER Cross-Program Revitalization Measures reflects a minor correction to the type of use categorizations found on pages 15-16 as compared to the original version that was posted in December 2006.
Additional background resources for the cross-program revitalization measures are now available online. Questions about this Cross Program Revitalization Measures effort should be directed to Guy Tomassoni in OSWER’s Land Revitalization Staff Office (tomassoni.guy@epa.gov, (202) 566-1937).
Brownfields Performance Measures
EPA's Office of Brownfields Cleanup and Redevelopment (OBCR) has developed new performance measures to help better manage and keep track of the performance of the Brownfields Program. These performance measures focus on the four types of grants in the program, including Assessment, Cleanup, Revolving Loan Fund, and Job Training grants. The Brownfields Property Profiles, Brownfields Grants Profile Forms, and the Job Training Forms are all used to collect performance measure data which includes information such as the number of assessments completed, the number of cleanups completed, the number of acres of green/open space created or preserved, and the number of jobs leveraged.
Superfund Performance Measures
EPA's Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation (OSRTI) has developed three performance measures to report the Superfund program's accomplishments in making land ready for reuse. The three performance measures are:
- The Number of Acres of Land at Superfund Sites that are Ready for Reuse;
- Number of Superfund Sites With land that is Ready for Reuse; and
- Sitewide Ready for Reuse (which measures the number of entire Superfund sites that are ready for reuse. More information about this measure can be found in EPA’s Sitewide Ready for Reuse Guidance).
The Superfund program is considering revising the names of these measures to be consistent with the OSWER cross-program revitalization measures.