Final Report of the Federal Facilities Environmental Restoration Dialogue Committee: CHAPTER 3
April 1996

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

Since its inception, the Committee has stressed that government agencies should not conduct their business and public interactions in a "Decide, Announce, and Defend" fashion. Examples from communities around the nation demonstrate that involving communities early and often in the decision-making process enables public stakeholders to help agencies make cost-efficient decisions that lead to faster cleanups. Community involvement is a vital part of any cleanup program and requires a sustained commitment of finances and resources from federal agencies and public stakeholders alike, even during times of budget constraints. Building on Principle 14 of the previous chapter, the recommendations in this chapter are aimed at improving community involvement processes to more actively engage those most affected by federal facilities.

Since the publication of the Interim Report, significant progress has been made in the implementation of the Interim Report recommendations and principles. For details regarding these efforts, see Boxes 1-7.

Interim Report Recommendations

In its 1993 Interim Report, the Committee identified the need for good information dissemination programs as an essential step in effective community involvement. The Interim Report identified three weaknesses in how federal agencies disseminate information regarding federal facilities cleanups:

• Stakeholder's opinions are often solicited late in the process after the governmental entities have concluded their investigatory work;

• The extent and the effectiveness of agency information dissemination and exchange efforts are inconsistent between facilities and between agencies; and

• Stakeholders perceive that requests for information are treated by government officials as burdensome and an impediment to management rather than as a right of citizenship.

To address these concerns, the Committee recommended three principles to guide the exchange of information:

• Federal agencies have an obligation to ensure that information is provided to all interested parties within applicable regulatory, resource, and budgetary constraints.

• Well developed information dissemination and exchange processes should ensure the timely release of information to public stakeholders and provide the basis for informed involvement in decision making. This should hold true for any facility, whether it is on the National Priorities List (NPL) or not.

• The information dissemination and exchange process must be consistent with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) principles, providing full disclosure of available information. Classification of information on the basis of national security concerns should not be used to bar the flow of relevant cleanup information where security/classification issues no longer exist. Such information should be declassified.

In addition to the above principles, the Committee recommended three specific actions in the Interim Report, including:

• developing agency dissemination policies;

• encouraging public stakeholders to portray accurately the draft status of documents or other preliminary information that they receive in draft form; and

• establishing a central point of contact within agencies for assisting in disseminating information.

Continuing Problems

The Committee reaffirms the importance of the principles and recommendations regarding information dissemination originally stated in the Interim Report. The members generally applaud the changes that have occurred in the past years allowing and even encouraging citizens to play more active and dynamic roles in the federal facility cleanup decision-making process. However, in identifying continuing problems with information dissemination, the Committee recognizes that this is only one, albeit important, component of an overall community involvement program. In the following recommendations, the Committee addresses the range of general issues regarding community involvement efforts in federal facility cleanups.

In current community involvement efforts, federal agencies often do not seek to include the full range of interested and affected parties and when they do, they sometimes do not provide appropriate or adequate information. This contributes to the continued mistrust that exists among some public stakeholders. In particular, concerns include:

Community involvement programs have not consistently attempted to reach out to the full range of stakeholders, particularly communities of color, low-income communities, and in some cases local government officials; Federal agency personnel are not always aware that the information requirements of communities of color and low-income communities may be broader than those of the regulatory community and may include information needs on the entire range of environmental impacts of proposed actions, employment, business development, and educational opportunities;

Federal agencies do not always include local government decision makers early enough to ensure that local officials can identify issues of concern related to cleanup, downsizing and closure;

Public stakeholders often do not have the technical understanding of the issues and are not prepared for participation in public activities. This limited ability hampers the ability of public stakeholders to provide relevant substantive input that can influence the decisions being made;

• Public stakeholders cannot effectively participate in the decision-making process when the field offices and headquarters of agencies are not communicating effectively with one another;

• Public stakeholders, especially communities of color and low-income communities, often do not have sufficient resources to translate the information provided by federal agencies into forms and formats that are useful, easily understandable, and informative for effective participation in agency decision making;

• Some federal agencies continue to apply the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemptions in an overly broad and cautious manner. The withholding of an entire document because portions of it are confidential such as internal advice, recommendations and proposals fails to recognize that other portions containing factual information may not be exempted from release;

• In some cases, information dissemination programs and community involvement programs are perceived to be public-relations efforts designed to present the agencies' actions in the best light and to gloss over problems;

• The number of agency personnel with expertise in involving public stakeholders in the decision-making process is limited; and

• Where financial and personnel resources are constrained, community involvement programs may be disproportionately affected.

Recommendations

In addition to the recommendations proposed in the Interim Report and summarized above, the Committee recommends that federal agencies draft or revisit current policies and guidance documents directing community involvement activities to ensure that the following items are incorporated to address the above concerns.

I. Fundamentals of Community Involvement

The Committee recognizes that there are many different and viable mechanisms for effectively incorporating community concerns in the cleanup decision-making process. However, the Committee believes any community involvement effort must be:

• transparent;
• open;
• interactive;
• inclusive; and
• responsive.

For these characteristics to be truly effective, agencies need to develop a communications structure in which public concerns are communicated to both headquarters and field office levels. This structure should facilitate public stakeholder input into all levels of the decision-making process. Processes embracing these characteristics will encourage public support of cleanup decisions, and they are likely to lead to a more efficient and cost effective cleanup program.

II. Assess Current Community Needs

Community involvement guidance documents should encourage field staff to conduct assessments of public stakeholders' needs and communities' existing resources prior to initiating community involvement programs. Such efforts will help to ensure a proposed program is appropriate for the community and does not lead to overlap or waste in relation to other on-going public involvement efforts. During this assessment, public stakeholders have a responsibility to raise issues and concerns regarding their involvement in the cleanup process. Agencies must be willing to invest the resources and staff expertise necessary to conduct a proper assessment and to implement effective community involvement efforts.

III. Identify Public Stakeholders

Agency policy should direct field staff to actively seek out and solicit the full diversity of public stakeholders in communities and specifically incorporate information on the importance of and effective approaches for informing communities of color, low-income communities, and local governments.

General guidance from the headquarters of a federal agency should raise awareness regarding the importance of including a broader diversity of public stakeholders. However, Committee members warn against the potential for field staff to implement "cookie-cutter" community involvement programs. There is no good, single implementation program appropriate for all Latino/Chicano communities, all African-American communities, all Asian/Pacific Islander communities, or all tribal reservations. For example, the culture, history, and resources of the Yakama Indian Nation are so different from the Hopi Tribe that any generalizations regarding information exchange programs for Indian Nations are likely to be incorrect. Any guidance must stress the importance of field staff learning about and understanding the specific community at hand.

IV. Use Appropriate Methods to Provide Information to Public Stakeholders

Agency community involvement policies and guidance documents should encourage field staff to use diverse methods of communication. Potential approaches include:

• Utilizing local media outlets such as local cable TV access and government channels, newspapers, and local internet service providers to get citizens involved;

• Ensuring materials for public participation are culturally sensitive and relevant to the specific area, including providing information in appropriate languages and at a variety of scientific levels;

• Using local government and other institutional community involvement mechanisms (i.e., zoning meetings, environmental boards, public health departments, and citizen advisory boards and local re-use authorities) for information exchange regarding cleanup activities. Local governments can establish and maintain information repositories that make documents available to the public at the same time as they are made available to regulators;

• Designating locations for access to information appropriate and convenient for the affected communities, and make copies available for public stakeholders; and

• Applying FOIA exemptions narrowly; consistent with FOIA, any reasonably segregable portion of a document should be provided to the requesting stakeholder after deleting portions of the document which are exempt.

V. Communicate Economic Opportunities

Because the economic well being of communities is often integrally linked to its overall environmental health, appropriate agency guidance documents should encourage field staff to inform the local communities, including communities of color and low-income communities, of cleanup employment opportunities. At a minimum, guidance documents should direct staff to advertise such opportunities afforded by the cleanup effort, including the skills required and risks inherent in the opportunities. In addition, regulated and regulating agencies should provide notices of educational and scholarship opportunities in all relevant languages. Boxes 8 and 9 provide examples of ways that government agencies are working to inform communities of such opportunities.

VI. Future Use Planning and Institutional Controls

In Principle 11 in chapter 2, the Committee recognizes the relationship between cleanup and future land uses, and in those instances where federal land is to be transferred from federal ownership, the importance of maintaining institutional control when cleanup does not allow for unrestricted use. The Committee recognizes that the mechanisms for community involvement in determining future land use and its relationship to cleanup is an important issue. We reiterate the following recommendations regarding involving communities in this matter:

• For properties being transferred from federal ownership, the federal role in the determination of future land use is generally limited to a review of the determination made by the state, tribal or local authorities that will have the responsibility to make the determination. There should be the appropriate forms of stakeholder involvement in these state, tribal, or local government determination processes.

• When making cleanup decisions for properties remaining in federal ownership, cleanup advisory boards, local planning and reuse authorities, and the public stakeholders should be consulted about reasonably anticipated future use assumptions.

• Cleanup decisions that have previously taken into account the anticipated future use of properties remaining in federal ownership should be re-evaluated if the land is to be transferred. In this circumstance, previously made cleanup decisions may need to be reexamined in view of the land use selected by the state, tribal, or local authorities that will have jurisdiction over the land to be transferred.

• Federal land to be transferred that is not cleaned up to standards that would permit unrestricted use should be subjected to the appropriate institutional controls exercised by the transferor/transferee and/or appropriate state, tribal, or local authority (e.g., deed restrictions, zoning, physical controls, or monitoring for the life of the hazard).

Conclusion

In general, community involvement processes should provide opportunities for the general public both to get information about cleanup activities and to affect decisions. These efforts are an integral part of cleanup programs, and should be considered a basic cost of doing business. Community involvement efforts should reach out to the broadest range of stakeholders possible and seek their involvement through a variety of effective and innovative methods appropriate to their community.

One particularly effective method of involvement is to establish advisory boards at the community level for the purpose of actively educating and engaging a diverse set of stakeholders in the cleanup decision-making process. Such advisory boards can play a unique role in an overall community involvement process. Through these boards, community members and agency representatives are asked to commit to open and regular dialogue and work together to find ways of expediting the cleanup process. Because of the key role advisory boards have taken in enabling community involvement, the following chapter outlines recommendations for the establishment and operation of these boards. Although the Committee agrees that these boards play an important role in the community involvement process, the Committee emphasizes that such boards are only one component of the community involvement process and should be used to complement other involvement activities discussed in this chapter.