State & Local Public Involvement efforts

[Mark Flory <flory.mark@epa.gov>]

Good Morning!  My name is Mark Flory and I am an EPA employee in the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations. I've been waiting for the dialog to take off before weighing in, but it looks like we are off to a gentle start this morning so I thought I'd go ahead and throw some ideas out there.

I work on the State and Local Government Team and as such I am involved in many of EPA's efforts to reach out to State and Local agencies, state and local elected leaders, and national associations representing state and local governments. One big advantage I have in working with these groups is that they are fairly easy to identify, relatively speaking, and therefore to contact and solicit input from.  Conversely, ten years ago when I worked for EPA Region 9 SanFrancisco Office as a community Relations coordinator for Hazardouse waste storage and treatment sites, it was hard work finding all the interested members of the public.  We started with the easier to identify elected officials and the appointed agency officials/public servants.  But then we had to comb the newspapers and community bulletin boards to try and find local activity groups, clubs, etc that might be interested. All of these were surrogates for the "public" and specifically finding the private citizen who was interested proved our greatest challenge.

The long and the short of it was that the "public" was and is a hard group to pinpoint.  Our best success came, I think in using very small circulation local newspapers to get the word out that we were holding a meeting. In the article we would announce where we had established a repository of information, almost always at the local public libraries, where peopel could learn more about the issues.  This was not a perfect approach, but it produced the largest turnout for our public meetings. 

One other thing we did, was to try as much as possible to hold join meetings of the many state and local government agencies that would be involved in permitting a new hazardous waste processor.  In one case in California we identified five - six permits (I can't remember the exact number) that had to be issued, three by the state, two by the county and one by the city, for the project to go forward.  All had overlapping and intersecting timelines to boot.  So it helped the public immensely to consolidate some of the meetings into one so that their lives did not have to be given over completely to tracking the local permits. 

So the two biggest barriers I see to soliciting public involvement in EPA policies are 1) How to find interested members of the public; and 2) hopw to keep the bureaucratic process and stacks of information from overwhelming the private citizen who has limited time to participate in the discussion.  

I can say alot more on this but perhaps this is enough of a start for now.  I think many states, tribes and local governments aare familiar with these problems and would agree it can be hard to find your public and get them to the meeting.  I'd be interested in hearing what difference the internet has made.  Ten years ago I did not have that option readily available.