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Meetings: CIC | |||||||||||||||
Citizens Information CommitteeMinutes of Public MeetingJanuary 16, 1997 Attendees: Dan Hopkins, EPA Meeting called to order 7:10 pm. Minutes of December meeting were approved. Ombudsman - Bob Martin Dan Hopkins [DH]: We have had several calls with Mr.. Martin. He is planning to come to Bloomington from the 27th through the 29th of January. I have given him the names of those who expressed an interest in speaking to him, Dennis Williamson, George and Sally Hegeman, and Mike Baker. But I have not arranged the meetings, Mr. Martin's office will take care of arranging the meetings. These meetings are prior to a public meeting. Mitch will send out Mr. Martin's number and the dates of his visit. Winston-Thomas John Langley [JL]: The IDNR has rejected our proposal to build a chain link fence [in the flood plain] around the newly discovered area of contamination [across Clear Creek]. We will resubmit the proposal using a 4x4 or 6x6 inch grid, but we must talk to our contractors first to find out what is available. The DNR modeled the chain-link option, and just felt it would catch too much debris. This larger weave is usually for farm use, and comes only in 4 foot heights, so we will look at adding strings of barb wire at the top. Lemon Lane DH: We have gotten back some preliminary data from the Lemon Lane sampling. Westinghouse has gotten their data back, but EPA has not gotten its data back, I assume the delay is because of the holidays. Westinghouse's data is preliminary, but it does indicate that there are areas of contamination, discrete hot spots. I know there may be some errors in this data, and I have just gotten the data in tabular from. We will have to plot it on our site map, and add our data when it comes in. Mike Baker: [MB]: Didn't EPA also test in areas that were not believed to be hot spots? DH: Yes, but the data has not come to us yet. We have had several meetings on ecological and human health risk assessments. This has taken more discussion than we had hoped, but I expect that we will be able to settle on a plan fairly soon to assess risk. You know that we have done some ecological sampling, but the methodology for looking at that data has not been settled on yet. MB: Is true that Earth Tech has hired a risk assessment person who has already moved to Bloomington, and has the State hired anyone yet? Resa Ramsey [RR]: The State has contracted Versar, Inc of Springfield, Virginia, and Versar has subcontracted two persons to work on the job. They also have an office in Cincinnati. They came on board on December 11, 1996 DH: You should know that the EPA is not using Earth Tech's risk assessors at this point, and I don't know if we will be able to in future. We are using EPA people, our in-house ecologists, as well as one of our national ecological risk assessors out of Edison, New Jersey, who attended our last meeting. MB: So the person who has moved here for Earth Tech will not be used by EPA? DH: The contracts for regional help on Superfund sites is on a three year rotation. The contracts are region wide, not just for these sites. Earth Tech was a prime contractor on the last contract, and they will not be for the next contract. So I have to phase out the old contract and begin the new, so I don't want to begin something new with them right now. MB: We [COPA] have been doing a search for risk assessment and karst professionals on the Internet. We received dozens of resumes from professionals ready to work on ecological and human health risk assessments. We had developed a short list of the most likely candidates. Of those the State hired one of the best, and we are quite happy that they did so [even though we could not them hire them]. And the people hired by Earth Tech also had great qualifications, so we are encouraged that some of the parties are using such well qualified people. We would like to offer the use of our list to any of the parties, we are checking backgrounds and credentials now. There may be specific tasks that are needed and we could help pinpoint the right contractor for the job. If any of the parties were to need help in financing the use of a specific contractor, COPA could piggyback some of its TAG money for this. Say the State has a contractor who is strong in Ecological Risk assessment, but not as strong in Human Health Risk Assessment. Perhaps we could then hire a health risk assessor, and we could merge the two sets of data, rather than each party hiring separate contractors, we could achieve some synergistic affect. DH: I have the data for the monitoring wells, but not the residential wells around Lemon Lane. I don't have it plotted yet, just booklets filled with data. Earth Tech is working to put it all together in a single booklet form that would make it accessible, but that is not completed yet. A copy of this will be put in the repositories next week. Of interest is one of the sites south of the landfill in Valhalla Cemetery, and it shows high levels of trichloroethylene. We have noticed that at the ICC Springs it shows up sporadically at about 10 ppb, and here it is showing up from 55-110 PPM, so there does seem to be something going on there. Trichloroethylene is the only contaminant that shows up in any quantity other than PCBs. MB: Are there any results from Westinghouse's berming project on the SW corner of the Landfill? DH: No. We need to do water flow studies, and no water is flowing as it is all ice and snow. Griffin Property RR: I am out of the loop on this one, it is not in my department. I know letters have gone out and there is some discussion going on, but I am not involved and do not know what is happening Michael List: [ML] How could we find out more? RR: I keep reminding them that I get questions about this as these meetings, but I have not received any updates. Perhaps you could contact the attorney assigned to this Catherine Gibbs. PCB and Dioxin Testing - Clear Creek Fish We had some confusion about how the fish were divided between us for dioxin testing, and Westinghouse, who did the PCB testing. The fish we got were 55-70 grams, and they are too little to use, so we will not sample them. We need to go back and get bigger fish, the idea being that bigger fish will actually have enough flesh to filet, so that we can get an idea of what people might be eating. A 50 or 70 gram fish is just not enough for someone to eat. Also bigger fish will have had time to accumulate and store the dioxin. So using results from these small fish will not really give us what we want to know about dioxin. The PCB samples from the bigger fish will take a while to be validated, but they got good samples. Mitch Rice (MR): Dan Sparks had some concerns about the fish caught at the last two sites. DH: I was at one of those sites. The problem was that we were working just a storm came through, and the water was turbid. We could shock the fish, but netting them was quite difficult as we could not see them. So there were not enough big fish, and we will have to go back out to collect additional samples. Neal's Landfill RR: The high flow dye tracer study came in about two weeks ago, and I have passed it on to my technical support staff [a geologist and a chemist] for review. The low flow study is not ready yet. ML: What about the plans and schedule for remediation at Neal's Landfill? DH: We are revising the entire schedule. We have committed to the Court that we are going to have a new schedule to submit at our Feb 13th status report to the Court. We just sat down today and started to work out a new schedule. Project Managers are to meet tomorrow, and we will continue to work on this. The schedule will have to lengthen. We have widely different viewpoints amongst the parties, and working this out takes time. We hope that there will be some efficiency in working on future sites by adopting some of the procedures worked out for sites already done. Specifically the issue is what the components are and how they are to be conducted. I think once we get past Winston Thomas and Lemon Lane things will move along faster. MR: Is this delay just for Neal's or all the sites? DH: All the sites are interrelated.. We thought we could carry on several different tasks at once, but it became evident that we needed to concentrate on just a few topics and get them done. The meetings concerning the ecological sampling seemed to take forever, but we are about on schedule. But Neal's got left out and is behind by several months. The Parties intend to hire a facilitator, and should have this person selected by the end of the month. We have the job description worked out, but we almost need a facilitator to decide on who to hire to facilitate. The person has to be agreed to by all parties, and paid by all parties. The payment scheme is not an equal payment by all parties, but all will contribute, hopefully ensuring neutrality on the part of the facilitator. We are hoping that a facilitator will help move the process along on technical and perhaps also management issues. George Hegeman [GH]: So the facilitator will have some decision making powers? DH: No, the service they will provide is to keep our project meetings on point. Issues will be identified for a quick solution, we have had problems with issues that could not be resolved at our level. Commitments will be made and honored, and if not the facilitator will take it to another level. Dave Novak [DN]: At some of the federal meetings [between different agencies with differing procedures and agendas] they have a facilitator at all of the meetings. These facilitators have lists of action items, and they run through the lists, and write notes and reports that keep the group on track. It works great. GH: What is the incentive for the facilitators? It would seem there is a built in incentive to drag out the process. Perhaps they are paid by the job, not by the meeting or hour? Electronic Format Standardization ML: Last meeting we talked about standardizing document formats with the Adobe PDF format that can be used by anyone for free. RR: I asked Westinghouse about this at the last technical meeting, and they said they would look into it, but it was unlikely because of the expense they just went through upgrading their software. I asked internally of my contact in my office and he said: "No, go away, the State is not going to do that." There is not much more I can say. He didn't say: "No, go away," he just basically said that other people had asked about it and so far it doesn't appear they are going to do that, because of other things that office is working on. MR: Well could we at least find out what format Westinghouse will be using in future. If they have just upgraded, perhaps they will use this new format consistently, and we could get software to read what they give us, if we knew this it would help quite a bit. It is hard when we get documents that need to be analyzed quickly, but we can not even print it out for lack of the right software, RR: It is not just Westinghouse, it is their subcontractors. MR: Well Westinghouse carries a mighty big stick, it seems they could easily tell their subs to provide their data in a specific format, after all they are paying for it. It seems ridiculous that we can not get information because a subcontractor for Westinghouse uses some arcane format. DH: This is a problem with EPA subcontractors as well. MR: It seems the government parties could maybe get together and set a standard that contractors are encouraged to conform to. DH: We can not mandate that they use one format or another, but I think that this issue will be worked on in the future.. MR: Ok, but you could let them know what you would prefer now, or at least if we could find out what format they will be using, we [COPA] can get the software and convert to PDF for others to see. DH: Even between government agencies there is no standard, we all have separate systems as do our subcontractors. JL: Thank God for fax machines, we have real problems getting documents attached to email. Things are not perfect for us in the cyber world. CIC Structure ML: Iris Kiesling is no longer with the City, and is now with the County. Though John Langley works for the City, it may be good to get someone on this body from the Council or other arm of City Government. MB: It may be time to restructure or change the format of this group. There is movement now by the Parties at Lemon Lane and Winston Thomas, and the focus in the past has been incinerator issues, and you should have done this issues - history - and if we were still moving towards those historical remedies or non-remedies, we would be having these sorts of discussions, they would be more meaningful. But if we are going to be discussing risk assessment and sampling because the Parties have agreed with the community to an extent and decided to move in this direction. We need to find a way to structure the CIC so that we don't spend the whole time dredging up the history. I think that has happened a lot, and I think a lot of people are unwilling to participate because they don't want to get into the same old discussions and arguments that we've all been involved in for six years. It doesn't mean that shouldn't be done here, well maybe that should be done in a different format. But if we want to get into a serious discussion of Risk Assessment at Lemon Lane, and we spend two and half hours during the CIC time arguing that we don't think there is a risk assessment, an RIFS, issues that may need to be discussed, but in a different arena for people who want to, but I think you are going to be hard pressed to get new people to come. How are we going to get past some of this old baggage and get into a meaningful discussion if we are hammering people with these old issues? I think these issues can be discussed but I don't think it should be in the CIC. ML: So what you are talking about is limiting access to people who are not members of the committee, because that is the source of the people who want to jump in and talk about issues that are essentially dead horses. MB: Well, I don't think you can limit it. Companies have mission statements that say, this is what we are about. and maybe we need to restructure the CIC so that we say just what we are about, that we outline in writing what we are and that we want more public involvement. GH: The CIC has always been a bit schizophrenic in that it has an educational role, and also is the community memory and information exchange about PCBs. And when we err on of our educational role and allow . lots of public participation, we sometimes lose out on some of the other aspects of the CIC mission. Maybe we should have public forums that are separate the more technical meetings. MR: Correct me if I'm wrong, but at a number of the early CIC meetings it was stated the CIC existed for the EPA to give information to the community. It is true that members of the public did give valuable information at the CIC, but the purpose was for the EPA to keep the community informed, am I correct? DN: I was told when I took over from John [Pericone] that the information was to go to the members of the CIC, and they were to take it back to their respective groups who would talk over these issues and bring it back to the CIC. There was then extra discussion, and then you bring back the meat and potatoes, and then you would have some sense of finality. Maybe we got away from that a little, I don't know. MB: The CIC has evolved, and maybe had a little more input than was intended Maybe we need help it evolve some more. Now that we have movement on these two sites, we need to spend our limited time talking about these issues, not arguing about the past. MR: Well, the last such meeting was not a CIC event. As I remember it from the early meetings of this group, the CIC did not take comments from the public, only those sitting on the Committee could speak. GH: Maybe we need to have a public forum every three or four meetings, and address public questions, or even raise questions to enhance the dialog. This could give us meetings to advance our educational role, and meetings address the more technical issues. MR: We haven't been taking information to our groups except through BCAT and the BBS/Website, [as there are few representatives of groups at our meetings.] We have never had a meeting where the CIC fielded questions from the public. DN: In the latest issue of New Directions, which is currently on hold, there is an article on the CIC. In those interviews, someone expressed the opinion that these meetings are something that is strictly run by the EPA, and they thought that was wrong. MR: I have always thought that the CIC was not for citizen input, only for giving information to the public. DN: Well, it is and it isn't. It should be five parties jointly. MR: So are you saying that since New Directions this is what the CIC is? [all five parties]. I don't think this was ever stated to the CIC. DN: Right. MB: The problem with the New Directions is that it is, rightly or wrongly, widely perceived to be dominated by Westinghouse's influence. It gives a false impression to the public that all the parties are going the same direction, when in reality they are bringing in a facilitator. The CIC is EPA dominated because the County doesn't come, the City had not participated in an official way for a long time. So the EPA, and the State are the only steady participants. ML: Dan and Resa have the information, I don't understand what is inappropriate about us getting it from them. DN: Does it serve a purpose beyond the six or seven people here? MB: I think the CIC serves a purpose. We may not always get the information the way we want it, the community has had input through the CIC. But I think there is a feeling in the community that there is a lack of communication. So maybe we need to look at some way to further the process of getting the information to the community. We need to concentrate on cleaning up the contamination we have, not fight about past mistakes. GH: One of the problems is that this has very technical issues and maybe all that the average citizen wants to know is whether he can drink his water, or whether you can go to the playground and kick up dust when you slide into home. But you must keep it on a technical level in order to get the answer right. ML: I am a little mystified by what you think the problem is with the CIC? Is it that we do not have enough interaction with the community at large, or that we have too much interaction with the community at large, and this bogs down the process? MB: I don't think we have a broad communication with the community. We communicate with each other, and with the same people who show up when there is a hot issue, but I don't think that there is a sense in the community that the CIC is a group that has much input on the issues for the community, so that we could have some sort of faith in the process. DN: Perhaps you need to publish some sort of mission statement. Put something in the paper, letting people know you are here, and what you are trying to do. ML: Who is complaining about this, and why are they not here? This committee was composed for representatives of a large number of groups. Where are these people? They no longer participate. BCAT is there for anyone who is interested. MR: Maybe we need to be more pro active about letting people know what is going on. Perhaps we could publish a summary of the CIC meetings in the HT, just to let people know we are here, and what we are doing. ML: We used to have press coverage. But two things happened, we had a lot of grassroots yelling and screaming, and people got tired of hearing the same old issues brought up. There is a certain portion of the community that will not be satisfied except that PCBs never having been here in the first place. The participation of those people alienated the representatives of the groups. GH: Some of the more successful CIC events have been public meetings. Abramovitz from GE and Westinghouse came to meetings over at the Biology building, and we've had speakers on remediation technologies. These things were well attended by the public. An interesting public forum can generate a lot of public attention. DN: The new politically correct name for this committee is the Citizens' Advisory Board, but I have been hesitant to change the name. ML: I would resist the idea of a committee that is not empowered to advise to have the name advisory board. DN: Well, Headquarters has issued these new guidelines, and you can see what they would really want and what we are doing here are different. Larime Wilson (LW): I know you had about thirty organizations originally, and a number of them who were seated would not come the meetings, saying they were a hoax. I think you should go back to these groups and ask them if they want to sit on the CIC. I don't think Inpirg has been asked to join this committee. Many of the people in these groups don't even know that the CIC exists. Second I think you need to contact the papers, especially the Herald Times. Some of the issues that come up here would be interesting to the press, if they knew about it. The HT doesn't even publish notice of the CIC meetings. BCAT is good, but not everyone watches it. You need press coverage. ML: The problem is that it is not very sexy news. This is dry and technical information, not juicy news. MB: I think this is a very good idea. I'll talk to Bob Saltzberg about it this Tuesday. A lot of what the paper publishes is dry. The truth is that you write the press release, and they print it. ML: The question is who is going to do this? We have no resources. MB: We have the minutes, we could make a summary and send it to the paper. DH: How useful is this information to you, is it worth taking back to your respective organizations? GH: Well I can tell you that it is quite useful to take back to the Health Board the information I got tonight about the need for a facilitator. MB: There was the change in the timetable. LW: There was fish sampling and trichloroethylene in the Cemetery. These are things people want to know about. ML: Well that is what this meeting is for. People can come here, or watch it on BCAT. LW: Ten thousand people read the HT, do you want 10,000 people to come down here? ML: No, but they can watch BCAT for instance. The HT has apparently decided that this sort of news is not what readers want to read about. MB: Well they don't make all the decisions, the public calls them up and says why not cover the ice rink story or whatever. We need to call them up and tell them to cover us. ML: I call them every month. JL: I was talking to a beat reporter about why PCB news is not as well covered as before. It is perceived as no longer in the center, but on the fringes of the news. MB: Wouldn't it be nice if they had a report about the fish sampling, and maybe a guest editorial about why we are doing fish sampling, and the whole idea of risk assessments. Start informing people about what is going on before it happens. DN: We thought we had a total information package, dissemination through the CIC, public meetings, and the New Directions, the single and joint party news releases would be a full picture. Maybe we erred in being so airtight in getting so much information out. CIC is not intended to get the full spectrum of detail. MR: Could I get a clarification of what how you guys [EPA] see the CIC? I hear a couple of different visions of the CIC is about. Do we want more groups to join us, or do we want to move the information to the community effectively, the two might not be exactly the same. DN: The most gratifying meetings we have are the ones where we can take back some input from people who have information and viewpoints to offer. We need some feedback to know that what we are doing is worthwhile. MR: This different than my understanding of the CIC DN: What do you think is the use of the CIC. MR: Well, I think that the truth can set you free, and that more you are able to bring information to light the better. As we learn more and bring this to public consciousness, we as a community are better able to come to equitable solutions. We have been able to get the info to the community fairly effectively so far through the BBS and now the Website, but I would suggest that perhaps we have a second CIC mailing list. Over 40,000 people have access to email here. We would have the original for CIC business. But this list could have the final minutes, news about pcbs, updates about local happenings, etc. MB: Do you think it would be good to draft a letter to some of these groups saying this is what we do, here are some of the issues we are discussing, and ask them to join us. I think if we ask some people who have been on the committee to come back, and they knew that it was not going to be arguments, they would come back. ML: We have our original model of group heads taking information to their respective groups, and we can send a summary of our minutes to the paper, and we can see what happens. MB: I think some of these public meetings need some different faces, not always the same group. DH: It is worthwhile to get more people involved, I think. I feel there is a segment that feels the CIC is not useful because it does not make decisions. But I value the feedback to help me do what I do. We characteristically have a hard time understanding what the community really wants. You are supposed to get feedback from the community, but who is the community, the people who come to the meetings? My sense is that you have a better handle on the community sense from your groups than I do. DN: If you want a list of the original members, you can ask Sona for it. MB: The Chamber has a list of community groups, and we could go through and figure out which groups might want to join. DH: I would hope that you get balance in the groups you invite. MB: If Mitch does a summary, would the process be to have Mike and Dan look it over? DH: I would do that. GH: I like the idea of two reviewers. DN: Now Mitch has been doing a very creditable job, but he may find out like Sona did that the job can take longer and longer, the minutes can come out later and later. If you do this, the summary should come out fairly quickly, with in the first two weeks. MR: No problem. ML: We could add to this summary an appeal to groups to join the CIC. MR: Should this appeal have people contact Michael, or should we use the COPA address and phone number? Would this seem improper for COPA to be the contact. DN: Not if you let people know it is because of the EPA TAG grant that you are able to fulfill this function. MB: We could go on WGTC talk radio on a day that the CIC meets, and talk about what we do. If the HT hears about us on the air, perhaps they will consider us more newsworthy. RR: I have three different points here. One, I think we need to get the mission statement done so that we can let people know what we are doing. Second, if the group gets too big, it can become crazy too. Third, when coming to a public meeting, I like to know what is going to be going on at the meeting. I think maybe people do not come to the meetings because they do no know what is going to be presented. If you keep to the agenda, then it is possible keep the communications focused. If someone asks a question that is not on the agenda, then try to answer it at the end of the meeting, or find another way to answer it. DN: A good example is this discussion here, we started this at ten after, and now it is fifty minutes later. The timekeeper would have cut this off. This is what a facilitator does, keep the discussion on track, cut off discussion when it gets off track, set action items for the next meeting. MR: That is fine for a decision making body that needs to get certain things done, which is not the case here. When an issue gets deep, like it has here, it is good that we can spend some discussion time on it. DN: This is the type of instance that Dan and I just love, we are having a great dialog ML: I don't mind being criticized, no problem. All through this process, one of the major gripes this community has had is that the public has not been allowed to speak, that decisions are made in private, the public's interests have not been heard. Now if this conflicts with the streamlined agenda, then it's my impression that it is most important that the public not feel that it is going to be squelched when they come to one of these meeting. It has been my task to undertake, and perhaps I failed at that task. However it is my feeling that whenever possible it is important to let people say what they want to say. I can change this style of running the meetings, but this is not a corporate board, we do not necessarily have to get from point A to point B. We are here for the benefit of the community, and if the community comes in, I have always erred on the side of letting people talk longer that the people on this committee would like me to let them talk. RR: What I was suggesting is that you release an agenda prior to the meeting. ML: We have come to depend on electronic communications to disseminate our information. It is natural and easy for Mitch and I to use email to communicate, and it is the preferable method. When the EPA was funding this, we could afford the paper and postage costs to send the agenda and minutes by mail, but this is no longer the case. So I emailed you an agenda, but you did not get it, it is not your fault. We have no resources to print and post. MB: I think you have been doing a great job of chairing these meetings, letting people talk, and asking them to stop. DH: I agree. It is a very difficult job. RR: How about sending a tentative agenda with the digested meeting notes? Then people could submit ideas for the agenda. ML: This has happened before, but not often. I am open to it. My method for setting the agenda is that I get the minutes from Mitch, and every promise that is made at that meeting goes into agenda for the next meeting. GH: The ranting that takes place is usually idiosyncratic, and I don't really mind it. These are really unhappy people, and they need to rant. It is perfectly human behavior and understandable. It may derail the meeting a bit, but a little ranting might be good for the blood circulation.. But I think you do a good balanced job of running the meetings. New Directions DN: The pending issue of New Directions is on hold. It may not be published at all. There are some problems with everyone agreeing. Next Meeting Thursday, March 6, 1997, 7:00 pm, Showers Complex |
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