[CPEO-BIF] Brownfields Grant Guidelines - Comment

[Emery Graham <egraham@ci.wilmington.de.us>]

-

One of the most glaring contradictions related to the Brownfields
Assessment Demonstration Program(BF)  is the lack of concurrance between
the costs associated with brownfields and the occurrence of potential
benefits from brownfields remediation, and, between who bears the costs
and who receives the benefits of brownfield removal. The citizens
living in the brownfields area are incurring the costs in the immediate
term.

The PRP's are receiving the benefits of cost avoidance schemes. Current
BF program evaluations suggest: 1) when the sites are being developed,
the residents of the brownfield area don't receive any benefits from the
projects's development and aren't indemnified for their losses due to
the negative effects of the brownfields and 2) the residents of the
brownfields area aren't the investors in subsequent brownfield site
developments and aren't the recipients of the majority of jobs created
by the new development. Prior studies, e.g., Urban Institutes,
Brownfields Impact on Development, suggest that there's an upper limit
to the net benefits derived from developing a brownfield when compared
to developing a greenfield in the same locale for a
similar purpose. In large part the marginal differences derive from a
positive local legislative climate and a hospitable local
community, i.e., marketplace. If the BF program doesn't modify it's
program logic and trajectory to account for these research findings it
is not likely to meet very much success. The following comments are
offered as a means to begin to modify EPA's  (a health and safety
program agency) approach to prosecuting an economic and community
development program.

The public in the BF recipient's locale is currently experiencing the
costs of brownfields. The PRP's and landowners are not spending their
capital to remove the health and safety dangers and other public costs
associated with the potential brownfield. The EPA is not using the laws
to force PRP compliance with the Federal statutes. The potential
benefits of brownfield development will not occur until sometime in the
undefined future. Unless some action is taken to reduce the immediate,
and growing, public costs of brownfields, costs now being borne at the
local level,  in the immediate and near term, the local public climate
is not likely to be conducive to the successful promotion of brownfield
development. The social cost multiplier effect of increased public
knowledge is demonstrated by the increase in negative social value of
brownfields resulting from increased public awareness of life, health,
and safety threats and dangers generated by brownfields in densely
populated residential areas. This increased awareness is a foreseeable
by product of effective brownfield community education programs and
program message promulgation. The reasonable local impacts of this
increased public awareness is the exercise of public pressure to place
the costs of brownfields on the PRP's.

EPA should require Brownfield cooperative agreement (BF) recipients to
use cooperative agreement funds for the purpose of producing and
implementing an organizational "health and safety program," if one is
not in effect at the time of agreement approval. A large percentage,
approaching 100%,  of Brownfield (BF) cooperative agreement recipients
do not have a health and safety program that complies with CFR 40
Section 311 and CFR 29 Section 1910.120.

The Brownfields "health and safety program" is to be distinguished from
a "site health and safety plan" primarily by the fact that the site
health and safety plan applies to the specific location of a funded
activity and the health and safety program applies to the organization
that has accepted funding and responsibility to carry out EPA authorized
activities. Recipients should be supplied with the information available
at OSHA's Brownfields Health and Safety website as part of their
application instructions.

In cases where the Brownfield cooperative agreement recipients are
located in relatively densely populated areas, the general public's
potential exposure to toxic substances is increased by the
implementation of brownfield assessment and remediation activities.
Additionally the employees in recipient organizations, along with the
general public, are denied the benefits of the EPA and OSHA regulations
promoting protection of life, health, and safety if there is no OSHA
compliant health and safety program implemented by organizations
involved in BF programs. BF funds are paid out of funds authorized under
CERCLA and hence must comply with the statutory and regulatory
obligations related to the expenditure of those funds.

Given the relationship between stakeholder participation and site
development, EPA should require all cooperative agreement
recipients include a plan to catalog and involve potentially responsible
parties(PRP) in community education and involvement activities. PRP's
represent an untapped source of development resources that need to be
kept in touch with the evolving technologies related to insurance
archaeology, Certified Capital Corporations, local legislative
mechanisms to empower litigation related research,  and evolving public
health technology and research in the areas of psychological impacts of
living in toxic waste impacted residential areas. Because EPA has failed
to emphasize the importance of PRP involvement, there has been no effort
to build relationships between waste site owners, local legislatures,
and local waste site area residents. This failure has allowed continued
misinformation to exist at a time when collaboration between
stakeholders is proving to yield productive remediation outcomes that
provide a much higher public utility than remediation decisions that
only reflect a skewed and disjoint decision process.

Because the success of a BF agreement recipient is measured by the
number of sites assessed and sites remediated, the impacts of the work
effort to produce these outcomes are not appropriately recognized or
accounted for in the BF process. Specifically the psychological impact
of living in waste contaminated residential areas, on the poor, African
American, elderly, under 7 years of age, high risk populations are not
addressed in the BF program. It has become obvious that the effect
of revealing the content, duration, and extent of contamination
impacting the aforementioned populations has a predictable and
measurable impact on the mental health of these at risk populations.
ATSDR has implemented a number of training programs  and conducted a
number of reviews on the psychological effects of living in hazardous
waste impacted communities. Mental health professionals have concluded
that one of the most harmful mental states is that of feeling helpless
and powerless to protect ones self and family from the dangers and
threats of toxic waste in the living environment. As a result of this
finding I suggest that BF funds be required to be used to expand
community education activities to include training on public health
based preventive measures that residents of toxic waste contaminated
residential areas can use to reduce or prevent the potential harms of
the toxins in their brownfield environments.

Submitted by:
Emery Graham
800 French St.
Wilmington, DE 19801
302-578-3106
egraham@ci.wilmington.de.us

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
CPEO: A DECADE OF SUCCESS.  Your generous support will ensure that our 
important work on military and environmental issues will continue.  
Please consider one of our donation options.  Thank you.
http://www.groundspring.org/donate/index.cfm?ID=2086-0|721-0