Comments of RAB Workshop

[Merv Tano <mervtano@netcom.com>]

Posting from mervtano@netcom.com (Mervyn L. Tano)

Following is my response to David Keiths comments re the RAB Workshop 
in San Francisco last weekend. Lenny suggested I post it to all. This 
is it with some slight editorial changes.

Mr. Keith,

I appreciated reading your observations regarding last weekend's 
RAB workshop. I thought it might be worth while to expand on my 
suggestion that the Restoration Advisory Boards "dance with the devil".

My sense is that the RABs are confronted by three sets of issues. 
First, are those issues related to the immediate environmental 
restoration activities taking place on DOD facilities. These are the 
issues that the Department of Defense wants addressed and the basis for 
establishing the RABs in the first place. Second, are the conversion or 
future use issues. These are, of course, directly related to the first 
order environmental restoration issues, but in the main, the Department 
of Defense would like to keep these two sets of issues 
compartmentalized.

If we use the military metaphor, these first two sets of issues are 
battles or skirmishes in the present classic war. My point is this: we 
are not engaged in a war in the classic sense, but are instead, engaged 
in a long-term, peoples' liberation movement. The environmental 
restoration activities at Fort Ord will someday be completed. The 
Rocky Mountain Arsenal will also be eventually environmentally 
restored. However, these will be replaced by other problems, other 
environmental restoration issues, other "enemies" if you will. Your 
and your community's immediate concern is Westover AFB, but your 
children's may be an army facility in Georgia, a refinery in Texas or a 
nuclear reactor in Arizona. 

The technology of public participation you and other RAB members are 
developing today can be used by your children 10 years from now and by 
my grandchildren 20 years hence. Do the RAB members need to be 
geohydrologists, chemists or other technical experts? I don't believe 
so. I do believe that they should be or become experts in public 
participation, however. At present, RAB members have access to 
technical consultants to decipher reports and studies. This is a fine 
tactic for today. I do not think that it is an appropriate tactic ten 
years from today. At that time I would like that technical consultant 
to be my daughter who works for a community-based environmental 
restoration organization and the project manager at the Air Force 
Center for Environmental Excellence to be your son.

I think that the third set of issues faced by RABs is one of long-term 
organizational and community development. I think that the question 
the RABs have to confront is this: "Are the RABs ephemera, the 
artifacts of which, fifty years from now, will be found in archives and 
the activities of which are memorialized in dissertations and learned 
journals, or will the RABs live on as an integral part of a new 
paradigm for decision-making in the United States. The point of my 
presentation last Saturday was to encourage RAB members to choose the 
latter option. I do not underestimate the magnitude of the challenges 
facing RAB members today, but I encourage them to create some space and 
time to consider the longer term issues and to think about establishing 
community-based and community-directed technical, advocacy 
organizations that can help us fight tomorrow's war. I am not 
suggesting the establishment of independent organizations that pursue 
their own agenda. The challenge is to create and operate technical 
organizations that are directed by and responsive to community-based 
organizations and community needs.