Re: RAB Bylaws

[dmiller@pm0.bu.edu]

From: dmiller@pm0.bu.edu (Dick and Jill Miller)

Hi, Jeff Green, and the rest of CareerPro@igc.org:
I think that your posting affects most of us. I'm Dick Miller, a 
citizen member of the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Command (SSCOM) RAB at 
U.S. Army Natick Laboratories in Natick, Massachusetts. Our RAB is not 
far from yours, and some agency members may sit on both our boards.
Here, we may be about to resolve a half-year debate over the same 
Citizen Charter problem. The Army provided us with a long and detailed 
draft wording which we found overly restrictive. We've provided an 
alternate wording which the Army apparently finds under-restrictive. We 
already have asked the Massachusetts and EPA appointees for their 
agencies' comments on our wording, and the Army is the only one which 
has expressed unhappiness. We hope to get its approval at the next 
monthly RAB meeting, which is this Thursday night.
Our proposed Citizen Charter wording is unusually brief:
"The RAB will investigate activities that pertain to the contamination 
of the facility, among which are those noted in the NPL dated May 1994." 
Simple, wot? The Army no longer is pushing for the original, detailed 
draft, but it has been pressing us to substitute "as" for "among which 
are those".
A little background on our own RAB:
The problem at "NLabs" is not as visible as many. We're drinking 
contaminated water, and we're studying why and what to do about it.
NLabs is on a point projecting into Lake Cochituate (17 miles west of 
Boston, once its first public water supply, now a major state park and 
the major recreational lake in eastern Massachusetts). NLabs also is 
less than a mile south of Natick's major public drinking-water wells. 
Fifty feet under NLabs, areas of the groundwater are contaminated with 
the carcinogens PCE and TCE, and these pollutants probably are moving 
slowly toward those town wells. Neither the actual source material nor 
the point of insertion is clearly understood despite much past and 
on-going research. The scope of the problem and proposed remediation 
are thus items we cannot yet measure, and may pose major dangers and/or 
expenses to our community. Yet the NPL would limit us, for one example, 
to concerns within the NLabs boundaries.
With all due respect to bureaucratic desires to contain the damage, we 
believe we are taking the correct course. Until we understand the total 
problem and its likely solutions, we don't want to limit our community's 
interest to the Army's current preferences. Some of the recent postings 
in this thread indicate that we are not alone in this concern.
I hope this helps.
--Dick Miller
cc: Jeff Green, Westover AFB RAB <isisGU@hampshire.edu>
 Marco Kaltofen, Citizen Co-Chair of NLabs RAB <Kaltofen@aol.com>
 
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