REGIONAL FORUM

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@igc.org>]

From: Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@igc.org>

A Report on the Regional Forum on Military Base Cleanup Technology
Lenny Siegel
October 7, 1996
On September 26-27, 1996, the Regional Forum on Military Base Cleanup 
Technology brought more than 300 participants to Millbrae California 
for two full days of talks and discussions. Sponsored by several 
agencies and organizations, the event was an outgrowth of the Hazardous 
Waste Generic Technologies Working Group of the Federal Advisory 
Committee to Demonstrate On-Site Innovative Technologies (DOIT).
The forum had two principal goals:
* Draw lessons learned from the forum experience to develop a 
model to recommend to the Department of Defense (DOD) for implementing 
a regional stakeholder approach in other areas of the country.
* Elicit a broad-based multi-state regional perspective on 
military base cleanup technology needs and concerns, leading to an 
action plan and communication of the plan's recommendations to national 
policy and funding decision-makers.
Over the weeks to come, members of the forum planning committee will be 
preparing a report incorporating those lessons and recommendations. 
This brief, personal summary is designed to stimulate discussion while 
the report is being drafted.
Regional Stakeholder Interaction
For nearly three years the Department of Defense and its regulatory 
agencies have actively sought site-specific stakeholder involvement in 
the oversight of environmental restoration activities. Primarily 
through the formation of Restoration Advisory Boards (RABs) at more 
than 250 active, closing, and former installations, the military has 
provided the people most affected by contamination and cleanup the 
opportunity to learn about and influence local cleanup decisions. 
Though there is plenty of room for improvement, the RAB experiment is 
generally considered a success.
A handful of community representatives, such as myself, take part in 
state, regional, and national advisory committees, but there have been 
few efforts to bring the site-specific partnerships to a higher level. 
This forum deliberately brought together community members, military 
representatives, regulators, and the private sector from several 
Western states. Not only did pre-conference publicity target the full 
range of constituencies, but forum sponsors provided travel 
scholarships to RAB members from as far away as the north slope of 
Alaska. In addition, the schedule and format of the forum was designed 
to promote both formal and informal interaction among participants.
>From the reaction of participants as well as the evaluation forms 
submitted, it's clear that the forum was a resounding success. People 
felt good about being there. They learned. They were heard. They 
established working relationships with people from other constituencies 
and distant locations. Community representatives who have been active 
on the local level proved both hungry for and capable of taking part in 
discussions of national cleanup policy.
While some participants came from as far away as New Jersey and 
Tennessee - and there were key decision-makers from inside the DC 
beltway - forum sponsors demonstrated that inviting a primarily 
regional audience was a cost-effective way to promote discussions of 
national policy. The basic approach should be replicable in other 
regions, but perhaps it worked better on the west coast because it 
built upon a number of existing partnerships and networks. The forum 
report will profile some of the techniques which made the event more 
than a series of lectures and briefings.
Promoting Innovative Technology
Building upon the three-year deliberations of the DOIT working group, 
the forum sought ways to encourage the development, demonstration, and 
implementation of innovative cleanup technologies that would make 
cleanup cheaper, faster, safer, and better. Break-out sessions explored 
four types of obstacles to the use of innovative technologies: 
regulatory, contracting, market - the difficulty of commercializing 
technologies developed for federal facilities cleanup - and 
communications, and then each reported back at the forum's final 
plenary session. Participants found a need for a standardized protocol 
for evaluating new technologies. They determined that more resources 
must explicitly be devoted to technology demonstrations. They 
encouraged the use of independent technology "champions" to build 
support for promising technologies.
The tools for overcoming regulatory, contracting, and market obstacles 
exist today, but they are not used widely enough. In each area, 
speakers pointed the finger away from shortcomings in their own 
organizations, arguing that the key to success was improved 
communications. Not everyone agreed that the agencies have yet solved 
their problems, but better communications clearly would be a giant step 
forward in the effort to improve the utilization of innovative technologies.
The communications sessions highlighted significant efforts now 
underway to make information available easily, rapidly, and 
comprehensively. But many of the participants noted that communications 
is more than posting data on the World Wide Web. It requires that 
information be targeted and tailored to the audiences that need it. It 
also came out that communications among public stakeholders often 
overcome the bureaucratic stovepipes that handicap the exchange of 
ideas and information at hierarchical agencies. (Though event sponsors 
tried to invite, through their agencies, remedial project managers 
[RPMs] in the region, at least some of the RPMs who attended only found 
out about the forum from community members of their restoration 
advisory boards.)
Thus, efforts designed to open up innovative technology programs to 
local, regional, and national stakeholder involvement will not only 
build enthusiasm for those technologies - where appropriate - but they 
will facilitate the surmounting of the regulatory, contracting, and 
market obstacles that currently slow the acceptance of worthwhile 
technologies. Resources devoted to improving and strengthening 
stakeholder communications should pay off, not just for the neighbors 
of contaminated facilities, but for cleanup as a whole.