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Edited by
Sally Cole-Misch
and
Bruce Kirschner
Windsor, Ontario
January 1996
This document is composed of a roundtable discussion and selected presentations which were made during a conference to evaluate successful implementation strategies for Remedial Action Plans and to foster their transfer within the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem. The conference was held on July 25 through 27, 1995 in Racine, Wisconsin. It was sponsored by the International Joint Commission and the Keland Endowment Fund of The Johnson Foundation. It is hoped that these proceedings will assist in efforts to remediate environmental problems in the Areas of Concern in the Great Lakes Basin.
Presenters were asked to ensure their presentations contained two types of information: one,
very detailed "how to" information on the specific implementation strategies being presented;
and two, general information on what the presenters felt made their implementation strategies
successful? The purpose of the roundtable discussion was to synthesize the general
information contained in the presentations into statements of what is required for successful
implementation strategies.
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
The agency participants in their introductory outlook statements set the context for the workshop: In today's times of declining government dollars for RAP operation and implementation, how do the RAPs remain viable into the future? What is a RAP going to look like? How do we energize as we go into the future?
Answering these questions, using the information from the presentations, was the goal of the roundtable discussion.
To start the discussion, a tentative list called "Pillars of Successful Strategies" was developed. These "pillars" were developed from the material contained in the presentations.
The five "Pillars of Successful Strategies" (in no particular order of importance) were:
Workshop participants were asked to comment on these "pillars" as well as add any others that they felt had been missed. While there was agreement that these "pillars" were common elements in all the presentations, participants added other "pillars", including:
After discussion of these additional "pillars," participants started to make observations about an evolution of the RAP process that they had observed from the different presentations. In particular, participants noted:
Due to time constraints, a number of questions were raised that could not be addressed. It was recommended that another forum be found to discuss these questions. The questions included:
The meeting concluded with a specific recommendation:
Welcome and Introduction to Conference
Welcome by Richard (Dick) Kinch, The Johnson Foundation
Alice Chamberlin
Commissioner, United States Section
International Joint Commission
Welcome everybody. Thank you very much Dick. I think I can speak on everybody's behalf to thank you and Charlie, and The Johnson Foundation for your hospitality, for the opportunity to be here. This is a fascinating place. And I was looking through the information about Wingspread and The Johnson Foundation and I want you to know that we share your goals for a thoughtful, productive conference that is likely to have impacts on our future planning, and those are words that we take to heart. I also want to thank Bruce Kirschner for the time that he has spent organizing this conference. This is a challenging time for the Remedial Action Plan (RAP) process; and Bruce, your persistence in organizing this conference is very much appreciated.
When I look out at the table tonight and also at our list of participants I see that we have here the experts that we at the International Joint Commission (IJC) rely on for much of our work under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA). You are the people that we turn to, to lead our RAPs, you're the people who we turn to review our RAPs and many of you are active in organizing and advocating remediation efforts all across the basin. As experts in the RAP process, we're turning to you now for your input regarding the strategies that have made the RAPs a success. And I suspect that all of you as leaders in your community have other commitments to environmental activism or community activism and so we at the IJC really appreciate your time and your effort -- not only leading the RAPs, but in sharing information with others. It's a difficult time to envision the future of the RAP process; it's a challenging time. And the success that the GLWQA envisions, whether remediation of Areas of Concern (AOCs), is really contained in these smaller success stories -- smaller, if you will -- success stories that each of you have to tell. There's success stories about your ecosystems, about your rivers, your shorelines, your dunes. It's success stories about community cooperation, public advisory committees, partnerships and agreements. And this is how we need to measure the RAP process. The RAP process, and indeed the GLWQA, is being measured -- it is being scrutinized -- from every corner. And so we need to make sure that people understand how we measure success and what it really means in the basin.
So we look forward to this conference to hear from you. We want to share the information that you have and we intend to do that at our biennial meeting in Duluth. We hope that many of you will be participating there. But that really is only a first step. And so, other ideas that you have for communicating your successes and for energizing the RAP process in the basin are ones that we want to hear. So I'm looking forward to the next few days and I'll turn the meeting back to you, Bruce. Thank you very much.
Bruce Kirschner
RAP & LaMP Coordinator
International Joint Commission
Thank you, Alice. I would like to introduce Doug McTavish, the Director of IJC's Great Lakes Regional Office.
Doug McTavish
Director, Great Lakes Regional Office
International Joint Commission
Thanks Bruce, and I too would like to welcome everyone. I had the pleasure of serving on the IJC's Water Quality Board during the early '80s, and I can remember the frustration at our meetings in talking about these AOCs and what should be done about it. In 1985 the Water Quality Board recommended the Remedial Action Plan process, that we now see before us. And that was formalized in the 1987 Protocol following recommendations of the IJC, after receipt of the material that was provided by the Water Quality Board.
The Water Quality Board, I'm sure there are other members here, would indicate they hadn't anticipated the length of time and the complexity that would be associated with RAPs for AOCs. None of us in 1985 thought that 10 years later we would be at Stage 2. We thought we would have been well beyond that. But they are more complex, there are more problems associated with them. I think the wisdom of the IJC recommending strongly there be the public involvement, public participation has really paid off. And a lot of you around this table are part of that tone of participation.
As Commissioner Chamberlin said, we are looking at the success stories now. We feel they are very important to get out to the other AOCs who perhaps aren't as far along as you are, or who have hit certain roadblocks. And that, coupled with the economic constraints that all governments are feeling, are just going to make it that much more difficult. And hopefully some of your successes, some of your creative ideas are going to be of help to them. So I look forward to the product of this meeting and certainly look forward to it being more input to the RAP process at the biennial meeting. And so again, welcome to the meeting.
Bruce Kirschner - Thank you, Doug. Our first presentation is going to be by Susan Gilbertson from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Susan Gilbertson
Project Manager, United States Environmental Protection Agency
On the U.S. side of the Great Lakes, the federal government is undergoing a significant period of change. No news there, I'm sure to most of you. What this means to the RAP process and indeed for community-based environmental protection across the country, is anybody's guess. We've been very successful over the last 20-25 years in achieving some significant environmental benefits. Again, no surprises there.
For example, Jim, I think that you would agree just in terms of sewage treatment and wastewater treatment, there's been significant improvement. That's taken a tremendous amount of public resources. There's still a lot to be done. Some would argue that the easy things happen. But some of those easy things are out of sight. People forget about the sewage treatment lines that run underneath the cities and they think that everything's hunkydory. Well, part of the reason for this story is to say that, "It's not enough to rest on our laurels, it's not enough to rest on what we have accomplished and what we have been able to achieve." Because the out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality I think, is something, if we're going to be successful in the future, we also need to keep in mind now.
I also think if we're going to honestly try and progress in the future, we have to deal with what has been a success or what has been a failure. And I know, at least at the federal level it's very uncomfortable for us to talk about failures. We don't like to do that. I think this is a good opportunity for us to do some honest assessment as to what has worked and what hasn't worked, and why. Just because something hasn't succeeded doesn't mean that you can't learn from it. That it hasn't been worth the attempt, that it doesn't have value, that we can't learn from it, and move on. I struggle with how to say that gracefully because that's something that federal employees don't like to talk about. In fact it makes our leadership -- especially in this day and age -- very, very nervous.
One of the things that is going to impact how we as a federal government approach the RAP program, as well as other programs that are community-based, is the level of funding, and is the re-authorization of the Clean Water Act. And I hope the Canadians in the crowd will bear with me for a minute. Our budgets are going to be cut, there's no doubt about that and who knows how deeply, or how much, but they are going to be cut. It's not only the cuts that impact us, it's also going to be the reauthorization of the Clean Water Act. Once we have a budget, it's not only the total dollar amount but how it's directed. And Congress is directing our budget for us this year, in very significant ways. It's not only what's been cut, but how we can or cannot use what's left. And this is going to have a very significant impact for RAPs at all levels.
I think there are also certain commonalities we see in dealing with some of the failures. If a RAP succeeds, I think it's because everyone truly is working in partnership. You are applying federal authorities, state authorities, local authorities. Sometimes, those authorities are in conflict. And if you think that you can work through this concept and avoid conflict, I think you're kidding yourselves. And I think those of you here recognize that. One of the challenges is: how do you work through that conflict, how do you reach consensus? And in some areas it's easier, and in other areas it's more complex. Which isn't to diminish the challenges in area "a" versus area "b," I think, and this is a very oblique way of sometimes getting into the fact, that we sometime let our egos get in the way.
We like to say that, "Well, you know my area is unique, and I had to do this and I had to do that;" give it up, people. Please, please give it up. As a federal employee, I have to negotiate between, at least in my region, six different states and some of you here receive grants from us, and some of you here have been getting very frantic phone calls from me over the last couple weeks on this very issue of grants. That's a very good example of where as federal employees we have to balance needs across the board and it makes it difficult frankly, when some of your egos get in the way. I don't have that luxury of being able to sit back and play favorites. I think where I see successes out there is where people have been able to move beyond some of those egos and personal agendas.
I was thinking that the change that is underway in the U.S. federal government is going to free us up tremendously. I, for one, look forward to that change because part of the empowerment that goes along with building a successful RAP program also means accountability. That partnership has to occur at federal, state and local levels and there has to be accountability at all levels. We sometimes dance around that because of politics, because of budgets, because of this or that. Think of this period of change as something that can free us all up to do a little bit better job of getting beyond the egos and getting beyond the personal agendas.
I think successful RAPs also benefit from leadership. I can see that I'm not going to get any arguments here. I think that strong leadership is sometimes confused with commanding people. Egos get in the way, an awful lot, in terms of who's going to be the leadership, and who's going to direct what and how it's going to get done. I had to go out to a meeting in Seattle. I was addressing a group which deals with estuaries in a manner similar to RAPs. It is amazing to me the similarities that people deal with in terms of identifying the stressors, identifying who's got the lead for what, getting everybody to get on board. The thing that I hear over and over again, is that successful programs invest an awful lot of time up front in building consensuses, in defining what's on the table, what's off the table and why; and reaching closure on that and then moving on. It is tremendously painstaking and it is personally very challenging. But the successful ones invest in that.
One of the things that I am very fearful for, for the RAP program, is that as the federal dollars dry up the basic funds that have been supporting the RAP coordinators, the people who are actually there to provide continuity, to provide the history, to provide the care and feeding, if you will, of that process are going to go away. And without them I think that the successes will come grinding to a halt very quickly. Now how as individuals, how that support, how that care and feeding is funded is fundamental to the continued success of this program.
Some of you may have heard one of my favorite, famous lines -- I took quite a bit of heat for this one -- and it went something along the lines of this: the federal cashcow is dying and in another year it will be dead. Was I right, or was I wrong? Unfortunately, I was right. We do not expect to have federal funds next year that we can direct into the RAP program and the LaMP program, for that matter. The states do have an avenue through their block grants and through their performance partnerships. How the states use that is up to the individual state. We will have no say in that.
So the challenge becomes: How are these groups going to fund for the infrastructure? Because without that infrastructure you don't get the inner development, you don't get the agreement. I think that some of the successful RAPs have started to look at fairly innovative ways to raise funds to maintain that infrastructure. As much as I would like to have a word of cheer and a ray of hope, it's not going to be the federal government, it's not. I think the successful RAPs, and this follows on from the point of : How are you going to form the infrastructure? The successful RAPs are willing to take on tough action and they're willing to make the hard decisions. They are willing to sanction and enforce any action. By the same token, they are also willing to back off an enforcement action perhaps, in certain cases. That can just be a part of when you have one part of the community that wants this action taken and wants it taken now.
Yet, maybe through the consensus building process you've been able to craft something that gets you more. And it may mean that it takes a couple of more years to put it in place, and it may mean that some of my federal colleagues who work in compliance have to sit on their hands for a year or so. It works if there's a commitment to continue forward. It works if there's a commitment to say, "Okay, you've had your opportunity, you blew it. Now we will come in and take an enforcement action."
The same goes as successful RAPs build their public participation processes. I think one of the things I've learned personally on this program, is just how difficult that is. And without it, I think a RAP or any community-based environmental thing is doomed to failure. It requires a very thick skin and it requires a certain sophistication. I think that some of the RAPs that are perhaps not as far along as others, have gone into public participation with a certain naivete. Which isn't to say that they can't be -- I hesitate to use this word -- fixed, improved, upgraded, whatever you want to call it. I've heard from some of the RAP groups that they're ready to walk away from their public participation efforts. And it scares me to death. Because without that public participation, I think the RAPs are doomed to failure. And I think the successful ones have invested and made that commitment to public participation. I don't have any answers for the public participation issues. I think they have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. But I'm afraid that if we abandon that, that cornerstone of it, I think the RAP program will fail.
I wish I had a nice little stump speech that I could give on, "How to be energetic as we go into the future." I haven't come up with that yet; give me a little time. I do think that the RAP program is viable. I think it's going to continue to be viable in the future, even on the U.S. side in the face of all these budget cuts.
Oh by the way, I think that you'll be hearing from some of the state people that are here. It's not just the federal government that's being cut. It's also the state governments that are having their budget cuts -- budget cut, there we go -- and they are the keeper of the RAP program, they really are. Can we work collectively and collaboratively? Yes. Does it mean that we're there with things other than dollars? Yes. I think that's going to have to be the future method of obtaining success. That we're willing to go in and provide our technical expertise. Some of our other skills, some programs are not going to be writing a cheque in the future because they just won't have the cheques to write.
As I started out by saying, "We're going through a major period of change," and I started viewing that as my ticket, my carte blanche to go out there and be innovative. This is probably going to scare some people, but it's not business as usual anymore. I think we have an awful lot that we can do in terms of being innovative. I've got to come up with a better way of saying this but I think the successful RAPs are going to be the ones where egos go out the door, I really mean that.
Bruce Kirschner - Thank you, Susan. Our next two presenters can probably testify to the budget problems in Ontario. Our next presenter will be Louise Knox from Environment Canada.
Louise Knox
RAP Coordinator, Environment Canada
Thanks, Bruce. What I'd like to do is give you some of my opinions based on my experience in the Hamilton Harbour RAP and also on my experience working for Environment Canada, which is a federal agency.
I guess the first thing that comes to mind tonight in this forum is that the federal government, and I'll say this for Canada -- and this is my opinion -- has an inflated view of its total importance in the RAP program and I'll let Gail tell you whether she says the same is true of the provincial government. The way the agenda is set up tonight is almost, is kind of symptomatic of the problem. Because we're looking at federal, state and provincial outlooks. Think about that in the context of the Hamilton Harbour RAP where federal and provincially- lead programs represents less than 10% of the costs that will be incurred to implement that RAP. So, municipalities in Hamilton Harbour, in terms of capital costs, municipally-lead programs will amount to $311 million; industrial lead programs will amount to $120 million, and $30 million over 20 years will come from federal and provincial agencies and private sources. So we need a reality check here. I don't know if this is true of other RAPs, I don't know if this is true in the United States. In Canada we need a reality check that says: where the action is happening is somewhere outside the federal and provincial agencies.
Federal government has taken the view and the approach in RAPs in Canada that its role is that of a facilitator and a catalyst. And I think, it's a very important role but I don't think it takes a lot of money and I don't think it can make or break the process. I think if the federal money dried up for facilitating Hamilton Harbour RAP tomorrow, the function would still be performed, probably by conservation authorities or maybe by the regional municipalities, because in that community there is a commitment to make that thing work.
So, while I'm not happy that Environment Canada is enduring some cuts and while I'm even less happy about the way the cuts are being made, I don't think it's going to make or break the RAP program and it certainly isn't going to make or break the Hamilton Harbour RAP. So I think we need to get a little bit of perspective on that, again, from the Canadian point of view.
If I had industry here and municipalities here to talk about what they're doing in the RAPs it would give us a rounded-out picture of what's actually going on in the real world. I think that the picture we're going to get here is going to help us but it will be skewed and we should keep that in mind. We're creating for ourselves this skewed picture of what is actually going on. So let's figure out, I guess to be constructive, let's try to figure out how we can correct that and give ourselves an appropriate perspective on the roles of the federal and provincial agencies, in Canada anyway.
The second thing is, I want to remark on some of the discussions from before and during dinner because I sense that a certain amount of not only panic, but there's some distress about the movement away from regulations in the United States. I know that this is a real concern and in fact we had Minister Copps, the federal minister of the environment hosted the G-7 Environment Ministers' meeting and Carol Browner came and appealed there for some help from Canada to try to shore up and strengthen in some way support for the federal actions related to the environment of the United States and Minister Copps has taken that to heart, so I think that EPA can expect some support from the federal government in Canada for some of its programs, and that may include RAPs.
But, a difference that I would draw between what's happening in Canada and what's happening in the United States, is that there's a bit less polarization. In other words, I get the feeling that some people see this as either you are a regulator or you're not, and you're either a good guy or a bad guy. I would make an appeal and we're doing this locally now, so I'm going to make an appeal here today, for people to try to see that maybe you can have both, maybe a mixture of voluntary and regulatory is possible. It's not black and white. Besides there are good reasons for the general reaction to regulations, which is to say that it's costing us way too much for enforcement per year. I think that's a valid criticism, certainly in Canada.
That doesn't mean that regulations don't have a place in our RAPs or that I would advocate throwing out regulations. Far from it. It's an important tool. But it does mean that maybe there is room for a mixture of regulatory and voluntary approaches. And I think in RAPs this is the ideal place for that to happen. You have got a locally driven process and you're trying to achieve certain goals, use all the tools you can get, be the integrator for the regulatory and voluntary tools. Try not to just look at the black and white issues. I understand that that's hard for some of the U.S. agencies, particularly when a regulator is running the RAP, it's kind of hard to say, "Well, we aren't going to rely on regulations. Do what you want to do." But I guess I'd make the case that we need to use common sense, and common sense is not yet, at least in my book, a dirty word.
So those, I guess, are the two points I would make. I won't go into detail of the cuts that we've had federally; we've been hit pretty hard. And really it's hard to take because we're losing some really good people and real expertise, but it's not going to be the end of the world. And I think we have with RAPs lots and lots of ways of getting around those problems.
Bruce Kirschner - Thank you, Louise. Our next speaker is Gail Krantzberg and she was the RAP coordinator for the first AOC that was cleaned up in the Great Lakes, so she can tell us about a successful local effort.
Gail Krantzberg
RAP Program Coordinator, Ontario Ministry of Environment and Energy
I want to back up a little bit and pick up on some elements of some of the things that we've been listening to this evening. First, in terms of Collingwood, and we've heard about successful stories and I guess you've gotten one off the list. You can consider that a successful story. I consider myself walking into Collingwood, as very naive when it came to a public involvement program. I walked into a community that looked at the provincial government, which was suing them for an illegal incinerator, and coming in and telling them that they were going to help them clean up their harbour. But nobody knew how much it was going to cost or who was going to do what. But the government was coming and help save them and help clean up their town. This was their perspective. This was not a good first interaction with some very powerful people in that community.
But sometimes I think naivete is a good thing, because very quickly I came to realize that the only way that I was going to get myself out of an extremely uncomfortable situation was to be blatantly honest. And they were the same with me: "Who's going to pay for this deal?" "I have no idea, Deputy Mayor, but when we get there I assure you I will work on it to find out who is going to pay." And any coordinator in the room or any person participating in the RAP program, knows that same frustration. You don't know what the plan is going to be so how do you know who's going to implement it, how do you know what it's going to cost? But let's sit down and say, we've got a harbour here, it's your harbour, what do you want to do with it? And the success of the RAP program and you're going to get the sort of community/municipality-driven projects going, the community working as a whole is to get them to say to its powers, "This is our local environment, we used your help as advisors to get us to this point, but it is ours and we are going to lead the process of cleanup. And we want you on board as a partner but if you're not here, we've been sitting around the table for six years working on this problem and we are going to make sure that the problem gets solved."
So the long and the short of it is, if the government money is drastically reduced and the local communities have pride in their resource, pride in their community and a shared commitment to a common end, it is going to happen. And that's something that I think we need to focus very strongly on and I think you'll probably hear during the next couple of days, is people talk about the successes: That's a local theme, a local ownership. Don't come in and tell us what to do. It's ours. It's our place, we live here, we will make sure that it happens because we all believe in it collectively.
Alice Chamberlin, earlier on, mentioned that it's extremely difficult to envision the future of what the RAP process is going to be. Well, when I sat down in my supervisor's office before becoming coordinator of the Collingwood Harbour RAP and was asked to do it, I said, "Well, what does a coordinator do? What is the RAP program all about?" Well, we don't really know, but that kind of thing can be okay as long as we're all working toward the same goal.
We have never sat back and anticipated the future. We are always reacting to the past and as RAP program coordinator for the province right now, I am intensely frustrated by that. And with the brains that we have sitting around the table here, I'm hopeful over the next couple of days we will take to heart, what our hosts at Wingspread have suggested to us, and let's come up with a product that we can discuss here. Here is where we think, we're going to have to be if we have the scenario of no more government programs. How are we going to implement recovery of the Great Lakes? How are we going to restore the Great Lakes ecosystem if the government funding is reduced to bare bones? How are we going to do that? Let's consider that a real calling and deal with it here as an issue collectively. And move it forward at the RAP forum when we meet in Duluth again collectively, with many of the PACs who many not be in a situation where they feel like they're getting somewhere; they're frustrated with the process. Let's have some potential solutions.
I just finished one of numerous reports that the IJC put out where typically there was an issue, there were the obstacles and then there were: here's some potential solutions. Well, why don't we deal with some of the potential solutions and start getting reactions, start anticipating what the RAP program is going to look like from here to the year 2000? As opposed to saying, "Well, next year EPA's cutting off, all provincial ministries are going to be cut by 30%, 50%... " What's going to happen? Let's let each PAC worry about it. I think we can come up with some creative solutions here. I think we've all found in the successes that we've experienced in our own RAPs formulas that made those successes.
I was asked to talk a bit about our successes. How do we measure success? And I think my PAC chairs turned it over to me to talk about. Well, this particular stream rehabilitation program needs some innovative techniques, of bioengineering, and new type of sediment cleanup and new type of this and innovative that and partnerships in this, and really the successes were very simple. And they were: very early you had communication, you had honesty, you had developed advocacy within your PAC. They became the owners. I think one way we've measured successes is by the strength and pride which are starting to be fostered within the communities of the RAPs.
The determination of those groups, the level of frustration they may have with government is one measure in effect, is one measure of success because they want to move forward, they've come a long ways, they want to move forward and now the formula's changing on them. They don't know what to do. They want to move forward but the formula's changing. So let's help them move forward with a new formula.
If this marks the tenth anniversary of the formal identification of AOCs, maybe we shouldn't be in such a huge rush to get all the plans finished and get everything done, but rely on the fact that we're going to have, incredibly I think, a mighty high quality that comes out of the Stage 2 process. In fact, all the way along the RAP process, let's not lose sight of how many positive things are happening.
So, two things I think I want to see happen by the end of this workshop. And one is that we entertain some potential solutions, or at least topics for further exploration at the Biennial Meeting, on where the RAP process is going to go, under a new formula. And the second is that, we look at those successes and figure out why: Why did those programs work, why did these projects work, why are those RAPs working?
Bruce Kirschner - Thank you, Gail. Our last speaker tonight is Ava Hottman, she's the Assistant Chief of the Water Program for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
Ava Hottman
Assistant Chief, DWQPA, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency
Well, I've been listening to everyone else and I decided that I was going to talk a little bit about some of the obstacles that are going the face the RAP process in coming years, but I decided to end the evening on a more upbeat note.
One of the things that we have not talked about, as we've talked about individual RAPs around the basin, is the success of the RAP process. I don't really think of RAPs as a program or RAPs as a plan, but RAPs as a process by which environmental decisions are made and environmental problems are solved. And that we have changed, at least in the United States, the national dialogue on environmental protection, especially in the water area. Community-based initiatives are the slogans of the '90s, geographic initiatives, public-private partnership, voluntary action, and the ecosystem approach have become the national environmental rhetoric.
The downside of this to the Great Lakes community is that everybody wants a RAP. One of the new programs that I've been put in charge of, which could be called Becoming a Victim of Your Success, involves 321 watersheds that the state of Ohio would like to develop RAPs on. Now I have RAP coordinators and all kinds of people assigned to RAPs in the Great Lakes basin, but the state is not going to give me 321 new people. In effect the RAP process will become somewhat of a victim of its success as other areas within our states and within our watersheds across the nation, in Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, on the Gulf of Mexico, the Everglades all begin to compete for what we have.
One of the things that I do really want to dispel is: I work for the Ohio EPA and as of August 4th, I will have worked there for 24 years. Only for three of those years did I have anything to do with regulations. And I think it is important for everyone to understand that state environmental agencies do not spend all of their time on regulations. It was fortunate that they put probably the only "unregulator" in the agency in charge of RAPs. But I have been working on the Cuyahoga River since August 4th, 1975. I don't feel that 20 years is a very short time. But it went just like this and the biological community is there now, so I'm not willing to deny the success of 20 years of regulatory programs and lawsuits now that we stand for the RAPs. But I also think that it is time, and as we have explored in Ohio, to change the way that we do business. This is not always easy. I think as we celebrate successes, and that's a lot of how I saw this conference initially, was to celebrate successes, I'm very, very careful.
As I look through a number of the attendees, there is one Rick Brewer. In the Ashtabula RAP we have a very small town, relatively speaking, when you compare it to Detroit, Cleveland, and Toledo, with a very big problem, very big environmental problem. They were one of the first community-based remedial action efforts in Ohio. They worked very hard on the Stage 1 and I remember the night Jim Chandler came out and we were at the yacht club and Rick and I went for a walk on the pier by the yacht club and we said, "How are we going to do this? I mean, how are we going to get this river clean?" They'd been to Washington and they had been to the state capitol trying to persuade them to get federal financing of the RAP. And I think during the course of the next few days we're going to hear a lot about what's going on in Ashtabula, but I think about how long and how few industries and how the true private sector is not terribly involved in the RAP process in any kind of substantial way and what we will hope in the future, will there be more Rick Brewers, more industries that come forward and say, "We are responsible -- and we have a responsibility to our community to see that something is done." Because in Ashtabula, the private sector is paying for $2 million worth of monitoring in the Ashtabula and has now formed an innovative partnership.
RAPs need to be very careful though. In Ohio RAPs, the state is really in partnership with the local government -- we are going to have to lay a much stronger foundation at the local level. In Ohio, I must say that the federal funds have helped us work that foundation. We hope we can keep that going for the next two years. I believe we have the funds to do that and without the main help from U.S. EPA. RAPs are going to have to be stronger at the local level.
Bring in new partners, don't be afraid to form alternative organizations that collaborate and are partners with the RAP. I think one of the things that can cause a RAP a lot of problems is if it begins to think that the RAP identity is the only identity and doesn't look out to form coalitions with other groups that have the same goals and allow those other groups to join in as we try to be special and unique.... and that's one of the reasons in Ohio the RAPs have been as successful as they have, because they were something so radically different than anything we had tried before. But it is important that we remember why we are there and that is to restore the beneficial uses of the river.
At least at Ohio EPA we are having to sit down with people, that we've been in court with before on many occasions and sometimes while we were in court with them, to talk about other things. I think it's important that we maintain open communication. It is important that under the umbrella of voluntary action, which seems to be one of the new slogans, that the corporate and private sectors come forward with voluntary actions. We have seen it happen, but it is going to have to be a greater extent. Jeff Busch is here from Toledo. The Maumee RAP is approaching some 50 sites to be cleaned up in one AOC. It's not going to be an easy battle.
One of the things that we have to stop thinking about is: how long will it take us to succeed? I once said the following at an IJC meeting and got a real awful look, "We're not going to follow a table of contents and we're not going to get it done on the schedule, because what is important is getting it done, not meeting a deadline." I think as a planner in the government that this is probably the true joy of the RAP process, absolutely no one has said it had to be done by Friday, September 22nd, 1995. So that we've had the opportunity to explore options we never would have explored.
Because we have no money -- and really, I mean I think this is one of the biggest federal ironies -- is that it is one of the most successful programs in environmental protection in the United States and yet it has almost had no dedicated appropriation. We have all had to scrounge and put together funding packages just to keep RAP coordinators and pay for public events, and yet RAPs are one of the most successful programs. The lesson there is to learn that we didn't spend a lot of time building programs, we spent a lot of time making programs work together, existing programs, existing laws. Sometimes we used them as a carrot, sometimes we used them as a club, sometimes we used them as a ladder. And I don't think those things will go away in the next five years, and we'll still have these existing tools. What we have to be sure of as governments, is that we have empowered the local community sufficiently to sustain the ups and downs of the political process.
As we were talking about at lunch, we also have to overcome probably what I perceive as the greatest threat to RAPs -- community burnout. Everytime we reach a major milestone, we complete a Stage 1, we complete an IJC review, we move a step forward, we are constantly battling community burnout. That's why I believe it is so important for the RAP process to expand to pull in other partners.
The other thing we have to do, is achieve a high profile. Using the Ohio example, when there are 320 RAP-wannabes, it is important that we maintain our Great Lakes focus and that we retain our identity, and be high in profile in other public actions that involve the environmental water quality. That we need to look for new structures and innovative alternative organizations that lend permanence to community-based initiatives.
In Ohio we decided very early on that we would not have a public involvement program; we have no public involvement program in Ohio. We have local-based organizations that are partners with Ohio EPA in making RAPs efficient. It is not Ohio EPA, it is those groups which have public outreach, have public education and do things to involve the general public.
That does not mean that we have given up our legal responsibilities and our authorities to enforce the law when the law is broken or to bring the pressure of the law to solve another problem. What Ohio EPA has tried -- never to pull rank, never to use its authority without involving the RAP community in the process. But it is important to remember that states have powers local governments don't have and that voluntary associations don't have, to get federal money and to match grants from other federal agencies, and to direct federal money and state money and other kinds of local efforts. We also have the ability to light the fire under recalcitrant parties.
The other thing is, to borrow something from the Civil Rights movement, "We have to keep our eyes on the prize." In these times it will become very easy to become diverted to other actions, to become depressed about the lack of flexibility because of our limited funds, but as Sue Gilbertson says, we can use this for new opportunities. But we have to develop clear priorities. We have to decide what are the most important things and move forward on them fiercely. We have to also, fortunately we can do this in Ohio, is become involved in the political action of cleanup, and remediation and preservation. And that means developing legislative strategies and funding strategies and being a player at the table. To quote Woody Allen, not a favorite person of mine, "The world is run by the people who sit down at the table."
In Ohio we just hope to keep our RAP communities at the table because like I said when I first came to Ashtabula, "Hi, I'm from the state and I need your help." Because quite frankly we had no budget in 1990. We got $85,000 for all RAP programs including all Lake Erie programs at Ohio EPA and now we have a budget of over $1 million a year. And that doesn't count on what is being spent on implementation locally. But, what we have to do is become political activists for a cause within the limits of our state statute as I found out at dinner, but also to involve the legislators in this process. To many people in Congress the RAPs are just the Great Lakes form of tobacco subsidies, just another set of pork barrel projects. And we have to work to convince them that we are in the business of solving environmental problems that we have not been able to solve before.
Bruce Kirschner - Thank you, Ava.
Innovations Toward Remediation
Bruce Kirschner - All right, our first speaker is going to be Rick Brewer. He's the director of Business Development for RMI Environmental Services.
Richard Brewer
Director, Business Development
RMI Environmental Services
Good morning. On behalf of myself and Brett, I'd like to thank the IJC and the Johnson Foundation for giving us the opportunity to be here to make this presentation on a subject that we're pretty excited about: The Ashtabula River Partnership. I'd like to quickly review what we're going to be talking about. I'm going to cover the historical background of the Ashtabula River as a resource. We think that's kind of important that you understand where we come from and why we're at where we're at today. Brett's going to talk about the development of the partnership concept. I'll get into why a partnership was established in addition to the RAP effort. This is a question that's come up in various conferences that we've given presentations at. What are the partnership organization's accomplishments? What was or is required for a successful Ashtabula River Partnership? We took a look at ourselves and looked at what is working, which may or may not work for others, but we want to show you what's working for us.
(Slides) This is the Ashtabula Harbor. We're about 20,000 feet up. It's a well-protected deep water harbor, you see the commercial shipping area out here. The Ashtabula River starts here and winds about a mile and a quarter, a mile and a half upstream, and what is called an navigable waterway. The harbor really is an area of resource that is very significant to the economy of the City of Ashtabula, as well as Ashtabula County.
This is a 1951 aerial photo of the harbor and it's changed considerably and we wanted to illustrate that today. In 1951, this is the old ship yard where they used to build war boats, about a mile up the river from the outer harbor. Here's Fields Brook which is an infamous creek, right now that happens to be a Superfund site, but at that time it was not. Fields Brook is a creek that many industrial complexes emptied their outfalls into and of course in those days the effluent was unregulated because the establishment of the U.S. EPA didn't come about until the early 1970s. As you can see, you won't see many pleasure craft or recreational boats on the river. I think in those days it wasn't really a popular recreational area. The river was pretty much dedicated to commercial shipping, both in the inner and outer harbor. Here you see a lot of heavy equipment down along the ships and of course in the ship building area up here. Over here was a reclamation area where they tore ships apart.
This is a two-week-old photograph. We tried to take it from about the same angle to show you some of the changes. As you go up and down the river now, you see a lot pleasure boats and pleasure crafts lining the river. The commercial shipping is limited to the outer harbor area and if you look at the banks out here, the dots, you'll see the heavy equipment has been removed. Now the ships are unloaded with conveyor systems, which are pretty modern technology. All this area in here has become yacht clubs and marinas. Fields Brook is right here. In 1983, Fields Brook was listed as an AOC and named a Superfund site and here in 1995, approximately $30 million has been spent on Fields Brook to characterize it and for litigation expenses and no remediation has been done to date. So it's not something that we're very proud of in the Ashtabula area. And unfortunately it dumps into the Ashtabula River and it's the primary source for the contaminants that we have to deal with now in getting the Ashtabula Harbor and River redredged.
In the earlier days this area was 18-20 feet deep when dredged to accommodate the ore boats, now it's anywhere from 2-7 feet deep. Commercial shipping is limited to the areas out here so there's been considerable changes over the years. You can see an awful lot of development upstream. This is the end of the navigable channel that will be dredged. This is the old shipyard again. These are drydocks that are now docks for recreational boating. This is looking from the north into the harbor.
I'd like to go over sort of the investment in marinas and the significance of pleasure boating that's occurred on the river, primarily since 1986. This is a fairly major complex here, there's boats on this side that you can't see down there, that are docked. That's about a $7 million investment by a local investor. Just down the river is another small public marina. As you move downriver further there's a yacht club that's been established here. This is another yacht club. This is a public marina here. And moving up the river north, you have a marina here. This is the Ashtabula Yacht Club which I'm a member of, small marina over here and some marine facilities and docks over here. Those are the same facilities. Just have to guess at which bridge is the last little marina. So, you can see the pleasure boating on the Ashtabula River has really taken ahold, and it has a big impact on our economy in the Ashtabula area. In order for it to continue the river has got to get cleaned up and the contaminants have to be removed.
I'd like to talk a little a bit from a historical perspective about the RAP and the background of the RAP in our community. In 1983, the first real sign that we as citizens had that there was a real problem in the sediments came when the Ohio Department of Health issued a fish consumption advisory on the river. Nobody paid much attention to the contaminants in the river until that time and then in 1985, of course, the river and area in the harbor was declared an Area of Concern, and it was so listed. And then in '87 the Ohio EPA initiated the RAP development. And of course in March of '88 the RAP was established in Ashtabula, and with the additional organization that brought together public, political people and businesses to try to address the concerns on the river.
In 1991 the RAP Stage 1 (problem definition) report was completed. That happened after the 1990 extensive sampling program that was sponsored by private industry and was conducted at the cost of $2 million. And that information was also used in determining what needed to be done. The Stage 1 RAP was reviewed by the IJC also in 1991. The RAP has been our vehicle to get political interests on the project. We made several trips to Washington and to the state capital to talk to our congressmen and regulators in various meetings, trying to get the cooperation and the funding aligned to go forward and get the river dredged. And finally our last meeting with the state was very successful; I think it was almost monumental actually. We had the state commit to giving us $7 million, contingent on getting the river dredged and getting matching funds from the federal government. And we think that's all going to happen.
The RAP was also the vehicle to get what we call interim dredging done. The river was beginning to fill in to the extent that it was becoming a hazard to all of the recreational boats that you saw in the photographs. And because of the RAP, and our then congressman Dennis Eckert in his efforts, we were able to get some funding to get the shallow spots in the river removed that were non-toxic. And we put those sediments into a confined disposal facility right on the edge of the river. And the RAP served as a facilitator of partnership which began to come about in January of '94, and its major partner. And we think that the RAP, or some organizations like the RAP, need to be around after the partnership is gone. The partnership's goal was primarily to get the river dredged. But we think that the RAP or another community organization like the RAP needs to continue to do things to protect our natural resource, which is the Ashtabula River.
At this time I think Brett, I'd like to have you come up and we'll review part of the presentation.
Brett Kaull
Projects Director, United States Congressional Representative Steve LaTourette
I'm Brett Kaull, I'm Projects Director to Congressman Steve LaTourette who represents northeastern Ohio and also part of the Cleveland area. I've had the opportunity to work with the Ashtabula River for about three years.
There are really three central projects that affect the future of the river as Rick has described: the Fields Brook Superfund project which has been in litigation, has expended about $30 million in characterizing the type of remedy they're going to use -- yet no cleanup to date. They are close to remedy selection, I think, but still $30 million has been invested in that effort. That is the upstream source of contaminants to the Ashtabula River recreational channel. Formerly it was a commercial navigational channel dredged by the Corps of Engineers. That's no longer the case, it's now a recreational channel so they don't dredge to the project depth anymore. But we think there's about 750,000 cubic yards of polluted sediment in that channel. And therefore we need to have some type of environmental dredging action occur there.
And finally the third concern is the actual maintenance of our commercial dredging channel in the outer harbor by the Corps of Engineers. The navigational channel has been dredged for the last time by the Corps until we have some time of cleanup action. We need some type of sediment disposal plan or cleanup action because the polluted sediments from the Ashtabula River recreational channel are now polluting the outer channel, prohibiting any type of open lake disposal anymore.
Two federal decisions of concern were really the catalyst in formation of the partnership to address remediation. U.S. EPA had developed enough evidence that the pollution in the recreational channel had come from Fields Brook and they were ready to designate, not only the lower river Superfund site but also the outer harbor, effectively tying up our commercial shipping and also potentially trained a lot of new potentially responsible parties (PRPs), property owners, marinas along the river. Also, the requirement that, from the Corps of Engineers perspective which is of course separate federal agency with a separate mission and mandate, which includes commercial shipping on the river, they needed some type of sediment disposal option for the now polluted sediments. Back in 1987, Water Resources Development Act at that time provided for new cost-share arrangements for constructing a confined disposal facility (CDF) on the Great Lakes and that would require a cost share on our local part and that was thought to approach approximately $3 million. Well, it was pretty clear that our small postindustrial town of Ashtabula didn't have that type of money to invest in a CDF.
What are the negative effects of these two federal decisions? Well, the port of Ashtabula would be closed. I don't think the Corps is going to dredge inside of a Superfund site, and even if they did, they don't have a place to put that sediment. Lead time on developing a CDF is about six or seven years from the Corps' perspective and we don't have that much time. Certainly the recreational-based economic development that was shown in the slides, all the new marinas, we've got about a 1,000 boat slips that would be in danger. Presently it's estimated that there's about $60 million of future recreational development on hold until we clean the river. So we want to see those new investment dollars come in but they're not going to come to the Superfund site, they're not going to come into a river that cannot be dredged. We think Superfund would delay the environmental cleanup indefinitely. We look to Fields Brook example and see more than a decade. We know we'll lose our commercial shipping if we don't act fast. The legal entanglements of Superfund, in its present form, are the reason for that. And finally the stigma of a Superfund designation at a tourist site is maybe a point of interest, but not a point where you want to have a boat and swim and fish. It's not something that a community would point to with pride.
In looking at the components that we have to work with, the components of the Ashtabula AOC. Fields Brook Superfund project is upstream and was contributing sediments to the recreational channel, which is noted by the blue area. Again, we have about 750,000 cubic yards. Obviously, U.S. EPA is the main player up here with its Superfund program. So U.S. EPA is involved up here on Superfund. U.S. EPA in extending Superfund would be involved in the future of this whole area here. The Corps of Engineers picks up in the dredging of the navigational channel itself.
So we have private interests up here, PRPs have great financial interests, local companies and industries. U.S. EPA has its interests in making sure that the contamination is cleaned up. They were developing the evidence and the authority to potentially designate this area a Superfund site. Now, the contaminated sediments from this stream area are migrating into the federal navigation project so we are unable to continue our open lake disposal, which we've done forever at this point, necessitating the need to build a CDF at a cost of $12 million, $3 million of which would be a local cost-share responsibility. Looking at these components we realize a couple of things. Number one, we can't build a CDF fast enough to keep our port open. And even if we did, why are we making the federal/local investment to build a CDF with a 20-year capacity when we haven't addressed our environmental dredging upstream? Was there some way to take the U.S. EPA interest, the Army Corps of Engineers interest in federal navigation and link them and leverage them towards the common goal of complete remediation of the river so we can move ahead and continue open lake dumping? In other words, are there common ties among those projects? Well there are. Each needs a disposal site and a facility to be built for both projects. Large financial commitments are involved. Explicit linkages between Fields Brook, it's polluted recreational channel, the recreational channel is polluting the navigation channel. Hence, again we have to build a CDF. These things are all linked. Is it possible for us to take an ecosystem approach and treat the Ashtabula River and Harbor as one resource? That's the IJC mandate and perhaps that's what we could do to make this project work. But we really need some encouragement to try to take this coordinated approach to built a multi-party, multi-purpose disposal facility. The Indiana Harbor effort presently is doing that. The Corps of Engineers has a need to maintain its federal navigation channel as well. So they're finding a common scale by building one multi-purpose, multi-party disposal facility, and realizing some economic benefit in doing that. That's a precedent that we can hang our hat on so the RAP committee called a meeting in January of 1994. At that point it was a pretty clear signal that Superfund again had the evidence and authority to designate the lower river a Superfund site. We felt that they were probably moving in that direction to do that and again that would take a lot of power away for keeping the port open. So they came to town and made that presentation at our request, and following that presentation the concept of working together to address navigation dredging authority along with environmental cleanup was presented to the Indiana Harbor precedent as the example. As this concept was presented, EPA sent a Superfund attorney out and he explained the Indiana Harbor example. Following his presentation, the group voted unanimously to strike a partnership, a public-private partnership predicated on Indiana Harbor to take a new approach toward remediation. Dramatically, EPA agreed at that point that in fact they would stand down on the designation for the whole river if we could show some type of progress in the coming months. And U.S. EPA and the Army Corps of Engineer also stood up to announce that they would dedicate staff and resources to support such an approach. The Ashtabula partnership was formally signed and chartered, a not legally binding charter on July 7. There were important government agencies there, U.S. EPA, Army Corps of Engineers, Ohio EPA, local communities, Commissioner Alice Chamberlin from the IJC came. How do we do it?
There are essentially two phases to the project. The development of a comprehensive management plan, or maybe what the old schoolers would call it, a feasibility study. In order to accomplish that we need additional river characterization. On the July 4th weekend, U.S. EPA's Mudpuppy was in town. It filled in the holes on a $2 million private effort that occurred a couple of years before. So now we've got pretty good characterization of the river we think. We need preliminary engineering and site selection for the disposal facility. Concurrent with that activity we need an environmental impact statement to be developed. Very importantly, cost-sharing formula, how much should private interests pay, how much does the Corps pay? What is Superfund's interest in this? Where's the local contribution? These are sticky issues that will occur during this phase. Community outreach is something we do early and we do often, and that's also part of this phase.
The cost of developing this plan is $1.8 million dollars over 22 months for a draft report, which will then go out for public comment. The important part is that currently we have over $2 million in hand to develop this report and we are moving on it right now. We are ahead of schedule on some of the items. It will yield all the products prior to breaking ground for construction. So we have a discrete task to accomplish. We have the money to accomplish it at this point for Phase 1.
Phase 2, I'll describe in a lot simpler terms. Build the facility. Remove the sediment and put it in. It's certainly the technically difficult part of it, but the issues that are addressed in the comprehensive management plan process over the coming year and a half will give us those answers that'll allow these actions. Cost-sharing is probably the most important part of that. How did we get the money? There are important new federal authorities to assist AOC that the Ashtabula River RAP and the Ashtabula River Partnership have used. The Water Resources Development Act of 1990 provided authority for technical assistance to RAP groups. That's called Section 401. And it's very generic, it can be used for all types of activities. Section 312 is a little more specific, but it gave first-time environmental dredging authority to the Army Corps of Engineers. They will dredge inside the federal navigation channel at a 100% federal cost for environmental purposes. They'll do environmental dredging for navigation purposes, I should say. They will dredge outside the federal navigation channel for environmental remediation at a 50% federal cost. Disposal cost requirements under Section 312 remain 100% local responsibility.
Clearly the case at Ashtabula, the environmental project has an impact on navigation responsibilities of the Army Corps of Engineers. Let's say you keep a clean navigation channel but you have contaminants discharging into it. It's in the Corps' interest to do some type of environmental remediation so that they can continue with their mandate for federal navigation channel maintenance.
But at this point we can't undertake open lake disposal any more. But here's where the confusion probably is. There are two projects here, the blue is the environmental dredging project. Formerly having federal navigation interest and was dredged to that depth. It hasn't had that in 33 years because we don't have the big boats and commercial interests so they can't justify coming up above the bridge. But this is all the current federal navigation channel that they do dredge and now because the old stuff is coming out into the current channel, we need a CDF like you have or we need to suggest environmental remediation of the upstream sources. So, by remediating this you are, the Corps, is actually helping its mandate to keep this channel clean. These are the upstream sources.
I think it's a new day for the Corps in a lot of ways. I've only been involved in this on and off for eight years so my perspective is not as deep as well, for instance, the state has been having bloody battles with the Corps on these issues. But in 1990, the Great Lakes delegation authorized this new authority and so it's the opening of the door to start doing these things.
Ava Hottman - This, I believe, is the first 401 Agreement ever written with the Army Corps of Engineers.
Brett Kaull - Let me talk about that and continue with the presentation a little bit. To get back on track, how are we paying for it? Last night we heard that in order to move ahead we need a unique mix of funding. We need state participation, federal participation, local participation. I think the Ashtabula partnership has packaged this type of approach. The U.S. EPA has dedicated a quarter of a million dollars to help us develop a comprehensive management plan. Call that goodwill money. I'm sure it's a very good demonstration of goodwill and cooperation and boy, do we appreciate it too. And along those lines $300,000 was added into the bill by former Congressman Eric Fingerhutt, my last employer, to support some type of activities. We decided we are going to use it to hire a project coordinator. We just filled it last week and actually we're dedicating only $200,000 of that towards the project coordinator. EPA dedicated two staff members, we have one of the attorneys on the Indiana Harbor project so he can use his experience to help us and we also have one of the RAP coordinators, Amy Pelka, from Region V, U.S. EPA. They come out to our meetings all the time. Now here's the interesting point that Ava was bringing up. Under the new 401 Authority, the Ohio EPA provided $300,000. They provided the cost share to leverage this new authority for the first time in the nation from the Corps of Engineers. They've also dedicated at least two staff members to the project.
So the Ohio EPA money leveraged a one-to-one match from the Corps of Engineers. That agreement was signed two months ago. It's the first time the 401 money has ever been used before. It's very general money, the RAP can use it in many different ways. We are using it to develop our comprehensive management plan. Now, also and this to me is the most dramatic sign of the Corps of Engineers doing business in a new way, they are shifting money out of their operation maintenance account, which should be used to develop a confined disposal facility on the outer harbor. Right, that's their traditional approach, build this thing, dredge the pollution, stick it in there. They have turned it in towards the development of this plan, of the comprehensive management plan. We hope to learn soon that we have $850,000 from them to do that. So that is a very clear demonstration on their part that they believe that the environmental dredging project will address certain navigation needs. That is a radical change for the Army Corps of Engineers. And they have dedicated two staff members to the project. Oxychem, which is one of the PRPs, but also one of the co-chairs of our partnership, has dedicated $25,000 to help with the sampling. And the community itself is supporting our coordinator position with $10,000 more in cost share.
What I have just described was define sources again for the development of this comprehensive management plan, which will place us on the edge of building the facility and removing the sediments, Phase 1. How do we fund Phase 2? How do you have hopes of accomplishing a project that could run anywhere from $40 to $80 million? That's a big thing to bite off. Well, there's a long standing commitment from Ohio EPA to provide $7 million. Now if you want to use that new environmental dredging authority from the Corps, you've got to match it one-to-one. It's a 50% cost share. Ohio stepped to the plate, and confirmed that when we are ready to dredge, we have a $7 million commitment from the state of Ohio. I'm not saying every RAP can get that, but this is a tool we have. Well with that federal authority, Section 312, we'll have a $14 million package and we think we'll have additional money from the Corps because of the navigation interests that are involved. The private and local contribution is already well demonstrated by $2 million of voluntary testing done by a few cooperating PRPs to characterize the river. If that work wasn't done a couple of years ago we couldn't move with this project, we would have to stop, characterize our river and figure out where we were going to go.
This work was an integral part of the Stage 1 RAP. The RAP was the absolute spring board upon which this partnership was launched. There's no doubt about it. Without that preliminary work we couldn't even start to do this. This is probably the most important point. Why not Superfund? We have to, and we think we can, convince the PRPs that the partnership is a better way to go. I don't expect them to come in entirely out of goodwill. A number of the PRPs are already not cooperating with EPA. You have a small cooperating group then you still have outside PRPs. The bottom line is is that they know from the Fields Brook experience that litigation is a lot of time and a lot of money. We don't have a decade. Our port will shut down probably, boats will have to start light loading in about five years. And when that happens a couple of times -- and this is one of the largest private commercial shipping facilities in the Great Lakes -- when that happens once, twice, that's it they lose their business, we lose the rail, the whole harbor silts in while we wait for Superfund to work or the new Superfund, whatever it is, to work through its problems. Instead we can offer that group to come in with us and say look, we have state contributions, we're leveraging federal money with it, we can buy down your cost to build this disposal facility to take care of the environmental dredging. We encourage Superfund to keep developing the evidence, if you will, they are the 800-pound gorilla in the closet. That is really driving, will help drive the interests of the PRPs to sit down at the table and say, hey not only is it the right thing to do because instead of delaying and shutting this harbor down, but it's the right thing to do financially. We have a financial interest, we are saving money by entering into this partnership and leaving the attorneys at home. Avoiding litigation, moving along timewise. An analogy to that is what drives the community to go to breakneck speed to do this, is the fact that the Corps of Engineers isn't dredging anymore. Our port is shut down. That is our very serious motivation to make this thing work and make it work as fast as possible.
Alice Chamberlin - Do the prime interests see the projects separately?
Rick Brewer - The reality is the relationship is definitely there, particularly with the PRPs on Fields Brook. They know that sooner or later they are going to have to do something to get involved with the river and we have an awful lot of them on as partners now. They want to be part of the design, part of the solution, that is; how do you get from here to there. There are some that are not on yet, they'll come on, once they're convinced that this is the most economical way to do this. How else would you go and get $15 or $20 million of federal, state and other kind of matching money to help you support to do what you'd have to do anyway, somehow, someway.
Elaine Kennedy - Is this really just a hole in the ground or is it a lined containment facility?
Brett Kaull - I was being flippant, I apologize, it'll be designed to be environmentally safe.
Gail Krantzberg - It seems to me, not knowing enough about the site, imperative that Fields Brook cleanup takes place in conjunction with the environmental dredging. Is the Fields Brook site still leaching back into the river?
Rick Brewer - Fields Brook is no longer polluting the river. Because of the NPDES permits that all the companies have to have for their outfalls, the water coming out of the brook now is clean. It's tested all the time; it's not contaminating the river at all. The concern is sediments along the brook are contaminated with 50 years of flushing pollutants down the brook and the concern is that, during a 100-year flood or something, those will get moved into the river. Those have to be removed, but probably the way it looks to me, with the sediments in the brook, would, if anything, be removed before the river is dredged. That happens to be a main concern of everybody involved with the river, too. We do not want to have the river cleaned up, and then have this happen. As a matter of fact, we will not let it happen.
Susan Gilbertson - Legally, statutorily, and with all those regulatory hooks, we can ensure that it moves in an appropriate, phased manner. They are not going to lose their funding because they haven't done something by a certain date. In other words, Fields Brook, and then some of the other things will occur. It will be sequenced, and I think it will all be put together in terms of the funding, and maintaining the legal cleanliness.
Brett Kaull - Let's just take the question from Jim and then Rick is going to talk about a partnership structure, or a milestone, and then hopefully we will have a little time for additional questions are the end.
Jim Murray - Maybe Rick is going to answer, but I don't know what company you are with and what is your interest? So far you have talked about resource, and how valuable it is. What is your company's interest and what brought them to be so vitally interested in the process?
Rick Brewer - My company is the RMI Environmental Services, and we have three plants in Ashtabula, and all our outfalls dump into Fields Brook. So we are PRPs. As far as we know, nothing that we have done over the years, because of what is being cleaned up in the brook, was contributed by us. But, nonetheless, we are involved. We took a very proactive role several years ago and wanted to be involved in the design of the cleanup because it became obvious to us that, if we allowed the U.S. EPA to hire a consultant to determine what the design was going to be, it would likely be much more costly than we would like. That is not a slam -- just how it works -- it ends up being much more costly to clean it up. We decided to be proactive and participate in getting involved in the design, and also began to organize companies to join in with us. We have been on top of Fields Brook as much as any company in the community. But my personal perspective is, I have been boating on the Ashtabula River since 1958; my parents had a boat; my wife's family had a boat. That's where we met. Right beside Fields Brook, at one of the yacht clubs, our parents started the one yacht club right beside the brook. We currently have a boat on the river; I am commodore of the Ashtabula Yacht Club; I have lived in Ashtabula County all my life. It goes beyond the professional and business thing; I have a real interest in the community and the county and what is going on. I am really interested in the resources.
I am a volunteer for the Citizens Committee. I am the co-chair of the coordinating committee of the Ashtabula River Partnership. I am also a member of the RAP. The RAP is a member of the partnership as an organization. We have a lot of organizations; 42 different organizations are partners.
Ava Hottman - Just to clarify a point, there are no citizens committees in Ohio RAPs. Citizens sit with state agencies as equal partners and are appointed to that by the director of the Ohio EPA. What we have is a mixture of partners that sit all around the council. So there isn't any separate committee, they do public outreach and public access, public organization. You work with different organizations but I think it is a really important concept, it is not a citizens committee.
Susan Gilbertson - I think this point illustrates a very critical difference from state to state, the Ohio legal structure accommodates that type of intermingling; whereas in some of the other states, the legal structure may not accommodate that. That is true for the federal government as well. This isn't to say you can't do things similarly, but you have to do them within a different set of operating constructs.
Rick Brewer - What I have to talk about will answer some of the questions. We love to talk about this, but the danger is we like to talk too long about it. "Why a partnership over a stand-alone RAP?" That is a question that we have been asked many times, and really didn't have a formulated answer, so we started to think about it. In our case, the RAP obviously was a seed organization that was facilitated by the Ohio EPA and has really helped us position ourselves to go forward with this partnership. The river project is very complicated because it involves numerous regulatory organizations, including the Corps of Engineers, as stakeholders. And it has Fields Brook, as we have talked about, dumping into it. We thought we needed a buy-in by all the stakeholders and we thought that getting through Stage 1 was an appropriate thing the RAP could handle, and do it very well, but when it comes to implementation we had the feeling that we just don't have the organization together, with cohesiveness, with all the regulators, all the companies, and other organizations in the community that we needed. So we formed this partnership. We developed a charter and clearly defined what it is we wanted to do, and we got folks to sign on to that charter -- I will talk about that in a minute. We developed bylaws because we thought we should have a structure around which the organization would operate; one which everyone had signed on to, and understood. Those were the first two things we did. We spent a lot of time doing that, it seems to some folks that it was a waste of time, but I think it has really helped us, as Susan has indicated yesterday. You need to have a plan, and that was a structure on which we operated. We also talked with management from the regulatory organizations, as well as industry. We came to Ashtabula on the 7th of July last year and signed before the media and the whole world, that they support this project by signing a charter that we had. And they made a little speech and indicated that they signed, or that they approved the partnership.
Through the persistence of the RAP never giving up, along with the successes the RAP had; we had a more broad-based partnership. The goal of the partnership is pretty simple and short: to look beyond traditional approaches to determine a comprehensive solution for the impairment of beneficial uses posed by the contaminated sediments not suitable for open lake disposal. The mission is basically broken down into four areas. The first is to find contaminated sediments to be addressed. As we have already talked, that is pretty well underway. The extensive $2 million study along with the supplemental study as done by the U.S. EPA and the Corps of Engineers. They have pretty well taken up most of the samples that should tell us what the contaminants are and the volume we are going to have to worry about removing, in terms of sediment: develop a detailed plan for sediment remediation -- that is well underway -- the Corps of Engineers, at our request, is taking a lead on that and developing a comprehensive management plan and an environmental impact statement. From time to time, they have agreed to come back to the partnership, and have us review it for approval. We have also told the Corps that we wanted the opportunity to have input to that, because we feel there are people in Ashtabula that can better do some of that than the Corps of Engineers sitting in Buffalo, and they have agreed with that. If you think about all that, when was the last time you heard the Corps say they were going to bring something back to anybody, for approval?
I think what we are talking about is different ways that this partnership really works. The Corps is a strong partner, and they are excited about this. We need to identify the resource needs to implementation and that is going to be ongoing. We are always going to have to wonder where the money is coming from to do the work. We have already done a lot of that and have some ideas, looking two, three, and four years down the road, for things we need to do. Generate a a timeline of milestones and activity -- that is being done concurrently with the development of the comprehensive management plan by the Corps and by the communities that are involved. I believe we need to have a schedule and I know Ava indicated yesterday that she doesn't like schedules imposed from above, but I believe you need to have a schedule because, if you don't have a schedule, I think you are in free-fall and I don't think you have anything to work toward. I think you have difficulty measuring your performance. If you can't measure your performance and show you have some successes, I think you are going to lose commitment from people who are working in the program.
I will talk a little about our organization. We have five committees; the coordinating committee is the managing committee; and we intentionally named that committee the coordinating committee instead of the steering committee, because steering committees are used in Superfund projects and we didn't want any relationship in our terminology with Superfund projects. The coordinating committee, as I indicated, manages the project; the siting committee, the project committee, and the outreach committee and resource committee are the other standing committees that report to us. The coordinating committee has the leadership role for the day-to-day decisions for the partnership. Somebody has to be available to take the calls and answer questions, and make decisions. We then report back on a quarterly basis on decisions.
I have been spending a lot of time on these activities -- I am hoping to get relieved here pretty soon -- because we have just hired a coordinator. I have been spending a lot of time; a local plant manager is a co-chair on our coordinating committee with me has been spending a lot of time.
The siting committee is responsible for the disposal of the site and they have already done that; recommended the disposal site, have a short list of three sites; and they will feed information to the project committee and the Corps of Engineers to assist in the environmental impact statement development. I might add that we have a lot of technical people who are highly qualified on all these committees. I think that is one thing you have to look for, is some professionals to get in your committees. You need professional leadership, I think, if you really want to move a project like this. The job of the project committee is to develop the scope of the project and do the design work, do the scheduling, lay out the milestones, build the comprehensive management plan. This is an extremely important committee and we have a highly talented person chairing it.
The outreach committee is supposed to educate and inform the community on what is going on at all times, particularly when there are major things to talk about, and they are also supposed to educate and inform internally the partnership. You can't just be worried about the public; you have to make sure the people in your own organization know what is going on. We have a woman that is leading our outreach committee. She is a real professional; she has a Master's degree in Marketing; she is a former public relations person. I think if you want to be successful, you had better put the right people in the right positions to lead. She is a volunteer, she has her own consulting business.
The resource committee is responsible for aligning the resources; looking for money wherever they can; for implementation; and it comes to two forms: money resources and other resources such as any kind of assistance which you can get from some of the partners that have expertise in certain areas that they would care to commit to the project. I want to quickly go over some of our accomplishments to show you how this organization has worked.
Basically, most of the major accomplishments have happened in the last six to seven months because we haven't really been organized that long as a partnership. We also want to brag a little bit about a couple of acknowledgements that we have gotten in the community here. In 1994 the concept was presented to the RAP; on July 7th the partnership kick-off meeting was held in Ashtabula. We had an excellent turnout; good media coverage; a lot of sign-ups that day. August 25th we had our first organizational meeting where these committees, which I just went over, were established, and what it is these committees would do; and we also signed on the committee membership. We have a strong committee membership in each of those committee areas. On September of 1994 we received a Best of the County Award. This is an award that is given out every year in September by a local organization, at a big dinner where you have 500-700 people and eight of these awards are given out annually; so we are pretty proud of that. In February 1995 we were nominated for the President's Award, Service Award. We didn't win it but the President wrote a letter and congratulated us on participating. We made a presentation at an Economics Profile breakfast, which is an important monthly breakfast where economic development projects are presented and our county considers this a major impact on the economy. In may 1995 the Ohio EPA gave us a $300,000 grant and we decided to leverage $300,000 more from the Corps. In June we announced to the public a short list of contaminated sediment storage sites. There was a televised news conference, along with the newspaper and radio media. Also in June we issued development of a comprehensive management plan and the environmental impact statement. The Corps took a lead on that, and that is underway. We received regulatory approval for the quality assurance plan of sampling the Mudpuppy was doing.
These have typically taken up to two years, getting them to a regulatory organization, and I think that is one of the benefits of having the U.S. EPA and the other organizations as partners. Nobody seems to want to be in the way of this thing. They want to get the ball out of their courts as fast as they can. In June 1995 we completed additional sediment sampling of the river; the Mudpuppy was there. The one thing I want to mention here is the dedication of the people. We had U.S. EPA people, and Corps people on the Mudpuppy, with their contractors. They had some mechanical problems beyond their control, and therefore they had to stay over extra days. It ended up that they stayed over the July 4th weekend; working 13-14 hours per day, in 95-degree heat, just to get this done on time. I think that is a real sign of commitment. Finally on July 17th we hired somebody to begin to replace me and my partner for a lot of the work we are doing, and be a full-time partnership coordinator. We also opened up an office down in the harbor area. On July 21 we completed a comprehensive outreach plan which I would be glad to go over with some of you folks later. It is a pretty interesting plan that our chairperson came up with.
The next topic, and the last one I have, is "What is required to establish a partnership that works?" and these are just my opinions with some of the things we have done. I think, first, you have to have a vision of what it is that you really want to accomplish to get real interest. Secondly, you need a mission. How are you going to go about doing it; what direction are you going to go? A clear definition of what is in it for the partners or participants. I think that is always true to make it successful. People want to know, "What's in it for me?" How will the community benefit? You need to be able to tell the public what is in it for them as well. Committed leadership; I don't think we could talk about that long enough. It takes a lot of personal time and effort and real leadership and drive to make this successful. The resources to get it started were very important; the assistance we received from the U.S. EPA, Ohio EPA and the Corps was essential.
You need an aggressive outreach program to reach the public. We don't want to get caught blindsiding the public somewhere down the road, with something we are going to do, and somebody says they didn't have a chance to address that or ask questions. We think it is very important that we have an excellent relationship with all the media. Don't blindside the media and drop something on them either, because they are your main conduit to the public. Dedication of the project's success by regulators in an aggressive fashion; that relates back to the 4th of July thing; it relates to getting the QA/QC approved in record time. Those kinds of things we need the regulators to be aggressive, and they may not be used to being aggressive on certain things; sometimes it is hard to get bureaucracy moving. Commitment from all the parties to expedite activities under their control. The ball is in your court; don't let it land on the ground and stop rolling; pick it up and get it out. You've got something to do; get it done. If you don't, the co-chairs or the coordinator are going to be on your back.
This last item may be the most important one. I think the plan has to be a "bottoms-up" plan, developed by all the players from the bottom, rather than somebody coming from the top down; and telling you how you are going to do it. Get everybody in a room; you can get a team formed and develop a plan; and agree that is what you are going to try and follow. We aren't trying to live outside any regulations, we are trying to live within the regulations; but you have to have everybody on the board. I don't think you can just have one regulatory agency on the board; and when you get all done, expect the other regulatory agency to buy in. You had better get them on board in the beginning.
Bruce Kirschner - Our next speaker is going to Virginia Aveni. She is going to talk to us about a Brownfields Initiative, which has been undertaken in Cuyahoga County, and explain how that may be useful in other AOCs.
Virginia Aveni
Senior Planner, Cuyahoga County Planning Commission
I will give you a little background about how we got into this, and I believe that Bruce wanted this presentation largely because it is a parallel to a RAP; it is based and was organized very much like the RAPs are, by using a stakeholders group to do the identifying of the problem and the planning; and it has grown into an advocacy group for our recommendations. The Cuyahoga County Planning Commission picked up an initiative on Brownsfield Redevelopment; and Brownfield we define as property which, either through perception or reality, is contaminated and has environmental impairments, which prohibit redevelopment and reuse of the property. In doing our work plan at the Planning Commission, which has been very much involved in the RAP, we will get all the environmental problems, that is my responsibility for environmental planning for the Planning Commission, what the environmental problems were, which were affecting the regional dynamics of the county and that was outmigration which had developed to the point that, within the geographic area in the county, we had lost about 43% over 10 years of our industrial capacity. We had, for the first time in 1990, more housing starts taking place around Cuyahoga County than were within the county. The problem of redevelopment was compounded by Superfund. Then this whole presentation kind of goes back to the liabilities of Superfund, and most of you are familiar with that, and know that the strict, joint and separate liability of Superfund requires that anybody who has ever had title to the property or deposited anything on the property is liable under Superfund law for their own contribution, and all of the cleanup that may be required and, with that, the liability has been in case law, extended to lenders, not based on their contribution but on a possible management role on that particular property as well. There is some debate whether in fact that law was really misinterpreted, but it had literally dried up any lending and, I think all of us in the Great Lakes basin can relate to this, that in the core cities, for older industrial property it is extremely difficult to get a loan to do any reuse for a new owner, or even for owners on the property itself. We had a case in Cuyahoga County where a foundry could not get the loan to do the air pollution control equipment that was required by the Clean Air Act and the Air Pollution Control Regulations. This was based on the fact that they were contributors to the very contamination that they needed to clean up and this is not an unusual case.
So, the discussion came down within our community: "What do we need to do about this," and we decided the first thing we needed to do was to bring all of the people to the table for an educational effort to understand what all the impairments may be. We identified those, not only as regulatory, based on Superfund law; but financial, because the cost of the redevelopment, the remediation, the assessments, and the very low markets in these areas, because there is so much property that fell into this characterization that the cost in financial resources were a major impairment.
The community was not together on either what the issue might be; exactly on what might be done about it, or even the way to manage it. We found, in our city at least, in our core city in Cleveland, that within the city structure -- and this could be true of our county government as well -- local governments don't deal with this on the same basis. They have an Economic Development Office over here, that is basically based on doing deals; in anything anyone wants to bring in, we want jobs so badly that we will take any project. You know, zoning may be changed, you can build on the lakefront, anything to get jobs in the community. The Building Department has a budget for demolition that is not related to the future use of the property and so the cleanup there basically called for the dumping of all the demolition material into what may have been a basement, covering it over and then here is land that may be land-banked for the future because there is not a private owner. It may be condemned for tax purposes, or whatever. But, we are growing exponentially acres and acres of land in the area, so that there are not community strategies. There are health departments; they are not in some cases trained or did not have the staff to do the necessary assessments. And they didn't talk to the economic development people in the end, except as required on a project-by- project basis.
We decided we needed community strategies development to try to bring this local capacity building together. Our commissioners, and two of our major foundations (the Georgetown Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation) gave us a grant to do a symposium, and it was a fun project because, the very kind leadership, interest and commitment which Rick Brewer displayed, we found people eager to participate; to come from all over the country; to really give us expertise on what people were doing in each one of these areas. The Northeast- Midwest Institute was one of our most perspective supporters in this area. We have used and built on a lot of work that they had done in Chicago the year before that. We seemed to be at a peak time when people really wanted to find out what to do to redevelop our industrial cities, in the Great Lakes, in the Northeast particularly.
We literally draw from the whole eastern part of the United States. We had people from about four to five states outside the Great Lakes who attended and the target was the regulators themselves, both state and federal regulators; local planning groups; economic development people; developers; bankers; and the citizens in environmental organizations. The representation was probably about equal, although it was more on the development side, except for environmental professionals from corporations that were largely in the business, and especially in the business of doing assessments and remediation projects. When we finished the sessions, we had breakout sessions in the afternoon, and the community strategies team came back with the recommendations that we needed. A followup which we accomplished by having the commissioners appoint a 42-member stakeholders committee, modelled on the RAPs, to look at what we needed to do to help remove the barriers. After six months of intensive deliberation, we had meetings every two weeks, and the business community, particularly -- it is amazing that people will take that much time from their regular work to attend these meetings, which would run about two hours in the morning -- then spend the time that it took to what developed into a strategic planning committee to come back with the recommendations, and actually write them. Our report looks like this, and we have gone into three printings of this and it has been sent to everybody and their dog, who has looked at Brownfields because of the interest in developing the same kind of a model.
When we issued our report based on a kind of strategic plan, which included both private and public sectors actions, and we actually broke that down into what would be almost voluntary actions, including management, changes and regulatory changes (both statutory and rule- making) it would indicate what Ohio EPA and U.S. EPA might do to solve the problem without changing any laws. While we were doing this, we were not the only people in Ohio doing it. The Governor had appointed another committee that was working in parallel in Columbus on state legislation for a voluntary cleanup program. We completed our process in time to weigh in and do quite a bit of advocacy and lobbying. The recommendation of this brownfields group was for a regulatory program, to allow voluntary cleanups within a Superfund framework, but to have oversight by the Ohio EPA. The group there recommended a totally privatized program, where certified contractors would do the assessments and the remediation plan, to be submitted to the agency, which, on approval, would get to what would be a generic/numeric standards which would be developed. Either generic/numeric standards or a risk assessment, site-specific risk assessment that would meet required risk goals. A 'no further action' letter would be issued by a certified professional, and the agency director would issue a covenant not to sue. There was a lot of anxiety about this in the environmental community, by taking the state's civil responsibility completely out of what future problems might arise on the property. At any rate, the State Bill passed with that privatized kind of a program and is now engaged in an intensive rule-making with a similar kind of committee. This is really like watching sausage being made, because we have people who are actually developing what will be these actions in the statutory framework, probably at a new level.
U.S. EPA, at the same time that we completed our report, was interested in what was going on, and our congressman at the time, Congressman Stokes, had already brought a grant into Cuyahoga County for the community college to help do an environmental justice piece, and a work equity project, to help train people in assessment and remediation. They decided this was a good pairing and offered us a grant for $200,000. We were not even seeking money to do this, but to continue a way that local government might provide the demonstration of how we do these projects at the local level. We are finishing our second year as a model demonstration community. The effect of the use of that money has been that the agency has been amazingly open to actually take out the pieces and use policy development coming out of that. Of course, it is not just us, it is the rest of the folks at local government that they have turned to, to see what can be done to help get the regulations out of the way and actually define this piece out of Superfund. The first thing they did was announce the delisting of all the low and medium priority sites on the CERCLIS list that fall down below Superfund level. That is a result of what we, and other folks going to them and saying, "Yes, we would be glad to help provide the local leadership on this, but what can you bring to the table?" We don't have funds to clean up the property; the regulations are in the way; and, in our experience, we will not get a sign-off by U.S. EPA of how 'clean is clean' when you get through. It is the time factor as much as the cost that kills any reuse of the properties. Lenders will not lend when they do not know there is a return to come back on whatever investment they are putting out. U.S. EPA says we can write a 'comfort letter' which says, "If there is a state program in place," and perspectively Ohio EPA came in to fill this gap and actually provide a lot of leadership. It has been a very proactive and much more flexible partnership, although informal at this time. There is no formalization of these roles.
The other thing that U.S. EPA brought out of this was a development of soil standards work that they are doing, which will hopefully, at some point, follow what the state has in generic/numerical standards, based on the future use of the property. Our state law said that they will use the Superfund range as far as the risk goal, and we are arm wrestling now on the subcommittee on what the finalization will be in state program. Most of the other states, and I believe that Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois -- all of the Great Lakes states, except New York -- have voluntary programs. Pennsylvania just passed theirs. They are all a little bit different. The next thing U.S. EPA has done is recognize these state programs, formally for what is defined as 'The Brownfields' again, the sites less than Superfund, that qualify for a memorandum of understanding between two states where those programs have been recognized. That is Minnesota and Illinois. We hope that Ohio will be recognized as soon as our rulemaking is done and it all takes effect in the fall.
The local capacity building of the piece that I passed around -- the local elements are that we are going to be working on the next year -- and those include trying to integrate the Brownfields Program and voluntary cleanup program by educating people within our economic development community. There needs to be a local capacity, not necessarily for doing the field work, but working with the contractors in feeling a familiarity. That seems to be the bottom line as far as the lenders go. If you find banks where they have someone on staff who has worked with contractors in the area, understands the law, and develops a comfort with the professionals in the field, and feels confident, there are still loans going on on those properties, even in Cuyahoga County. Absent the sophistication that is built up by volunteer persons on the RAPs and so on or professionals in the field, you don't have the local capacity to deal with this.
The next thing we are going to be concentrating on is the establishment of a geographic information system (GIS) for the county. Our initial survey, which is very rough, was that about 14% of the property in Cuyahoga County is a brownfields site, because they may or may not need remediation, but they at least have to have an assessment, because there has been an industrial use on it. The GIS -- we have already built up the database -- and this is going on a parallel stage. U.S. EPA can deliver a CD ROM with at least their own database on that, that can be tied to other files to illustrate what the uses have been on the property, and some base level information. We just received about $90,000 in a grant that we are going to be expanding on that, and adding other characterizations that we think will give a pretty good profile of what the environmental definition will be of the property, including degree slope, wetlands, defining the flood plains, etc., and then bringing in the possible contamination part. Integrating the economic development plan for your area, with the environmental information, and I think that is where we are at in the Cuyahoga RAP. We are beginning to look at the factors that work in the reverse area: what are the federal policies that are pushing the abandonment of these areas, and the outmigration that is affecting grey fields at the same time? It's the problem of continued expansion of highways, even industrial revenue, policies on capital gains, and a whole range of things that are continuing to drag our economy from the inner city out to the other areas.
The public health capability is something we don't have a good handle on, either. I will close with the information that we have, and don't have, on groundwater. That is going to be the hardest thing within our state volunteer program, for us to know how functionally and legally to define groundwater contamination and what the remediation strategies are for that. We don't have groundwater as a source of drinking water in Cuyahoga County, so we are looking at a whole classification system for the state. It is a deal breaker, as far as the cost. If we have to pump and treat groundwater, where we have literally hundreds and thousands of acres in an area, most of that property won't move; it will continue to sit; the cost is too high; there is not enough market for it; and so the property will continue to sit and, if you have leaching problems, the environmental problem will probably go on. But the cost of cleaning it up to what is a safe level for public health use, and a way of determining what the travel time, etc. go onto the modelling of what that particular standard will be, and what sort of remediation is going to be necessary on those sites. That is something we need to look at locally, but I don't know whether we would want that written into state law, because it might mean that nobody would use this law. It is a real challenge.
I echo exactly what Rick said about what it takes to make these programs work. It is requiring leadership and commitment, and it seems to me this is the time when people are especially interested in being involved in what the planning for their community is going to look like for the future. Land use seems to be one of the hottest buttons that comes back to what we expect to be doing with this property, as it is reused. We are not going to have large industrial capacity and great new steel plants that are a mile or two miles long, but we do have industrial uses and manufacturing picking up. I would just tell you we have gone the next step in looking at financing in the state, and in Cuyahoga County we have been arguing for grant money. There is a need for public money to help do the strategic part of this. Even with the privatized program, the really difficult-to-do side needs at least to be offerable by the local economic development people. Just like building a new industrial park, we need to at least be able to come in with enough money for the assessments to say: this is the cost; we have the infrastructure here for you; we have other advantages of being here; and the perspective cost to clean up is this much. We don't have money to do that. There are new bills in the state legislature that do this, but they also are encouraging rural industrial parks, but we need to think about what an 'urban industrial park' would look like. At the same time, we are still interested in the rural industrial areas. We do need public money to do this, and we don't have it at the local level.
Bruce Kirschner - Our next speaker is going to be Kathy Bero. She is going to be talking to us about community education projects that they have piloted in Milwaukee, and they are used in other areas now in Wisconsin.
Kathy Bero
Wisconsin Director, Lake Michigan Federation
I do things a little differently, so you will have to bear with me. I have some videos to show you. I do want to ask you a couple of questions: I want you to raise your hand if you have heard of the problems facing the habitats, or the species within the habitat. The Serengeti Plains? The Amazon Rain Forest? The Great Barrier Reef? What do all these places have that the Great Lakes don't? They have nothing on the Great Lakes except one thing: and that is a really good marketing strategy. Would anyone disagree?
Here in the Great Lakes we have, and some of you might be familiar with these; we have approximately 65 species in habitat that are globally rare, or found no where else in the world. How many of you knew that? I frankly didn't know that until about six months ago. There are approximately 38 million people who live here. That is a really formidable force if they are informed and activated; we have a lot of people here. Some of you might have seen the Communications Consortium Media Center's report on what people think about the environment, and how to educate people about environment. It had some very interesting information. It was an opinions trend study; and one of the things it said was that people in general, from the surveys they put together, feel environmentalists exaggerate the threats to the environment; and 28% in 1991 agreed with that statement. Now, in 1995, 42% agree with that. No 2: Threats are as serious as the environmentalists say they are. In 1991, 66% of the people believed that to be true; now 48%. The third point that I thought was interesting was that: In the last 10 years, has the condition of the environment gotten worse? Today, 45% of the people believe that is true. So, if 45% of the people believe that is true, in the Great Lakes basin alone we are talking about 17 million people -- that is a lot of people to rally around cleaning up the Great Lakes. Where are they? At the International Joint Commission meeting? We get only 600, 800 persons, something like that. Pretty minuscule. So how do we get all these people going? How do we get them excited about the Great Lakes? Well, how do we get them excited about virtual elimination, or zero discharge? What do those terms even mean? I can't tell you how many meetings I have been to, where we have talked about, how do you define virtual elimination?
With this question in mind, about four years ago the Lake Michigan Federation decided it is time to try to get some really solid marketing kinds of programs that are educational. We basically called them 'public empowerment campaigns.' We are not talking about strict marketing and advertising; but we are talking about getting people excited with information. The first one that we decided to go on was, household pollution prevention, and, being honest here, when I came up with this idea and wrote the grants, even my boss didn't support it. There were no environmental organizations in the basin that supported a campaign on household pollution prevention. We have all seen the little fact sheets showing alternate recipes you can use in your home, and all that kind of stuff. Well, everybody said: "Why are you wasting all this time on puff projects?" My boss said to me: "If you can raise the money, you can do the project. But I am not putting any time into it." I went to the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, which is a fairly progressive sewage treatment plant, and they committed $75,000. That is how strongly they believed that this would have an impact on their inputs into the system. Households are an area that you can't get to; you can't regulate them; very difficult to track them up the pipe and see who is doing what. They said this would be a great opportunity for us to get informational materials out to the public to let them know what they are doing. It also serves a second role: once they know what they are doing in their homes, then they will take that further. We hope they would take the next step, and they did, and I will tell you about that in a second.
What we did was: The Sewerage District supported the first year, and then we had funding through U.S. EPA and Milwaukee Foundation to support some of the work in the second year. We also started receiving a lot of attention. We won the Best Environmental Education Award in the country -- we beat out Texas -- and some of you might not understand that Texas comes up with some really good educational programs. I sat next to their Attorney General when getting the award and she was very sad. They are used to winning it every year. It has gotten a lot of attention, nationwide.
I have a lot of literature which you can take with you. But, what I want to do is show you a couple of clips from some of the videos we have been using in the public service announcements (PSAs). The way this project works is we developed a recipe book. None of the information is original, or new. It's all from various other sources that we just put together in an attractive way. It is a self-mailer, and it is very simple for people to read, and we have series of other brochures that go with it. People get really excited about this. We started, in Milwaukee by doing a six-part series on outdoor Wisconsin. I don't know if you are familiar with that, but they air in 15 different states. They have a pretty wide viewing audience and they showed us, mixing up some of these recipes. That, in conjunction with the No. 1 television station aired our PSAs at prime time during Oprah, and at night time. They never did them in the middle of the night, or early morning. They were really great about it. Between those two things, we got calls from literally thousands of people. When the PSA would air, we would have phone calls every two minutes for about a week to a week-and-a- half. I mean the phone was ringing off the wall. We had no way of knowing this was going to happen.
What we started to notice, after that first week-and-a-half, we were also very good at getting these things out immediately; within two days of the call, it went in the mail, so people didn't lose their enthusiasm. After about three to four weeks, we started getting another rash of calls; not as often, but pretty numerous. And one of our volunteers started noticing that these calls were coming from people on the same streets that had called originally, so they were getting their guide, and they were sharing it with their neighbor. Then they were calling and asking for a couple; I am going to send it to my daughter, or my friend over here. We got calls literally from all over the country. Right now, apparently, something is being aired in Florida. Last week we got a lot of calls from Florida -- we just don't know where they are going to come from next. Over 300 communities are now using this program.
The key to this program, with the PSAs and videos and the written materials, is that we let any community that wants to, change the lines that say "for information, contact." They also can change their resources, and all that stuff. So they now have ownership of this. They feel they can really get behind it; they only have to pay $100 to get all the masters; and then they do whatever they want to do with it, with regard to distribution. So over 300 communities, in four countries, are using it: U.S., Canada, Argentina, and now also in South Africa. It is getting wide distribution for, I think, two reasons: 1) it is simple, very simple, and it tells people what they can do as individuals at home, where they are comfortable, and where they feel they can have control; and 2) it's fun. We had comedians do the videos and PSAs, so it is fun for people to get involved. They don't feel threatened; we don't have a lot of big words; we don't have lots of big concepts; this is very simple. This is the foundation from which we can then start getting people involved in conversations of zero discharge and virtual elimination. You can't get people to feel comfortable with these terms if they are uncomfortable, and it is not going to happen by throwing them a bunch of reports, and saying 'read this and then you are going to know' and then come out to a public hearing and talk. This is a much longer-term strategy but it is building a really strong baseline.
Bruce Kirschner - Mark Mitchell, the Director of the Rouge River Education Project will now outline some successful techniques for implementing an information and education strategy.
Mark Mitchell
Director, Rouge Education Project
The area which I'm going to talk about is southeast Michigan. (Slides) This is Lake Huron up here, of course, St. Clair River coming down, Lake St. Clair, Detroit River, western Lake Erie and so what we are talking about is this area here, southeast Michigan. Another satellite photo moving into the Detroit area, downtown and in the suburbs. Basically this area that I'm circling is the Rouge watershed, 465 square mi