Post 8.

One of the tasks that I both hated and loved was transcribing public meeting recordings. For every contaminated site that is listed either under WQARF or Superfund, the Outreach Unit has to create a community advisory board (CAB) that functions as a go between for the impacted neighborhoods and the parties involved in the clean-up, whether it be those responsible for the contamination or an outside company contracted to clean up the site. Throughout the process, the details of the site are presented to the CAB as are the plans for how it will be treated and what that might mean for the residents living around the site. While I definitely advocate the creation of a community board, it oftentimes doesn't function as it should. Listening to the meetings that sometimes lasted 2 hrs was painful, even for someone like me who had background knowledge of some of the presentation material. The presentations were often highly technical in nature especially when they had the geologists outside of ADEQ present their findings to the public. In some cases, the public meetings were meant to deliberate on what would be the best course of action for the site and who the responsible party should be. You can imagine how heated some of these "discussions" got as companies tried to wiggle their way out of paying for the clean-up while local residents were greatly concerned about how this would affect their neighborhood.

I recently watched a PBS special regarding a small town in Kentucky who is fighting against coal mining companies. Here, we have a similar situation where a community advisory board is chosen to discuss what the best course of action should be for their town. Should they accept the monetary compensation offered by the coal companies that will ultimately end in mountaintop removal? Or should they fight the coal company and band together to help support their local economy using other means? Surprisingly, the little town won the battle utilizing simple strategies like public meetings and writing letters, but the difference was that the whole town participated and got behind a cause.

One of the main complaints from the supervisor I worked with was that they didn't get a lot of participation from the residents and it was like pulling teeth to form some of the community boards because people didn't "have the time" or thought it wasn't worth the effort and so on and so on. Unfortunately, this is the state of affairs in most US cities. Citizen engagement is a declining trend but is one that has the potential to be the most powerful-if only people realized it.