RISK COMMUNICATION IN COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION: COMPARING REGIONAL PROGRAMS IN SOUTH FLORIDA
Impact/Purpose:
This project compares the Environmental Protection Agency's CERCLA and the Army Corps of Engineers' Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) remedy- selection processes in order to assess the relative viability of various risk communication strategies for enhancing citizen involvement in and acceptance of public environmental decision-making in a large geographic area. The objectives of this project are: (1) to assess the level of citizen participation and involvement at various stages of the decision-making process under CERCLA and CERP; (2) to assess acceptance within various relevant affected communities, especially African-American, Hispanic, and Native American communities, regarding remedy selection; (3) to evaluate risk communication processes and strategies employed by governmental entities associated with these projects and related cost accounting methodologies used in feasibility studies; and (4) to develop recommendations regarding effective risk communication strategies and costs accounting for larger, diverse geographic areas.
Description:
Comparison of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) decision-making regimes revealed several parallels. Both regimes envision government acting as a force to remediate environmental damage rather than to restrain or prevent ongoing or future pollution. Thus, there were similar uneasy relationships in both programs between these regimes and environmental regulatory regimes under other statutes. However, the two programs developed differing approaches to accommodating environmental regulatory statutes, such as the Safe Drinking Water Act or the Clean Water Act. An important contrast between the two regimes is their varying perspectives on the role of judicial review.
Florida’s Acceler8 initiative, begun in the fall of 2004 during the project period, permitted the state to accelerate from CERP’s timetable a number of Everglades restoration projects through the use of state borrowing authority. The initiative was partly an intergovernmental response to an emerging cumbersome, federal CERP decision-making process. For many months during the project period, the Corps’ guidance, procedures, and practices limited interaction between the public and scientists, engineers, and managers at meetings nominally open to the public. Where the Corps needed regular stakeholder involvement in decision-making, it had to “work around” statutes such as the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) to structure that involvement. Ironically, federal law intended to guarantee public openness and access ended up complicating the Corps’ objective of providing meaningful public involvement. Adaptive management led to reliance on more streamlined state financing and administrative processes, with federal influences limited to regulatory requirements that are not a special part of CERP, such as the Clean Water Act’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) and Section 404 processes. The project identified a small group of key career public servants who are making CERP implementation and intergovernmental cooperation work despite the obstacles noted above.
The general public’s misconceptions about Everglades restoration in part resulted from a higher degree of publicity about particularly sensational, affectively charged aspects of the enterprise, such as controversial litigation. These included misperceptions about the sources of phosphorus contamination, risks associated with aquifer storage and recovery systems, and the role of various governmental institutions in Everglades decision-making.