ALRC Committee Minutes October 5, 2001
In attendance from the community were: Lee Miller, Jim English, Steve Macdonald, May Gerstle, Lyman Houghton and Rita Schenck. Bonnie Meyer represented Public Health Seattle-King County.
Minutes from September 7th were accepted with modification. Minutes from the September 21st meeting were accepted w/o modification.
The roster was reviewed, and corrections made. Rita will distribute the corrected roster.
The draft letter to the legislators was reviewed and modified. Rita is to send modifications to Jim and he will sign it and email it to our legislators ASAP. Time is critical in this task, because official notice that the Statement of Work is to be modified is imminent.
The NAS Arsenic in Drinking Water News Release was distributed.
The New Mission Statement was approved unanimously.
It was suggested that since Molly Gibbs of DOE, has problems communicating with more than one committee member at a time. It was suggested that May should be the be main contact for DOE since she was already working with Molly on the ground rules and has a good working relationship. Lyman and others agreed.
The Mission statement sets up activities, and we arranged those activities into sub-committees. The membership and leadership of each is below.
- Gathering and disseminating-- information May leads, Lyman and Nan (if willing) will serve on sub-committee.
- Facilitating Research-- Rita leads, with Steve on the sub-committee
- Working with individuals and groups from the community as well as government agencies (except DOE). Jim leads, with Lee and Steve on the sub- committee
- Fostering successful partnerships-- Lyman leads, with Jim on the sub-committee
- Taking action to clean up our island-- Shaheeda leads.
May will send the mission statement and sub-committee information to Molly Gibbs.
Goals and objectives will be discussed at the next meeting as well as ground rules. May will circulate drafts for discussion.
We discussed the recent experience with Ecology and their quarterly newsletter. We note here for the record that Ecology contacted us less than 4 hours before their deadline, and we provided finished material on time, but they refused to publish it. Both the Ticket and the Beachcomber will be publishing our article anyway.
We reviewed a "remediation" article to be sent to the papers by May. Rita has also written an article showing a risk assessment based on the latest information from the National Academy of Sciences publication on the toxicity of arsenic.
Bonnie passed out an evaluation/survey to help Public Health Seattle-King County to better communicate to residents of King County.
Our next meeting will be at the Library on Friday November 2, at 3:30 PM. The State Department of. Ecology has asked to attend. Lyman stated that it is important that DOE communicate their agenda well in advance of the meeting and that he length of their presentation be expressed before the meeting as well. This will help our meetings stay on track and focused on Island business. The public is encouraged to attend as well. Lyman also asked that we make a determined effort to involve more community members----the work load is growing.
There was an update on the phytoremediation project
Respectfully submitted by Rita Schenck.