Since my recent statement commenting on U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell's TV ad broadcast in Western Kentucky, has been distributed more widely than any other statement I've written on Rural Thoughts, I thought I might elaborate a bit more. In the ad, McConnell pretty much claims to have been single handedly responsible for the sick worker's compensation program for the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
But it has me thinking that maybe I should write down more of what happened and my perception of McConnell's role in things regarding the plant while I was both a member and chair of the CAB as well as my involvement as a concerned citizen.
There are a myriad of issues surrounding the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant site other than worker's compensation. But that issue is intertwined with the environmental issues at the plant, as it was a lack of concern for the environment that lead to the workers being unnecessarily and unknowingly exposed. This column won't address some issues, (i.e., plant neighbors whose property has been contaminated with no relief from the government) but it does, I believe, provide additional insight into the system's view of environmental issues. McConnell, being a big part of that system for the last couple decades, is both a part of that view, and has to share some responsibility for the results of having that view. It becomes clear pretty quick that environmental and worker protection was not at the top of the list for those responsible for the operation and maintenance of the PGDP, and McConnell has to share a significant responsibility for the huge problems.
This column will focus on the oversight activities of the DOE's Paducah "Site Specific Advisory Board." This is DOE's "official" "Citizen's Advisory Board" (CAB) that gives the agency input on cleanup activities at the plant. At the Paducah site, this has been an entity, funded by DOE, for over a decade. As I stated previously, I was a member for the first 8 years, and served as chair or co-chair for 6 of those years. DOE spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on administrative support and travel for the CAB, although members do not get compensated for their time. A CAB is required by law to be "fairly balanced" in terms of points of view represented. Ours was pretty much that way. We had everything from plant workers to environmental activists. We did our best to review information and give recommendations. It wasn't easy to come to consensus, but we did a number of times.
We constantly complained that DOE would have already decided on projects before they let us in on it, and the CAB continually asked for earlier input and better information. Nevertheless, a cleanup plan of some sort emerged, and there were projects ongoing. A few things the CAB approved, but most of time we complained about their priorities and the way the money was being spent.
During my tenure on the CAB, George W. Bush was appointed to become the head of the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government by the U.S. Supreme Court. I mean, come on, he certainly wasn't "elected" by any sense of the word. But that's a whole other encyclopedia. As head of the Executive Branch, he became top dog of all the federal agencies. That includes the U.S. Dept. of Energy, or DOE as we not so fondly refer to them. Like male dogs marking their territory, new presidents (maybe less successfully than male dogs) like to leave their mark, or philosophy of government, on the agencies under him (or her, although there hasn't been a "her" yet). If a new president, or governor for that matter, comes in after a two term or more president or governor, it can be a slow and painstaking job to change an agency throughout the agency. You can't just fire everyone and put in your people. That was done one time too many and there are laws against it. Ask Ernie Fletcher, who recently ran afoul of the same thing as Governor of Kentucky.
But with the DOE, Bush, being an oilman, viewed the DOE more as important from the production end of the energy issue. Environmental cleanup wasn't a priority. He also was looking for nooks and cranies in the budget to cut so he could fund other things, like never ending war in the middle east. No brainer - let's cut environmental cleanup across the board! Bush also had his own business buddies that he was trying to steer more money toward.
He had a problem though. Most of the major DOE sites already had cleanup agreements in place with the state regulatory agency for the state in which the facility was located. Those cleanup agreements were, for the most part, developed with citizen's advisory boards (ill informed and ultimately powerless as they were) and were part of legally required agreements to remediate "superfund" sites (not in every case). There was buy-in by the state agency, the U.S. EPA, and the public to some extent. I'm not trying to say that these agreements were good or properly promulgated - or that public involvement was sufficient - i'm just saying that compared to what happened to our CAB in the story that follows, these existing agreements at least had some public involvement.
The Bush administration wasn't satisfied with these agreements. They wanted to do things their way. Bush isn't much into negotiating - he just bullies his way through. His way of dealing with the in-place agreements and the entrenchment in the agencies was to institute a "top to bottom review" of the DOE.
In theory, this wasn't a bad idea. They really needed, and still need, a real, objective, independent top to bottom to middle to bottom to top to bottom to top review. DOE is not a great agency. It has a history of putting worker health and safety, the environment, and open government last. It wastes a lot of money. But, it quickly became clear that the purpose of Bush's so-called "review" wasn't for the purpose of honestly holding the agency and it's main contractors accountable for their spending of public money versus what actually had been done in the past. No, they were using this process to form the justification for reducing some environmental cleanup costs and to try to reduce public involvement in the process of deciding how appropriated money was going to be allocated. But, they had to sell it to the state regulatory agencies in the states with the major DOE sites. These include for example, Washington state because of Hanford, New Mexico because Los Alamos and Sandia National Lab, Tennessee because of Oak Ridge, Idaho because of Idaho National Lab, and on and on, including Kentucky because of the Paducah site (note that not all these states have republican governors). Unfortunately for Bush, most of the states balked. They like that cleanup money rolling in. They resisted talk of reductions. So the administration came up with plan B.
Plan B was basically exortion. Bush sent out his high level officials to tell the states that if they wanted to get any money for the coming year's cleanup, they better agree to change the existing cleanup agreements. At one point, Bush sent a deputy Sec. of Energy around to tell these state agencies that they were actually going to withhold cleanup money until they re-negotiated the cleanup agreements. That got the state's attention!
Bush wanted to switch to something he called "risk based" management for the cleanup. A good example of what that meant is at the Paducah site. While the Paducah site had proposed back in the 1990s a comprehensive cleanup of the massive, perhaps worst in the nation, groundwater contamination plume here, that plan was estimated at the time as costing some $998 million dollars. It was said that it could be completed in 15 years. But that plan soon became dashed against the rocks of failed technology and patent infringment, and dropped out of site. But it was still "on the books" as a priority. They just didn't know how to do it. (or didn't want to pay for it.) Of course, Bechtel-Jacobs, the cleanup contractor, made a lot of money, along the way.
Under "risk based" clean-up, the risk to the residents around the plant that had lost use of their wells because they are full of chemicals, heavy metals, and radiation, had been eliminated when the wells were condemned and and capped. And now, since they were provided with city water, the risk had been eliminated. Therefore, according to the Bush logic, DOE no longer had to prioritize groundwater cleanup very high. That cleanup need could be buried in future budgets but removed from current ones. That's risk based cleanup. (And this isn't the only example, just a good one.)
Of course, that's absurd. The contamination is going into the Ohio River, and citizens just downriver at Cairo, Illinois are getting their drinking water from the Ohio River. But no one seems to care about that. It's just a poor, mostly African American community with a bad history, right? But that didn't register on Bush's "risk" scale.
To Kentucky's credit, they were the last state to capitulate to the Bush extortion. But this where things get really interesting. All the while this was going on, there was a separate but importantly related track that was going on regarding the administration of the Paducah site. For decades, the Paducah site had been under the jurisdiction of the Oak Ridge DOE reservation. For practical political purposes, that meant any funding for Paducah flowed through the Oak Ridge bureacracy. There always was a feeling at the Paducah site that Paducah got the short end of the stick from Oak Ridge. I don't know if that is true or not, but it provided a 24 hour complaint for Paducah. So, there was some political pressure to remedy that perception. The Paducah plant's U.S. Representative, Ed Whifield, had pledged to work to change the Oak Ridge "rip off. "
In this political context and climate, DOE and the State of Kentucky started having meetings in which obviously DOE was trying to "convince" Kentucky to support it's new cleanup plans. Those meetings were being held in Lexington. And guess what? The CAB wasn't kept in the loop about those meetings, although we knew they were going on. So, during the year and half or so that Kentucky was holding out about changing the cleanup plan and going to "risk based" cleanup, the meetings were being held in Lexington, Kentucky. The CAB thought that was weird. Why would you want to be meeting in Lexington when the problem was in Paducah? Duh.
As an aside, eventually, Congress and the DOE ripped Paducah and Portsmouth away from Oak Ridge and created the "Office of Portsmouth and Paducah." Well, maybe that seemed like a decent idea. But when they announced that the headquarters would be located in, guess where - yes, Lexington, Kentucky, it all made more sense. Keep the hard decisionmaking out of the towns that would be affected by the decisions. Much easier. And, Bush hired am ice-cold bureaucrat like William Murphie to run the office. He's actually still there. In all my years of dealing with agencies, few bureaucrats have gained the disdain of everyone as well as Murphie has - both in Paducah and Portsmouth. Bush is proud I'm sure.
But the Lexington office being the "official" headquarters for Paducah actually happened after the CAB meltdown. Leading up to that, the meetings between DOE and Kentucky continued in Lexington. In the meantime, the in-place cleanup plan had basically been put on hold. And it wasn't that the CAB thought that the current cleanup plan was all that great - but at least it was the devil we knew. We were very leery of what was transpiring, because we had very little input into the "top to bottom" review, we knew what had gone on in other state's with similar DOE cleanup sites, which had capitulated and gone with "amended" cleanup agreements, the public had very little input, and we weren't privvy to what was being talked about in Lexington.
When we had meetings, there would be plenty of questions about what was going on in Lexington. During the approximate year and half that the Lexington meetings went on, the CAB submitted to DOE, by consensus, 4 different recommendations asking DOE to give us more information and an opportunity to have an input into the process of redoing the cleanup plan. More than once we offered to send a representative to Lexington to sit in on the meetings, and were denied. In response to each recommendation, we were assured that the CAB's input would be sought out and considered BEFORE any decisions were made to change the current cleanup plan.
Those assurances turned out to be hollow and false. One morning, residents in the Paducah region awoke to headlines in the local paper that DOE and the commonwealth of Kentucky had reached an agreement over changing the cleanup plans - and guess what - the CAB never did get a chance to have input! The CAB was so outraged that 7 members, including me, resigned in protest. It was one of the worst examples of government dishonesty that I have ever encountered.
Ronald Lamb, a (contaminated) landowner nearby to the plant whose family owned their land prior to the plant being sited at the current location, and I, who live and grow food 16 miles downwind from the facility filed suit, represented by Kentucky Resources Council attorney Tom Fitzgerald, challenging this new agreement. We wanted to have it reopened with more public involvement. That case, after all kinds of frivilous legal wrangling by the DOE and the state, has pretty much ground to a halt in federal court in eastern Kentucky. But it's still there. I think we have some good issues, but it's a burden to try to sue the government. It may never get adjudicated, but at least we put it on the record that there was some serious concerns about this. (And please note that his suit is one seeking only an injunction and not any financial compensation.)
At the time that this was going on, one other incident by DOE with the CAB added to the desperate feeling that many of the CAB members were feeling. That was the incident of Al Puckett's attempt to get a seat on the board. Al Puckett is a former worker, and plant neighbor. He was active in the union while he worked, and he brought up environmental concerns about worker exposure. His "reward" was to be made to stand at a post for about two years with no work. If he left his post, he would be reprimanded. He became a vocal critic of the plant, in part because of his experience as a former worker and in part because of being a plant neighbor and being near all the contamination.
In fact, due to his status as an outspoken critic of the plant's environmental and labor record, he has been oft quoted in the media. His picture accompanied a section in the Washington Post series about the Paducah facility which contained a lot of quotes from Al critical of the plant. But he wasn’t the only one. By this time a number of workers had spoken out. But Al had been one of the first and most vocal. He was quoted pretty frequently in major media, and not just in the U.S. No doubt he had come to develop a very strong belief in the lack of credibility of DOE and the danger of nuclear energy. And, worse yet, he spoke, (and still speaks, as best as he can with his health problems,) publicly about his beliefs, a right that we should all cherish.
A testament to his concern over the issue was the fact that he came to our CAB meetings virtually every month, and always would speak. Besides the governmental people and the contractors that either were required by bosses or felt obligated, or some other financial incentive, to come, our CAB meetings were modestly attended. However, for those from the public that came for any reason, there always seemed to be an artificial boundary between us and them. I mean, we were just volunteers also. I think a lot of the board shared that feeling. We wanted to be inclusive as we were supposedly representing the "general public."
In order to comply with the requirement of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, (which required an advisory committee be "fairly balanced") the CAB had established categories of interests that would be represented in various proportion in order to keep the committee balanced. For example, we had categories like plant workers, plant neighbors, elected officials, health care workers, teachers, non plant union member, businessperson, etc. When someone would leave the board, we would note the category, and when our membership fell to a low enough level, we put out public notices for membership and take applications.
We would review the applications, cast them against our categorical vacancies, and then vote up or down. If we got a consensus recommendation on an applicant, we passed that on to DOE, and in every case they had been approved. Our door wasn't always being beaten down by people wanting to be on the CAB, although we usually had a few applications when we put out notices.
Al had applied several times, and at the time we didn't really have a category available, and some of the more conservative members of the CAB were leery because of his activist background. His applications weren't approved by consensus. But, after a while, by his regular attendance, his dedication to the issues, his historical knowledge, and the fact that a category for him had come open, he won over his detractors, and his last application was approved by consensus by the CAB. We sent a recommendation, the same one that had been approved 100% of the time by DOE in the past, that Al be made a member of the CAB. But this time, in the words of Gomer Pyle, "Surprise, Surprise, Surprise!" This DOE said no, and put their handpicked person on the CAB. The CAB was shocked.
Add this all up, and our CAB was in an uproar. Seven members, including me, to save our dignity and distance ourself from this abuse of how this public money was being spent, resigned. Others who wanted to remain on the board, privately expressed support. No one was happy. There was some hope that our action would bring changes. I'll only say that I don't believe it has. The Paducah CAB has little credibility anymore. It still spends a good bit of public money. But, DOE has the rubber stamp CAB that it always wanted. But there's no true community support for what is rubber stamped.
And where was McConnell during all of this? Nowhere to be seen for the most part. I can't remember any of his western Kentucky assistants coming to a CAB meeting, even though the federal government was spending hundreds of thousands of federal taxpayer dollars a year on the CAB. McConnell himself never met with the CAB.
He was silent while the Bush DOE extorted Kentucky regulators to lower their cleanup standards at the plant. He was silent when the Bush DOE overturned the consensus nomination of Al Puckett to be on the CAB. He's been silent on a lot of the key issues regarding the gaseous diffusion plant over the years. He's been a Bush rubber stamp for the most part.
The only issue I remember his taking an active hand in was the trial balloon that was flown proposing that the DOE buy out local landowners that are contaminated. That proposal has been shrouded in secrecy which has created more distrust in the community. It has gone no where, even though at one time the CAB has surveyed the community about their view of a buy out which indicated that there was some openness in the community about the possibility. That good will has been squandered at the moment.
This is why McConnell is so desperate to create the illusion that he cares about the plant, and he's doing that thru his misleading and inaccurate campaign ad. It is a false and misleading picture that is being painted. Hopefully people can see through the sham. But hey, is anyone surprised he's trying it?
