Background

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) hazardous waste cleanup programs had longstanding national dilemma over how thoroughly to clean up Superfund, RCRA Corrective Action, and lightly contaminated Brownfield sites. The debate started in the 1980’s after the Love Canal disaster resulted in the creation of the Superfund Program. The dilemma became known as the “How Clean is Clean” question, and it had to be answered at every cleanup site. Essentially, as information technology improved, the Web developed, and as databases became reachable from one’s desk or pocket, economics prevailed over pristine cleanups to answer the question of how clean is clean enough. Government decision makers began approving risk-based cleanups (RBCs). ​

 

RBCs work like this:

1) The most serious contamination and debris are removed from a site and sent to expensive off-site biological and high-temperature thermal treatment facilities.

2) Less serious, yet widespread lightly contaminated soil is contained in place on the site and the cleaned up property zoned for redevelopment through a structure of real estate title restrictions called institutional controls/land use controls (LUCs).

3) The level of cleanup depends upon the risks posed by the waste contained on site; the risk level determines the zoning of the site – industrial reuse, commercial reuse, or residential reuse.

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Assessment

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Meanwhile, Smith knew the nation still had a huge problem: the potential disastrous failure of land use controls in the future. After all, Superfund was started as a response to the failure of land use controls at the Hooker Chemical Dump in Love Canal. Historical records on the title to the Love Canal property clearly stated there was a large amount of toxic waste disposed there, but developers of the subdivision in New York either missed or ignored the restrictions on the land, ultimately sickening and killing many Love Canal residents. ​ Smith knew the nation simply could not have a repeat performance of Love Canal, but EPA elected to go ahead with RBCs anyway. EPA hoped that technology would prevent history from repeating itself. However, as early in the new RBC era as 1998, reports from all over the country began pouring in from watchdog environmental groups that EPA’s IC/LUCs were poorly implemented and failing all over the nation, tracked inconsistently by a handful of states, and showed every sign of creating future Love Canals. ​

 

During the years in which Smith was revising the Superfund Community Involvement Coordinator Training Handbook and Toolkit and later negotiating the transition of the Brownfields Management System and Staff from a bankrupt/going out of business contractor to DynCorp/CSC, by 2000 he had read enough bad news about EPA’s fumbling of LUCs to be alarmed and angry. After all, he had vocally opposed the use of ICs/LUCs during his entire five year stint at EPA and his two lobbying years at ENSCO. ​

 

But because Smith felt outcome ownership from being part of the Superfund program, he decided to accept the LUCs issue at face value, forget “I told you so,” and fix a problem he had repeatedly predicted and opposed in the first place. Smith figured that if LUCs data elements and their databases could be standardized across the states and made easily accessible to anyone excavating for any reason, the problem could be flipped; a solution would protect public health, be a boon to real estate developers and an economic stimulus for hard-hit communities. Smith saw an economic and environmental win/win within reach.

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Solution

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Smith discussed the LUCs problem with his DynCorp/CSC client, the Brownfields Office Director. Smith next approached an NGO that was working with the Brownfields office on LUCs, the International City/County Management Association (ICMA). Smith met with an ICMA LUCs expert and his staff who explained to Smith that they were launching a Web-site and intended it to have a national database up to help standardize the widely divergent, ineffective state LUCs tracking data elements and databases. Smith quickly partnered CSC with ICMA to make LUCs.org the shining star, the central repository of LUCs information for the nation’s Brownfields cleanup and economic revitalization projects. ​

 

Meanwhile Superfund was trying to establish its own LUCs tracking database and approaching the LUCs problem from another angle supported by another division of CSC, Science and Engineering. Smith was in the Policy Analysis division of CSC; he saw an opportunity to unify the two different approaches, standardizing state LUCs tracking would be his short term goal while helping with the long term goal of a large national database of all LUCs, their location, titles, restrictions, and maintenance and inspection schedules. ​

 

Smith built his own team at CSC. Together, they studied every aspect of the LUCs dysfunction, writing and publishing their comprehensive analysis, Land Use Controls (LUCs) A Status Report. Smith also sought out the Science and Engineering Division of CSC to help them with their approach to make LUCs functional and trackable. Smith had to beef up his IT skills to communicate with this division of CSC so he collaborated with their IT experts. Smith also completed EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response IT Life Cycle Management Guidance Overview and Practical Exercises. Soon Smith was capable of explaining to CSC’s IT experts the data definitions and data elements required to properly track LUCs in a standardized national database. Armed with the vast and detailed LUCs information and recommendations that Smith’s staff amassed during the drafting of the LUCs status report, Smith shifted into implementation mode. Unbeknownst to Smith, he was serving two masters that would soon come to clash.

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Implementation

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ICMA and CSC launched the LUCs.org Web site and Smith began filling it with meaningful LUCs content. Soon the CSC/ICMA partnership had created LUCs.org and the largest LUCs-related database in the world, but not a LUCs tracking database. Instead the elusive LUCs tracking database was being pursued in two separate, opposing efforts – EPA Brownfields Office and the EPA Superfund Office, which were at growing odds with each other about how the database should work. Smith did everything in his power to resolve the differences between the two offices. Smith kept explaining that the Superfund approach was the long term goal, and that the Brownfields approach was a short-term fix aimed at making the state LUCs tracking systems more standardized. There need not be a bureaucratic battle. ​

 

Smith trained the CSC IT staff about everything he’d analyzed about the state tracking bases. Smith helped the Superfund database by speaking, presenting, and facilitating breakout work sessions at all of the many Superfund Institutional Control Workshops. These workshops were productive meetings that brought the EPA regions and the states together on what everyone needed to do to create a national LUCs tracking database. Eventually, though, Smith had to leave this effort and focus solely on the short-term, Brownfields effort. ​

 

Smith put all his might into coming up with a Web Ring that would serve as a short term fix. The Web ring was to be a part of LUCs.org; it would gather all the State LUCs Tracking Systems into one graphic interface, the LUC Webring. The Brownfields Office Director wanted to launch the Web Ring and wanted to avoid the creation of what she feared might become an unwieldy and expensive database that might not work well. Smith believed this could be accomplished in the interim period before Superfund’s national database was built, and did not have to compete with it for resources from EPA. Ultimately, after the Brownfield Office Director retired, EPA took an abrupt about face and for reasons of its own suddenly defunded LUCs.org.  EPA’s new Brownfields office began to manage the Webring contract, a cost plus contract, as if it were a time and materials contract, making Smith’s work on it mostly unbillable and extraordinarily unmanageable. The message was clear. ​

 

Meanwhile, Smith had been struck as he was crossing the street in a crosswalk by a minivan running a red light. He had to leave CSC to address several bulging, deteriorated, and painful lumbar and cervical discs. Smith used a personal trainer combined with physical therapy to rehabilitate his back and within a year found a combination of non-opiod methods to manage the pain. ​

 

Smith took this in stride. “Working with public/private partnerships has great rewards and great risks. Smith says, “I know that I made risk-based cleanups at Superfund and Brownfield sites much safer – in the long term – for redevelopment by creating and working with the public/private partnership to create LUCs.org. It was a labor of love and I would do it again.”