The operations of the numerous agencies of local government can impact the environment directly, and can also greatly influence the operations of private sector facilities located in their jurisdictions by the regulatory milieu they establish. The ERI process will provide an opportunity to examine the environmental challenges which local governments are likely to face over the next several years, and to build the foundations for sensible planning to meet them.
For general background, see "What is the ERI?"
Features distinguishing the Local Government sector include:
· A large number of independent, geographically dispersed organizations
· Individual organizations responsible for carrying out a wide variety of processes and operations with potential environmental impact
· Decision-making a more public process than is the case in private organizations
· Direct public accountability for specific policies, expenditures, decisions, and outcomes
· Unique regulatory status in that organizations in the sector are both regulated in their activities and are responsible for regulating the activities of other organizations and individuals in their jurisdictions
(Regarding the last point, it has been suggested that we avoid the use of the word “sector” in referring to local governments. Some local officials may find the use of the term inappropriate to apply to units which are themselves responsible for regulating industry “sectors”.)
These features, and an initial analysis of potential players and partners associated with municipalities and local governments, suggest the following approach to the elements of the ERI process template.
The basic task for each ERI sector is the creation of a roadmap document, generated through a collaborative effort involving broad participation from individuals and organizations comprising the sector. The steps involved in generating the document are:
Each sector to which the ERI will be applied has its own distinguishing characteristics, and the details of the ERI process will vary accordingly. Mid-course corrections are expected.
The following outlines how the ERI process template will be applied specifically to the case of the Local Government sector.
Profile of Local Government Operations, one of a series of sector notebooks issued by EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA) indicates that the sector comprises nearly 85,000 distinct government and special district units. Individuals who could potentially serve as content providers for this sector thus number in the hundreds of thousands. It is clearly impractical to attempt to reach the entire population of potentially interested individuals and organizations in this sector directly.
NCMS will compile a list of organizations which may have an interest in participating in ERI activities for this sector. These organizations will also be valuable partners in introducing the ERI to content providers.
As a nucleus for the list, NCMS will begin with several organizations with which it is already familiar, and with whom NCMS has already been involved in shared activities or partnerships. These include:
· The International City/County Management Association (ICMA), operators of the Local Government Compliance Assistance Network (LGEAN), an OECA compliance assistance center.
· The National Pollution Prevention Roundtable (NPPR), which includes many individuals among its membership representing municipal, county, and state government agencies.
· The Air and Waste Management Association (A&WMA), a professional organization not specific to the local governments sector, but with significant participation from the sector. A&WMA is a partner in LGEAN.
Individuals from these organizations will be asked to help fill out the list.
Other organizations already identified by NCMS which deal with environmental issues and involve significant participation by individuals in this sector include:
· American Public Works Association (APWA)
· The American Water Works Association (AWWA)
· The Environmental Council of the States (ECOS)
Other organizations which involve the sector, but which do not have a specifically environmental focus, will also be approached for suggestions for further contacts, and for possible interest in participation. Examples include:
· The National Association of Counties (NACo)
· The National League of Cities (NLC)
· The National Association of Regional Councils (NARC)
In contrast to some sectors, for which for example a single regularly scheduled national meeting might be expected to involve a significant proportion of the potential players, it would be impractical to schedule a launch activity for the local government ERI around any one event. The launch for this case will consist of a series of outreach activities, including meetings, electronic communications, and notices or articles in publications. The immediate objective of the task will be to establish a core group of committed participants. Due to the dispersed nature of the sector, it is expected that a website will be particularly useful in tying participants and activities together. The website will therefore be created and publicized early in the process.
Due to the great diversity in the number and type of operations carried out in this sector, the definition of a well-chosen set of goals will be crucial. The scope of the roadmap can start out with the entire suite of challenges facing the sector, but to attempt to cover the entire range is unlikely to be manageable within the constraints of the resources available to the project at this stage. The greatest opportunity for this stage of the process to create value might lie in developing a consensus among participants on prioritization of issues. The objective is not necessarily to identify the same priority list that would be generated by a cost-benefit analysis: the participants will, after all, be a self-selected subset of individuals from the sector, and not necessarily representative of the sector as a whole. But by coalescing the views of those who choose to participate, the ERI may serve to identify those environmental issues facing local governments which will be most amenable to change and improvement in the coming years.
From an enforcement point of view, the top priority in this sector has been in the wastewater area, by a wide margin (over 4000 enforcement actions relating to sewerage systems alone between 1993 and 1998, versus a few hundred in the next most populous category, according to the OECA sector notebook). However, this may or may not correspond to the top priority issue for the next several years from the perspective of ERI participants. Other contenders would include:
· construction and road repair
· vehicle operation and maintenance
· solid and hazardous waste
· air quality issues
· land use and planning
· pesticides
It is likely that the list would vary according to the geographic and economic conditions characterizing a given locality, as well as changes in the regulations (such as new particulate and ozone standards) to be expected in the next few years. It may well be that, in their role as regulators, local governments will determine that more of their planning resources should be devoted toward areas where change is anticipated, even if their overall economic impact is not as large.
It may be that this task should expect to generate two different priority lists: one summarizing participants’ perceptions on their most difficult upcoming challenges, and another listing those topics which they recommend be addressed by the ERI. The former might be a useful deliverable for overall planning purposes, but the latter would help the ERI concentrate its resources on subsequent tasks on areas where it is likely to do the most good.
It is expected that the nature and degree of stakeholder involvement in the ERI will be very different from one sector to another. We recognize that the deliverables from the ERI must ultimately achieve stakeholder acceptance if they are to attain their maximum potential usefulness. However, we feel that one of the most significant aspects of the ERI is the ability, through the collaborative process, of tapping into and distilling out the best technical input that those actually involved in carrying on a sector’s activities can provide. In some sectors, that may mean keeping sector and stakeholder participants at arm’s length during the initial phases of the process. In others, a closer interaction may prove synergistic.
Local governments are ultimately answerable to the citizenry. Decisions made by a local government unit involve the stakeholders in a much more immediate sense than those of a private company. This could cut both ways. Local officials are typically accustomed to dealing with the public; on the other hand, they may be particularly sensitive to certain aspects of environmental policy, based on previous experience with their constituents. It may be that participants from this sector will be able to draw on their own expertise in public interaction to suggest appropriate mechanisms for stakeholder participation. Ideally, mechanisms developed for integrating sector participation with stakeholder involvement developed in the Local Government sector will prove to be useful models for subsequent ERI sectors to draw on in establishing their own stakeholder liaison arrangements.
The selection of working groups for this sector is expected to mirror the interests of the participants and the set of priorities as defined in task 3. NCMS will provide communications resources to facilitate the efforts of each subgroup. The deliverables from this task will be draft documents from each subgroup which will summarize the input of the participants.
The ERI program plan includes three key content elements in the deliverable to be generated from each sector:
· a list of processes and associated risk factors
· an assessment of pollution prevention and risk mitigation opportunities
·
a description of monitoring techniques
These were formulated with reference to a typical manufacturing sector. In the context of this more services-oriented sector, the elements may be modified somewhat. Thus, the documents generated by the subgroups may be expected to contain:
· summaries of environmental issues and challenges which will need to be dealt with by local governments over the next several years
· anticipated levels of performance which may be required for compliance, and which might be obtained beyond compliance, together with an estimation of the resources required to attain a given level, and
· a discussion of applicable performance metrics
It would also be useful to include a description of an environmental management system which would be feasible for local government units to develop (with references to examples of systems already established, if examples can be found). Each of these working documents would be used as the basis of a section of the final document.
Individual units of local government probably differ more sharply from one another than do the individual manufacturing organizations comprising a given sector, in terms of the range of their activities and the diversity of the constraints under which they must operate. Consequently, the review process is likely to elicit widely divergent viewpoints. The roadmapping process will benefit from this broader perspective. However, it would be prudent to allow for a somewhat lengthier review phase for this sector than might be expected for others.
With the concurrence of the participants, the review process will also involve extensive stakeholder review.
NCMS will prepare a final document based on the input derived from the review process. Participants will be given an opportunity to comment on the document before it is released in final form.
The document will be posted on a publicly accessible website. Provisions will be made to produce hard copy versions for the convenience of EPA and participants. If warranted by demand, the hard copy version will be sold at cost to the public.