Roberts & Kay, Inc. -- Site-Specific Advisory Board for the Paducah (Kentucky) Gaseous Diffusion Plant

Site-Specific Advisory Board for the Paducah (Kentucky) Gaseous Diffusion Plant

1995 – 2006

The Site-Specific Advisory Board (SSAB) is a multi-stakeholder citizen board for the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Federal Superfund Cleanup Site that is directed by the Department of Energy (DOE) and overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Kentucky Department of Waste Management. The board is chartered under the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

RKI's work in Paducah has had three phases. In the first phase, Steve conducted a feasibility study on whether to institute a citizens' advisory board for the clean-up effort for the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The Department of Energy provided initial funding for that feasibility study; additional interest came from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department for Waste Management in Kentucky.

The feasibility study involved a round of interviews with individuals considered to be stakeholders or potential stakeholders in the plant clean-up and eventual reuse issues. Steve began with a Department of Energy list of persons who had been involved in public meetings or hearings on the site, or who had expressed an interest in it. Steve also interviewed local elected officials, including the mayor of Paducah, the county judge executive, the state representatives and state senator, and school officials. The initial round of interviews addressed a range of topics, all aimed at one central question:

From the perspective of the individual being interviewed, did it seem feasible to establish a multi-party advisory board, one that would have a range of constituents represented on it and would provide advice to the three partner agencies at the site?

In this first phase, Steve functioned as an outside analyst. He gathered information and documented the existing conditions and preferences regarding the formation of an advisory board. At the end of the first phase, Steve made a preliminary judgment that it was reasonable to proceed to further work on the actual parameters of this board and how it might function. To start the second phase, Steve recruited a work group from the list of interviewees and facilitated its meetings. The primary charge of this group was to discuss and then draft the kinds of documents that a citizens' advisory board would need. The work group determined the parameters and then put those parameters in written form.

The work group also took responsibility for helping to make the final determination of whether a board could be formed and function effectively. The group determined that there were grounds for moving forward and it drafted the written materials the board would need in order to function. The members of the group then drafted a set of procedures for how to handle the selection of members for the advisory board and chose themselves as the site selection group. They followed their process and chose 12 initial members of the Site-Specific Advisory Board. The Department of Energy approved that group of nominees and formally constructed the SSAB as a functioning advisory board within the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which is a set of federal regulations that set up the parameters for the functioning of such groups.

In the second phase with the work group and with the site selection committee, Steve served both as a facilitator and as a technical advisor on issues of process and the construction of the citizens' advisory board. He also drafted and redrafted the written documents for the group. Once the advisory board was formed, Steve agreed to serve as an ongoing facilitator for the advisory board.

In the third phase, from the formation of the Advisory Board until December 2006, Steve facilitated the Board's regular meetings, which addressed all aspects of environmental restoration and waste management at the site.

Visit more descriptions of our work in the areas of complex public and environmental decision making (multi-party) and collaboration and coalition building.