The Federal Advisory Committee to Develop On-site Innovative Technologies (the DOIT Committee) has been hustling. The committee is part of a memorandum of understanding between the Western Governors Association and the Departments of Defense, Interior, Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency (signed in 1991) to cooperate on expediting waste site cleanups and advance better technologies. The regional approach was expected to serve as a demonstration of principles and practices which could be adopted nationally on federally owned or managed lands (military bases, defense research facilities, parks, forests, range lands).
After developing baseline reports and assessing the alternatives available for addressing federal facilities cleanup in the West, the federal-state partnership agreed that demonstration projects were needed to test new models for deploying and evaluating more efficient and effective technologies, stakeholder involvement, and regulatory and institutional streamlining.
Demonstration projects were also needed to improve technology demonstration design and evaluation to help assure financial feasibility, insurability, and eventual commercialization of innovative technologies. To accomplish this, the partnership set out to develop a process and structure to identify, fund, and evaluate demonstration projects which will result in new policy and processes to achieve cleanup goals more rapidly and at less cost.
The DOIT Committee was formed in 1992 to provide a structure at the regional level to integrate existing models and efforts and test new approaches to waste technology development, deployment, and commercialization. The committee consists of four western governors, the secretaries of DOD, DOE, DOI, the administrator of the EPA, and one ex officio member each from the Office of Management and Budget and the Western Governors' Association. The committee and working groups assigned to address mixed waste, mine waste, base closure wastes, and munitions/unexploded ordnance; have either convened or met deadlines during every month of 1993. In June they met to discuss innovative technologies for environmental restoration and waste management. In August they held a commercialization roundtable. They are scheduled to continue this pace through the year and expect their first field demonstration to begin during the fourth quarter.
An important part of this initiative is stakeholder involvement. The group is working from eight guiding principles to (1) involve stakeholders early and often during the project; (2) provide timely and equal access to accurate information for participants in the project; (3) begin the project with an understandable description of the decision making process, well articulated expectations for stakeholder involvement in that process, and clearly defined goals for the outcome of that process; (4) provide the necessary resources (technical and financial) to support key participants in the process; (5) ensure that decision making is open; (6) document responses to comments and suggestions from stakeholders on key decisions and products; (7) ensure that project schedules are realistic and sufficiently flexible to accommodate the complex dynamics of diverse stakeholder involvement; and (8) establish and demand clear accountability for the process. They have already written and reviewed a stakeholder participation plan.
