Here is a great example of the games played with agendas, legistar and lack of minutes and handouts at meetings. Thank you to Maria and Jim Powell for their continued work with the Midwest Environmental Justice Organization (MEJO) and this fantastic blog post.
First, let me rant.
Non-legistar agendas
This is how city staff hide information from the public, or make it really hard to find. And therefore limit public input and access. This example ticks almost all the boxes.
- Present information to a “non-legistar” committee.
- This lets them avoid putting information out with the agenda, because they isn’t a way to easily link information on-line. That means that the public can’t
- access information on-line prior to the meeting
- intelligently prepare public comment
- Second, even if they do hand out information to the public in the meeting, they avoid having to put it on-line after the fact, and its not searchable or easy for the public to find.
- This lets them avoid putting information out with the agenda, because they isn’t a way to easily link information on-line. That means that the public can’t
- Don’t bring copies for the public.
- Don’t provide minutes for the meetings. This is one of those “non-legistar” committees that I blogged about earlier this week. Follow the instructions to get here and then you will find there are agendas but no minutes or “notes” that they have on their agenda to “review”.
- If you use a “non-legistar” agenda format, it doesn’t offer “public comment” or the standard language about interpretation services or other public friendly/good government items like disclosure of conflicts, approval of previous minutes, public comment for items not on the agenda, etc.
I’m surprised they didn’t hold the meeting at 2:00 in the afternoon!
Agenda
Here’s the agenda and the the entirety of the items on their agenda. Notice there are no links to additional information or public comment.
5:00 PM Water Quality Technical Advisory Committee Madison Water Utility 119 E. Olin Ave, Room Conference B
Water Quality Technical Advisory Committee Meeting
1. AGENDA REPAIR / ANNOUNCEMENTS / ADMINISTRATION
2. REVIEW OF MEETING NOTES
3. WATER QUALITY MONITORING & TREATMENT POLICY REVIEW
4. 2018 WATER QUALITY MONITORING RESULTS REVIEW
• ATP
• Inorganics
• Iron & Manganese – Wells and Distribution
• Radium
• Volatile Organics
5. PFAS DISCUSSION
6. FUTURE AGENDA ITEMS
• MWU Master Plan & Capital Improvement Plan
• Annexations – Town of Madison; Town of Blooming Grove
• Private Well Program Policies
7. ADJOURNMENT
Thank goodness for resident activists! More needed!!!
If it weren’t for Maria and Jim and a handful of others who have dedicated so much time to attending meetings, digging up information and reporting on it, our community would be left in the dark.
We need more people doing exactly this!!! If you don’t want to start your own blog, you’re always welcome to post things here. You don’t even need to know how to blog, write it up and email it to me! Or, join Forwardlookout – I’ll get you a log in and show you the (easy) ropes to do it yourself!
MEJO Blog Post with details
Madison Water Utility withheld PFAS data because the public “wouldn’t understand”by Maria Powell |
At an April 15 Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) meeting, the Madison Water Utility admitted that it kept PFAS test data from the public, and the committee agreed with the approach, saying the public “wouldn’t understand” the data. Madison, Wisconsin has among the highest rates of college graduates and advanced degree holders of any city in the nation.
The utility publicly released new March PFAS data from five Madison wells on April 9. The results listed many compounds detected as simply being “present,” with no actual data and a footnote stating that these compounds were “detected at levels too low to accurately quantify.”
The PFAS levels labelled as “present” were above the detection limits but below the reporting limits. The standard protocol is to report numbers in this range, but put a “J” next to them indicating that the numbers are estimates (called “J-flags). The Water Utility reported February results from Well 15 this way—and even included J-flags in adding up total PFAS levels.
But for the March data, utility officials clearly made an explicit decision to be much less transparent with the public about the actual PFAS results, reporting only “present” for J-flag numbers and not sharing full data and/or actual lab reports on their website.[1]
Full PFAS data shared with Technical Advisory Committee but not with public
At the April 15 Water Utility Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) meeting, water quality manager Joe Grande shared the complete March data from the five wells, including the J-flagged data and levels found below detection limits (marked with < ).[2]
Though TAC meetings are public, copies of documents (with data being discussed) are typically not provided to citizen attendees, so we have to take photos of them during meetings; this is how we obtained the full March data linked above.[3] Citizen attendees are also not allowed to speak or raise questions at TAC meetings.
Committee members advised Grande on how he should share this data—or not—with the public in the future. They agreed that though they understand these numbers—because “we’re insiders,” one said—the public “wouldn’t understand.” So this data shouldn’t be shared with them lest it cause undue public alarm. (Ironically, MEJO members—the public—are the ones who recommended that the Water Utility gather expanded PFAS data from all Madison wells in the first place, even though we “wouldn’t understand” the data resulting from these tests.)
TAC member Dr. Henry Anderson (retired former Chief Medical Officer at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services) worried that people might add all these low numbers together, come up with a total that looks like a lot (but isn’t of concern in his opinion), and become inappropriately alarmed. He advised Grande not to publicly share combined PFAS levels (which Grande had listed at the bottom of the table)—and, further, not to combine PFAS at all but only consider individual levels.[4]
Several other states have made regulatory decisions to combine more than one PFAS compound in their official standards, and have chosen to be transparent and precautionary when reporting PFAS data.
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