Butte, Mont. (August 23, 2023) – Earlier this year, following my fourth visit to Butte, I made a commitment to invest more in community engagement and transparency related to ongoing Superfund activity. While engagement takes time and resources to bear results, the steps we have taken over the past several months represent an unprecedented set of efforts and investments to connect with the community. Today, I am announcing that the EPA Butte Superfund team will be making additional meetings — the Butte Priority Soils Operable Unit (BPSOU) remedial action materials management meetings, remedial design and remedial action meetings, and the site-wide groundwater modeling meetings — available for virtual observation through the end of the year. EPA will share details for each of these meetings in the Butte newsletter and on our website ahead of time. EPA staff will also continue to share information from these technical meetings at future community meetings.
I recognize that this is a critical time in implementing work under the 2020 BPSOU Consent Decree and it is important that the Butte community is included as we design key aspects of the cleanup. However, there are a lot of practical trade-offs and potential challenges that come with opening these meetings up to the public, including a risk of slowing down cleanup actions, which we know is also a priority for the community. There are also concerns about accessibility, frequency and ensuring that there are not misunderstandings resulting from complex and nuanced technical discussions. We are going to use the next four months to determine whether the benefits of opening these meetings for virtual observation are the best way to ensure that we are meeting the overall goals of the cleanup, which include both a timely cleanup and community support.
EPA will continue to be responsive to the Butte community throughout the cleanup process. Our first step to enhance transparency was bringing in more EPA staff so we could better share information and address questions and concerns from individuals across the community more effectively. I’m proud that in less than six months we’ve more than doubled EPA’s Butte site team, which has been devoted to making website improvements, developing a regular newsletter for the site, providing written explanations to outstanding questions, and helping synthesize and organize meetings involving various partners and stakeholders.
At the same time, I also directed staff to distribute clear and updated messages about key meetings and cleanup topics. In June, I traveled to Butte with EPA senior managers for meetings with Butte Silver Bow, Atlantic Richfield, Montana DEQ and the Montana Natural Resource Damage Program. Following this meeting, EPA issued a press release and a comprehensive summary of the topics discussed to make sure key information from the meeting was shared widely. Also, last week, EPA’s site team issued a position paper on a topic that has been a particular source of confusion, the proposed reuse of onsite material at the BPSOU. We will be following up on the paper with a community meeting on August 30 to get feedback and share more information. Each of these efforts reflect improved community engagement, and we will continue to develop and share this type of information as we move forward in developing remedial design and cleanup plans for specific areas of the site.
EPA is invested in completing the tasks before us. The hard-earned and widely celebrated 2020 BPSOU Consent Decree establishes a science-based framework that is guiding remaining actions to protect public health and the environment, and the resources we are now devoting to community engagement will help us work within that framework to achieve our goals in a clear and transparent manner. I look forward to the upcoming months as a time of progress as we look toward a healthy, vibrant post-Superfund future for the people of Butte.