Meyer on Community Participation in Environmental Cleanup Decisions

The last installment in the Cityscape trilogy is Peter Meyer's Brownfields, Risk-Based Corrective Action, and Local Communities.  Here's the abstract: 

This article addresses the problems facing communities that suffer both environmental risks from past contamination and depressed economic activity. In such settings, redevelopment of contaminated sites and the associated economic development may require compromised standards for environmental mitigation. This potential conflict is often resolved through risk-based corrective action on sites cleaned only for their prospective use. But partial cleanups can be shown to face inevitable failure at some future date. Thus, in such an approach, communities face risks that they need to understand and should be capable of accepting or rejecting. The article considers these risks and assesses four alternative land use control strategies for assuring community participation in making decisions about both the cleanup process today and the response to risks of failure in the future.

Jim K.