ALRC Meeting Minutes June 1 2001

Present at the meeting were Jim English, Nan Hammett, Steve MacDonald, May Gerstle and Dennis Saunders of ALRC, Alison Arthur of the Beachcomber, Caren Adams from King County, Dawn Hooper and Norm Peck from Ecology and Frank Peryea and Elizabeth Beers from WSU.

Minutes from the last regularly scheduled meeting and from the previous week's meeting to discuss the agricultural survey were reviewed and approved. The Ag survey appears to be on track to go out near the end of June.

Most of the meeting revolved around the upcoming meetings around the child use area sampling results. Property owners already have the results, and a meeting is planned for the 11th to provide general community outreach. There will be a run-thru of this meeting for the benefit of the Ecology presenters for ALRC to review and help edit. That meeting will be at the Library at 2:30 on the 6th (Wednesday).

The format/agenda of the June 11 meeting will be:

6:30 open house

7:00lecture/presentation

7:30 dialog

8:30 kiosks

9:00 closure (may go beyond this)

There are 6 kiosks/displays envisioned, including information about ALRC.

There was some discussion about how the community should be notified about the meeting of the 11th at McMurray. Ecology will be placing ads in the Beachcomber and the Ticket. They will also notify the Seattle and Tacoma papers about the meeting ahead of time (for a public service announcement) and will notify the Voice of Vashon. Jim will notify the community council in order to have the meeting noticed on the webpage. He will also look into other community web pages, including the Ferry cam. Dawn agreed to get him the notice ahead of time so that it could be properly posted.

There was some discussion about the notice. It was agreed that the notice should read that the meeting was sponsored by Ecology, Public Health and the Community Council (in that order). There is a conflict with VIGA's board meeting on the 11th. Sylvia will attend the board meeting, and will urge VIGA board members to attend at least part of the public meeting.

The committee reviewed Public Health's fact sheet advising community residents of the actions they could take to protect themselves. The Q&A document was also reviewed. The committee expressed its satisfaction that its suggestions about the Q&A document were taken aboard.

There was some discussion about data format: Norm said the data would be expressed as a "box and whiskers format". He and Steve explained what that meant. The question of the interim action decision rules was raised. After much discussion, Norm stated that decision units that were analyzed for their average and upper control limits [sic] and that units whose average was below the MTCA standards would not be targets for interim action. Units whose average was above the MTCA standard were evaluated using the 95% confidence interval and where this was below the interim action level, no interim action would be taken and that for those whose 95% confidence interval was above the interim action level, further samples would be taken.

The committee expressed its concern that these technical issues should be clearly described to the public in non-technical language. In particular, the decision rules should be clear.

There was some discussion about the potential actions that might be taken as interim actions. Norm explained that there was a menu of choices, from inexpensive (placement of wood chips) to very expensive (removal and replacement of soil). Any remedial action would be performed in consultation with the property owner.

Frank Peryea spoke briefly about the proposed research—he has a great deal of experience with community groups in the Wenatchee area, and commented that the Vashon group was much further along in a short period of time than were the groups he was familiar with.

We took up the issue of drinking water sampling. The primary concern is the small wells, which provide water for over half the people on the island, but which are not tested. Considering the difficulty we have had with the disclosure issues related to the child use areas, we decided that it would be better to have blind sampling, where islanders can get the sample containers and sample instructions, provide basic information (not including well location/ownership), take their water to be tested, given a serial number and get results from posted listings. We will broach this with Public Health on the planned meeting Monday with Dr. Plough.

The next meeting is planned for the second Friday of July (the 13th) in the library at 11:30.