39 



Secondly, I think that there should have been more information 

 conveyed about the options if there were others than the Mud 

 Dump that were going to be considered at the initiation of the 

 process, and that we had information or scientific understanding of 

 what the criteria were going to be. At the point where we realized 

 that there were no criteria, I think we all should have had a convo- 

 cation to explain what the steps of the process to develop the crite- 

 ria were going to be and been able to participate in them whether 

 through the dioxin steering committee or some other venue. 



I also think that risk assessment needs to be better understood 

 by the general public. I don't believe most laypeople understand 

 what it means when we talk about bioaccumulation or bulk sedi- 

 ment tests and bioaccumulation, and we don't explain well enough 

 what the real human risk is and whether people ought to be con- 

 cerned or not concerned about the element that is being discussed. 



And I think the Federal agencies, the states, and we need to do a 

 better job — we meaning the general public — in conveying informa- 

 tion about what is at risk and what the process for assessing risk is 

 and make sure that there is ongoing information conveyed about 

 the changes in science that are taking place and how they are 

 going to be introduced to the review process. 



I think that the Congress in legislative enactments has indicated 

 that as science matures, as new technology is provided, it needs to 

 be stably introduced so that we don't have a wholesale catastrophe 

 in the sense that there is change that nobody knows how to deal 

 with, that we work it through in some collective fashion. I don't 

 think that has happened in this case, and I think those are some 

 areas where had things been different we might have had a more 

 reasonable dialog in way of concluding this permit decision. 



Mr. Green. Mr. Chairman, if I could just ask one additional 

 question of Mr. Lee and 



Mr. Ortiz. Sure. Go right ahead. 



Mr. Green. Mr. Lee, I understand the concern about the regula- 

 tory lag in our experience in the Port of Houston. We were notified 

 two or three weeks ago that it is going to take a year to do a com- 

 puter run on the heavy flow because they have already done the 

 runs on the medium flow and a low flow, and if you could provide 

 any information that would also meet the criteria but also I know 

 that to respond as quickly as you can to lower the regulatory lag 

 that we see? 



Mr. Lee. Well, Congressman, you raise a good point. Frequently, 

 when a port is an applicant for a project which ultimately will ter- 

 minate in a permit to proceed, it is very difficult when you start 

 down that path to know exactly what all of the concerns and the 

 various regulatory agencies, local, state, and Federal, will be as you 

 look at the project. There also is a tendency frequently in the regu- 

 latory community, whose primary concern as it should be is with 

 the environment and environmental impacts, to expect that the en- 

 gineering decisions on what the project really needs to look like in 

 order to make commercial sense and engineering sense and to be 

 technically feasible and doable. 



You constantly find yourself in a situation where the designs 

 aren't mature enough yet in what they think needs to be done to 

 satisfy what the regulatory people would like to see in the way of 



