One of the more frustrating aspects of working in environmental consulting is watching your work become a part of the political football game that surrounds many major projects. For example, several years back, I worked on a transmission line project in California's San Joaquin Valley.
The purpose of the project was to upgrade the existing electrical grid to account for population growth (and hence increased power construction) in the county. There were several potential routes, and the environmental crews were performing review activities to determine which route was the most environmentally feasible. As I performed the archaeological surveys for the project, I routinely encountered land owners (including home owners, farmers, and ranchers) who made it clear that they felt the project was necessary and even a boon to the community, but who routinely informed me that they would fight tooth and nail to make sure that the project crossed somebody else's land.
The fighting involved professional attacks against my work. A group of land owners denied access to my crew, preventing us from surveying these locations for archaeological sites. So, with no other recourse, we used a combination of older archaeological reports and records, historic photos and maps, and current topographic maps, as well as observations made from public roads, to gain a rough idea of the likelihood of finding archaeological sites in these areas. The report that was finally produced stated clearly that the estimate was rough, and that it was no substitute for a careful archaeological survey, and that such a survey must be performed before anything could be built.
Well, the landowners who had denied us access got hold of a copy of the report, saw this, and then contacted members of the local Native American tribal organization and the head of the local historical society, claiming that the project crossed through a known native village site (not true, the village site was several miles to the north of the proposed project area) and that my crew and I didn't perform any analysis of the area in question and claimed that a "windshield survey" (where you drive through the area and look at stuff from the road, which we did admittedly do as a part of the larger analysis) was sufficient (which we very definitely did not claim, the exact opposite was stated in the report, in fact). A letter containing these, well...let's call them dubious statements*, was sent to the tribal organization and the historical society, who then complained to the state agency in charge of licensing the project. The next thing I know, the agency's environmental office is demanding an explanation for my alleged malfeasance, which is odd as had they bothered to actually read the document in question (and which was sent to them before it was sent to anyone else) they would have found that the claims being made about the report were completely untrue.
Luckily, my boss knew the historian, so I was able to call her. Once I had her on the phone, we had a very strange conversation in which she started by telling me how terrible a job I had done and how poor my professional ethics were, but as I walked her through the report and the information contained therein (and pointed out the page numbers where it was shown that we were unable to perform a pedestrian survey because the very same landowners who had gotten her worked up had denied our crew access to the land), she began to change her views and take my side. When all was said and done, she asked for a few changes to make it clear that any route selected would be subject to pedestrian survey (which was already stated clearly and prominently multiple times in the report, but I was willing to play politics enough to include it yet one more time), but was otherwise satisfied that we had done the best that we could, and that there may be more to the situation than she had been led to believe.
The weird irony is that the other possible routes were riddled with archaeological sites and weird biology issues. The route where the landowners had denied us access was an unknown, but our preliminary analysis indicated that it was likely to be the worst of the all possible routes. The problem is that, lacking data, there is a possibility that the powers that be at the utilities company might eventually decide to take a gamble on the route for which little is known rather than sink money into mitigation for the other routes, and the stunt with the lying about the studies hurt the credibility of the opponents of the route. The effects of the attempt to prevent construction of the route by denying access and lying about the contents of the report are still unknown, but there is a possibility that it may result in these people losing land in an eminent domain grab and essentially backfire. Time will tell.
*A polite way of saying "slanderous bullshit told by liars with no sense of morality and a desire to get their way even if it means screwing other people over." Not that I have an opinion, or anything.
Showing posts with label Report Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Report Writing. Show all posts
Monday, February 7, 2011
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Fresno, Race Riots, and Historical Blindness
Some years back, I was assigned a project that involved a new electrical substation in Fresno. I performed the appropriate archaeological surveys, and wrote the requisite report. There are a few standard report formats for cultural/historic resource surveys, and the one that is used is dependent on the agency to which the report will be submitted. This was going to the California Energy Commission, and the report format for that agency requires that there be a section describing the history of the area in which the survey took place.
In this particular case, I was writing about an area outside of town, and so it was relevant to discuss the history of the hinterlands of Fresno*. This meant discussing the groups of people who lived in the hinterlands historically, which in Fresno largely meant non-white people. To this end, it seemed relevant to include a section on race riots that occurred in Fresno in the 1890s.
I submitted the report to the client for review, and a few weeks later received in back with a few comments, one of which was that they wanted me to remove all references to the race riots. The stated reason was that they didn't wish to "fan the flames of racial tension" within the region.
I immediately thought the following:
1) It's a compliance report. The only people who are going to read it are the government regulators, researchers who are looking for archaeological data on the region, and people who - due either to an over-developed sense of civic responsibility or (more likely) out of a desire to derail the project - are looking to make sure that the developer performed all necessary environmental review. The first two types will either not care or be interested in the race riots, and the latter group are likely to count their omission as a sign that the cultural resources contractor (me) didn't do sufficient background research and therefore may use it as an opening for attacking the project. So, really, no harm would be done by including this information, and some harm may have been done through the exclusion of it.
2) Fanning the flames of racial tensions? Really? Don't get me wrong, Fresno is an ethnically diverse and large city (a population of around 1/2 a million, not including the surrounding towns and unincorporated areas), and like any large and ethnically diverse city there are racial tensions. I am not naive about this. However, these tensions get enflamed by politicians harping on them, by police officers engaging in racially charged activities, by economic and social inequalities...but not by compliance reports that are only read by a small number of individuals. Our clients were either woefully naive about how the review process goes, or else seemed to be astoundingly arrogant as to the importance of their project to the community (assuming that a wide variety of people would read the reports).
3) Although there are certainly people currently living in and around Fresno whose ancestors were involved in the riots, Fresno, like most cities in California, grew due to a post-WWII population and migration boom. Moreover, like many cities int he San Joaquin Valley, Fresno has a short civic memory, meaning that even those who are descended from people who were involved in the riots are unlikely to remember them. Moreover, these occurred in the 1890s, when race riots were not uncommon throughout the United States (a fact that should be known to anyone who managed to graduate high school), so to describe them for Fresno within a compliance report is not going to increase the racial tensions existing in an area even if a large swath of the populace were to read it.
To be fair, I think that the request to remove the references was due to naivete on the part of the client. They were a new company, and clearly had extensive business an engineering experience, but were novices to the environmental review process. They probably were not aware of just how few people would review the document, and were concerned that it would be widely distributed. But in the end the riots did happen. They are a matter of historical record. There is absolutely zero point in changing a historic review in order to pretend like they didn't occur. And it has bugged me ever since.
*Yeah, yeah, all of the Bay Area and L.A. people can insert their "Fresno is a hinterland" joke here.
In this particular case, I was writing about an area outside of town, and so it was relevant to discuss the history of the hinterlands of Fresno*. This meant discussing the groups of people who lived in the hinterlands historically, which in Fresno largely meant non-white people. To this end, it seemed relevant to include a section on race riots that occurred in Fresno in the 1890s.
I submitted the report to the client for review, and a few weeks later received in back with a few comments, one of which was that they wanted me to remove all references to the race riots. The stated reason was that they didn't wish to "fan the flames of racial tension" within the region.
I immediately thought the following:
1) It's a compliance report. The only people who are going to read it are the government regulators, researchers who are looking for archaeological data on the region, and people who - due either to an over-developed sense of civic responsibility or (more likely) out of a desire to derail the project - are looking to make sure that the developer performed all necessary environmental review. The first two types will either not care or be interested in the race riots, and the latter group are likely to count their omission as a sign that the cultural resources contractor (me) didn't do sufficient background research and therefore may use it as an opening for attacking the project. So, really, no harm would be done by including this information, and some harm may have been done through the exclusion of it.
2) Fanning the flames of racial tensions? Really? Don't get me wrong, Fresno is an ethnically diverse and large city (a population of around 1/2 a million, not including the surrounding towns and unincorporated areas), and like any large and ethnically diverse city there are racial tensions. I am not naive about this. However, these tensions get enflamed by politicians harping on them, by police officers engaging in racially charged activities, by economic and social inequalities...but not by compliance reports that are only read by a small number of individuals. Our clients were either woefully naive about how the review process goes, or else seemed to be astoundingly arrogant as to the importance of their project to the community (assuming that a wide variety of people would read the reports).
3) Although there are certainly people currently living in and around Fresno whose ancestors were involved in the riots, Fresno, like most cities in California, grew due to a post-WWII population and migration boom. Moreover, like many cities int he San Joaquin Valley, Fresno has a short civic memory, meaning that even those who are descended from people who were involved in the riots are unlikely to remember them. Moreover, these occurred in the 1890s, when race riots were not uncommon throughout the United States (a fact that should be known to anyone who managed to graduate high school), so to describe them for Fresno within a compliance report is not going to increase the racial tensions existing in an area even if a large swath of the populace were to read it.
To be fair, I think that the request to remove the references was due to naivete on the part of the client. They were a new company, and clearly had extensive business an engineering experience, but were novices to the environmental review process. They probably were not aware of just how few people would review the document, and were concerned that it would be widely distributed. But in the end the riots did happen. They are a matter of historical record. There is absolutely zero point in changing a historic review in order to pretend like they didn't occur. And it has bugged me ever since.
*Yeah, yeah, all of the Bay Area and L.A. people can insert their "Fresno is a hinterland" joke here.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Re-Emerging
I have survived. Six weeks ago, I stated that I had been charged with completing a rather voluminous report in six weeks (during a week and a half of which I would be out of the country and unable to work on it). I was lucky in that my co-worker Kelly was also assigned, and between the two of us, we wrangled a crew of thirteen people who were spread all over California, and managed to produce the report on time.
All of the crew working on this were fantastic. Without the help of the GIS folks who work for my company, our maps and graphics would not have been produced on time or nearly as well. The lab techs all pitched in to help create cleaned-up and readable site records (nearly 600 of them, in the end). And between my boss and I, we had the text of the report hammered out within a few days. Even Kaylia, being sick of me being gone all the time, spent time in the office with me over the weekend, printing out pages for the report.
We had many late night putting it together, especially towards the end. Wednesday night, I was at the office until midnight. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I was here until 1 AM, and the report wasn't complete until 2 am Sunday night/Monday morning.
In the end, the report contained 8,000 pages of text. It took up 18 binders. Yesterday, I drove it to Chowchilla (a town in the eastern portion of California's Central Valley) to drop it off with my boss.
This was the largest project that I had ever been involved in. The total project area covered 200 square miles, and while we only had access to a portion of that, we were responsible for accounting for all of it in some manner. It took nearly seven months of field work, and the sheer number of sites found resulted in a management challenge that proved even more difficult because, due to another large project taking priority, we had mostly green employees in the field, and were having to teach them fieldwork while simultaneously trying to finish the project.
Add to that the fact that our client, a very large company, had poor internal comunication, and even poorer comunication with their various contractors, and you have a situation in which the archaeologists were working hard to finish the project, while various individuals within the client organization were only ever getting part of the picture (and therefore thoroughly confused as to what we were doing, despite our best efforts). The client kept adding new paperwork and meetings to our schedule while simultaneously complaining that we weren't moving fast enough. And, of course, there were the frequently insinuated threats directed at me and Kelly.
Anyway, suffice to say, it was a struggle.
But, the draft report is off. Mind you, that is not to say that we are out of this yet. We sent the draft report to the client, but we still have to assemble a copy for the government agency that will be reviewing it. Once that is done, we wait for agency comments (and there will be some), and then we have to revise.
But, for the moment, I am done with a huge task.
All of the crew working on this were fantastic. Without the help of the GIS folks who work for my company, our maps and graphics would not have been produced on time or nearly as well. The lab techs all pitched in to help create cleaned-up and readable site records (nearly 600 of them, in the end). And between my boss and I, we had the text of the report hammered out within a few days. Even Kaylia, being sick of me being gone all the time, spent time in the office with me over the weekend, printing out pages for the report.
We had many late night putting it together, especially towards the end. Wednesday night, I was at the office until midnight. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I was here until 1 AM, and the report wasn't complete until 2 am Sunday night/Monday morning.
In the end, the report contained 8,000 pages of text. It took up 18 binders. Yesterday, I drove it to Chowchilla (a town in the eastern portion of California's Central Valley) to drop it off with my boss.
This was the largest project that I had ever been involved in. The total project area covered 200 square miles, and while we only had access to a portion of that, we were responsible for accounting for all of it in some manner. It took nearly seven months of field work, and the sheer number of sites found resulted in a management challenge that proved even more difficult because, due to another large project taking priority, we had mostly green employees in the field, and were having to teach them fieldwork while simultaneously trying to finish the project.
Add to that the fact that our client, a very large company, had poor internal comunication, and even poorer comunication with their various contractors, and you have a situation in which the archaeologists were working hard to finish the project, while various individuals within the client organization were only ever getting part of the picture (and therefore thoroughly confused as to what we were doing, despite our best efforts). The client kept adding new paperwork and meetings to our schedule while simultaneously complaining that we weren't moving fast enough. And, of course, there were the frequently insinuated threats directed at me and Kelly.
Anyway, suffice to say, it was a struggle.
But, the draft report is off. Mind you, that is not to say that we are out of this yet. We sent the draft report to the client, but we still have to assemble a copy for the government agency that will be reviewing it. Once that is done, we wait for agency comments (and there will be some), and then we have to revise.
But, for the moment, I am done with a huge task.
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