The Environmental Protection Agency is considering relocating its program manager for the Energy Department’s Hanford Site away from the nearby city of Richland. Acting program manager Laura Buelow told the Hanford Advisory Board (HAB) last week that a decision on potentially basing the manager on the other side of Washington state in Seattle would be made when a job candidate is offered the position.
The EPA is a Hanford regulator and a party to the Tri-Party Agreement, which sets legally binding cleanup milestones for the Department of Energy at the 586-square-mile former plutonium production complex.
Moving the manager’s position to Seattle is not acceptable, Hanford Advisory Board Chairwoman Susan Leckband wrote in a letter sent Monday to Michelle Pirzadeh, acting EPA Region 10 administrator. The position, vacated when Dennis Faulk took early retirement in August, has been assigned to Richland since environmental cleanup began at Hanford, Leckband said.
“The HAB urges you in the strongest terms to locate the manager you select to replace Mr. Faulk in the Richland office,” she wrote. The “complex and dynamic interactions” among the EPA, DOE’s Hanford offices, the Washington state Department of Ecology, the HAB, Native American tribes, and other stakeholders “require the EPA manager to reside in your Richland office to do an effective job regulating the Hanford cleanup,” Leckband added.
The HAB believes the EPA Hanford project manager must maintain a “confident presence in the Tri-Cities to recognize and understand community and stakeholder environmental concerns,” Leckband said. Keeping the program manager in Richland also would allow prompt EPA investigation and response to incidents at Hanford, she said. Basing the EPA’s Hanford program manager in Seattle would leave just four staff members in the agency’s Richland office assigned to Hanford. The federal agency’s fellow Hanford regulator and Tri-Party Agreement agency, the Department of Ecology, has about 70 people in its Nuclear Waste Program office in Richland.
The posting for the job closed Wednesday. The hiring decision might be made by Chris Hladick, the Alaska state commerce commissioner who will start work in Seattle as the EPA Region 10 administrator on Dec. 4.
There has been no public word on why the EPA might relocate the project manager position to Seattle, which is just over 200 miles from Richland, a city of about 55,000 in southeastern Washington.
Buelow also told the HAB that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has taken back signatory authority for records of decision laying out the cleanup plan for Superfund site projects that cost more than $50 million. The change is intended to make records of decision more uniform across the nation, she said. Most Hanford records of decision are signed by the regional EPA administrator, who in some cases has delegated signatory authority to the Hanford program manager.
The first record of decision at Hanford that Pruitt might consider would cover the site’s 100-D and 100-H areas, which include the D, DR, and H reactors along the Columbia River. Most environmental remediation has been completed in the two areas under an interim record of decision. However, a “couple of $100 million” worth of work remains to be done, with most of the expense for operating the pump and treat plants that clean hexavalent chromium from the groundwater in the area, Buelow said.
