After two presidential administrations allowed the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board to dwindle to only seven out of a potential 25 members, the panel voted this week to adopt a policy to avoid such staffing shortages in the future.
The Citizens Advisory Board voted during an online meeting carried Monday via Youtube to revise its member appointment process by allowing current members whose terms have expired to temporarily stick around when the headcount slips below 75%.
A package of prospective advisory board members was rejected by the DOE headquarters on June 10 because it included too few female applicants, Amy Boyette, Savannah River’s external affairs director, said during the meeting. The citizens board wants to recruit more women, Boyette said. “We do continue to try innovative ways to reach diverse populations,” she added.
The roster of prospective members was first submitted to DOE in August 2020, months before control of the government transferred from the Donald Trump administration to the Joe Biden administration, officials noted during the session.
Acting board chair Gregg Murray said that the DOE wants community input, “yet that input is being stymied by the delayed membership package approval process and resulting absence of a full-strength board.” Murray said he missed having the 10 or so additional members that would normally take part in discussions.
The citizens advisory board “made a recommendation to DOE regarding membership. That recommendation will be treated like all recommendations we receive from the boards – it will be considered and a response letter will be provided to the board regarding if the recommendation will be accepted, partially accepted, or rejected,” a DOE spokesperson wrote in an email Friday to Weapons Complex Monitor.
The Savannah River Citizens Advisory Board finds itself halfway through 2021 with a skeleton crew-type panel and an August deadline to propose a list of new members. As a result, the panel plans to carry-on with its remaining members through the rest of this year with hopes of returning to full strength in 2022.
The panel has already suspended much of its activities in 2021 “recognizing that actions based on the vote of less than a third of the CAB [Citizens Advisory Board] would lack credibility and legitimacy,” according to the panel’s policy draft.
During the meeting Michael Budney, the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s top federal executive at Savannah River, said the new advisory panel policy should help it maintain greater “continuity” when DOE fails to sign off on enough new members before old ones must depart.
