The Observer, September 2007

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From the Executive Director: Critical elements make citizen oversight effective

By John Devens

Earlier this month, I chaired a panel at the Clean Pacific conference in Seattle. The topic was, what’s required to make citizen oversight work?

We’ve spent 18 years thinking about that question, and the conference gave us an excuse to boil the answer down to a few key points I’d like to share here.

Four main things – in addition to passionate, committed citizens – are essential to effective citizen oversight: authority, money, autonomy, and access. Let’s take them in order.

First, authority.

Ours comes from two sources. One is the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, passed in response to the Exxon Valdez spill. It requires citizen oversight in Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound, and we fill that role in the Sound. Government agencies and the oil industry know that federal law gives us a seat at the table when decisions are being made about the safety of crude oil transportation through our waters.

The other source of our authority is our contract with Alyeska. Besides funding us, as discussed below, it spells out our powers and responsibilities with respect to oversight of the terminal and tankers in Prince William Sound, and it contains considerable guidance on how Alyeska is required to interact with us.

Then there’s money.

Our mission is minimizing environmental impacts from the oil tankers traveling the Sound and the Valdez terminal where they load. That’s expensive.

We conduct technical research, monitor tanker and terminal operations, evaluate industry and government proposals, and analyze complex documents like contingency plans. This requires a solid professional staff and relationships with numerous expert technical contractors. Maintaining long-term technical and analytical capability on this scale requires guaranteed, adequate, inflation-adjusted funding.

Virtually all of ours – now about $3 million a year – is through a long-term contract with Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. While industry funding obviously comes with its own set of challenges, it has worked in our case. Our budget has mostly kept up with inflation. While we’ve had a few financial disagreements with Alyeska, they have been over issues and amounts that were small in relation to the total scale of our operations.

As a result, we believe industry funding is the best approach. Such a funding contract should be mandatory as a matter of law in order for the industry being overseen to be considered in compliance with oil-spill contingency plans and other regulatory requirements.

Autonomy is another critical element of citizen oversight. It has several facets.

Foremost among them are internal structure and governance. These must be left up to the oversight group, so long as it operates in accordance with its authorizing legislation and funding contract. Our 18 member entities are independent organizations and they alone choose their representatives to our board, which elects its own officers and tells me what to do as executive director of the council. No government official gets to review, approve, or veto these processes, nor does the oil industry have a say. We believe any political, agency, or industry role would be the death knell of the autonomy and independence required for effective citizen oversight.

Similarly, our board does not include voting seats for representatives of the government agencies that oversee the oil industry, nor for the industry itself. The citizen voice should consist of unfiltered and unalloyed input from citizens alone.

No citizens’ council can be expected to be all things to all people, to serve some amorphous conglomeration required to incorporate all the contending parties, any more than a government agency or an oil company board of directors should be subject to such a requirement.

Budgetary independence is another important component of autonomy. The group must have control of its own budget. It is critical that neither industry, regulators, nor elected officials be able to veto its projects or initiatives.
Freedom of inquiry is also essential. The group should be able to retain technical experts and commission research even if, in some cases, it covers the same ground as industry or government-sponsored research.

Finally, there’s the freedom to inform. The group must be able to communicate with the public, news media, regulators, and elected officials as necessary to carry out its mission, all without oversight or control by government or industry.

Access is the fourth crucial element of effective citizen oversight.

The authorizing legislation, as well as any funding contract, should guarantee the group has access to industry facilities, personnel, and records on the same basis as regulators. In addition, regulators and companies receiving formal advice or other communications from the group should be required to respond in writing.

All four of these elements are present in the system built up over the past 18 years among our council, the oil industry, and its regulators in Prince William Sound. Although nothing can guarantee there will never be another accident on the scale of the Exxon Valdez, we believe this system of interaction has materially reduced the chances of such disasters, while producing the good working partnership among citizens, industry, and regulators that was envisioned in the Oil Pollution Act.

We believe this system will continue serving Alaskans well, adapting to change and keeping everyone focused on the most important thing: ensuring that the rich and beautiful natural environment of the Sound provides us with pleasure and sustenance long after the last load of oil leaves Valdez.