Dennis S. Hurtt
U.S. Department of Energy
Carlsbad Area Office

Chris L. West, William P. Whiting, and Karen F. Mikel
Westinghouse Waste Isolation Division

Ann C. Marshall
Carlsbad Area Office Technical Assistance Contractor

The road to opening the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the nation's first fully permitted nuclear waste repository, has been successful, in large part, due to the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Carlsbad Area Office establishment a comprehensive network of public affairs outreach partnerships and programs.

National outreach activities that support the WIPP have proven effective and of great interest to many other sites. All the public affairs programs directly support the WIPP's mission to protect human health and the environment by opening and operating the site.

The key message of the WIPP centers on its commitment to the safe management and disposal of the nation's transuranic waste as the only solution to a pressing national problem of temporary, above ground storage.

From a national perspective, the WIPP program is broad reaching. See FIGURE 1. It involves more than half the states in the nation. The public affairs outreach activities involve all the Congressional, state, county, and municipal elected and appointed officials in those states.

Stakeholders who have an interest or are impacted represent a major special interest group targeted by the WIPP's outreach activities. The Carlsbad Area Office's DOE counterparts at the 23 generator and storage sites are key partners who are in turn supported by a myriad of compact administrators, partnerships supported by memorandums of agreement, citizens who are members of oversight committees, and community leaders who both support and oppose their national mission.

In addition, the WIPP addresses the immediate interest of the local, regional, technical, and national news media. An estimated 15,000 news media have published one or more articles about the WIPP in its lifetime. Members of the public have interacted with the WIPP at a rate of 250,000 responses per year.

The Carlsbad, New Mexico community that includes the WIPP's employees and their families are considered the fundamental key to the success of the project. However, WIPP stakeholders are both diverse and diversified.

Six evolving strategies have been identified internally or negotiated with key stakeholders to facilitate the opening and operation of the WIPP:

Seek meaningful partnerships, both within and outside the U.S. Department of Energy.

• Communicate accurate and timely information about all activities to all stakeholders.
• Achieve productive working relationships and effective communication with stakeholders interested in detailed information about the WIPP facility and the National Transuranic Program.
• Improve management awareness, acceptance, and responsiveness to key stakeholder issues.
• Encourage stakeholder participation in the planning and decision making beyond what is required by statute.
• Identify, benchmark, and implement any process, technology, or program that will enhance outreach, communications, or public acceptance.

Through the WIPP Information Center the Westinghouse Waste Isolation Division responds to stakeholder concerns and interests on subjects such as safety, public documents, transportation, regulatory compliance, waste characteristics, and the WIPP facility.

Once issues, interests, or concerns are identified, Information Center staff make a major effort to resolve them accurately and get the answer back quickly. However, the effort does not stop there. Any inquiry is considered a "grab sample" and an effort is made to distribute the answer to a much wider audience. Special efforts are made to overlap communications, particularly in Northern New Mexico.

When inaccurate or misleading statements appear in the print or broadcast media or in other public forums, the Public Affairs Team prepares formal responses and delivers them to the news media. This pushback strategy has proven very successful. Now, many stakeholders and elected officials who follow the WIPP and are extemely knowledgeable ask for background information on the issue. They join the WIPP in setting the record straight with the news media.

As in all industries it is necessary to anticipate customer needs. The WIPP public affairs planning processes use public opinion polling data when available. They also gather Information from public hearings, interviews, and benchmarks to determine information needs of stakeholders, elected officials, and the public.

Every strategic partnership nurtured by the Carlsbad Area Office is detailed in a disciplined planning process. Although each plan is uniquely different and designed to meet a strategic objective, most plans follow a common management by objective format with considerable emphasis on measurement.

Most public affairs practitioners resist measuring their individual or group performances. Once performances are tracked and measured, however, the measurements prove invaluable. For example, the Carlsbad Area Office tracks eight metric points for the Westinghouse Waste Isolation Division. The tracked progress in fiscal year 1997 showed a 160 percent increase. One area, which was eliminated from the computation, increased more than 600 percent.

Public meetings, although frequently required by statue, are a fundamental link in building a formal record of public participation. Although seen by many as a necessary, technical step in the openness process, the Carlsbad Area Office has capitalized on the public meeting process as an opportunity to build links within the DOE community, special interest groups, the news media, and the public.

In the past three years, stakeholders have had more than 125 separate public opportunities to voice concerns and support, to offer input and questions, or to see and hear about the WIPP programs. Some of the public meeting opportunities have included:

• Scoping meetings on the Waste isolation Pilot Plant Disposal Phase Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement.
• Regular quarterly meetings with oversight groups such as the New Mexico Environmental Evaluation Group.
• Meetings with leaders of communities impacted by the WIPP site.
• Meetings with tribal governments.
• Numerous hearings conducted by the WIPP regulators such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the New Mexico Environment Department.

The process of building internal partnerships involves pre-planning and advanced communications. Dates, times, and locations for public meetings are identified as early as possible and published in the Carlsbad Area Office Monthly Calendar for stakeholders.

In some cases, the Carlsbad Area Office, Office of Public Affairs offers to use its toll free telephone number to schedule presenters at hearings. This allows stakeholders direct contact or voice mail access to a WIPP representative.

WIPP educational outreach programs and initiatives rely on thorough teamwork by the Carlsbad Area Office, its contractors, school districts, institutions of higher education, and students. Building partnerships within educational institutions is important. This is based upon national opinion research that identifies educators as one of the most credible groups to communicate complex risk information to the public and media.

What is most important to this partnership is that the Carlsbad Area Office does more than try to inform educators; it also strives to listen to educators. Therefore, the two goals of the WIPP educational partnerships are to:

• Listen to educators for key program guidance.
• Expose educators and students to innovative and unique learning opportunities.

Several of the successful programs are:

Rural Community College Initiative. Sponsored by a Ford Foundation grant, the Rural Community College Initiative teams Westinghouse Electric Corporation with the New Mexico State University at Carlsbad to develop a grant that uses rural college resources. This grant focuses on creating jobs, raising income, generating wealth, and reinvesting that wealth in regional businesses, institutions, and people. Through volunteerism, staff at the WIPP contributed more than $10,000 in in-kind services.

Renaissance Program. Through the support of the WIPP management and operations contractor, the Renaissance Program was implemented to improve self-esteem by motivating the "middle student" in academic achievement, attendance, leadership, and citizenship. Carlsbad is the first school district in the nation to have a district-wide Renaissance Program. A local advisory board governs the program through which faculty and community volunteers, many from the WIPP, manage its day-to-day activities. The way Renaissance is administered in each school is unique; but in every school, it is a process for recognizing and rewarding positive student behavior and achievement.

Southeastern New Mexico Educational Resource Center. The mission of the Southeastern New Mexico Educational Resource Center is to provide resources to the 11 school districts in southeastern New Mexico through the collaborative efforts of school districts, governmental agencies such as the U.S. Department of Energy, Westinghouse Electric Company, and Sandia National Laboratories. Local business and industries have joined in this partnership. The center is working with school districts to:

• Identify needed math and science materials and equipment.
• Meet needs through the provisions of technical assistance, excess property transfers, and educational materials.
• Coordinate faculty training.
• Promote an awareness of employment opportunities enhanced by a knowledge of math, science, and technology.
• Initiate programs that bridge the gap from school to work.

Waste-Management Environment and Research Consortium. The Waste-Management Environment and Research Consortium conducts an annual environmental design contest for universities, providing competition, educational challenges, and transfer of technology. This unique and innovative contest, championed by the WIPP contractors, is the only university level environmental design contest of its kind that provides participants with design and practical experience on actual environmental restoration issues. The contest is structured to give university student groups from United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe an opportunity to exchange information through the designing, developing, and testing of an environmental control process. To support this unique effort that brings a broad cross section of new environmentalists together, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Carlsbad Area Office, and the Westinghouse Electric Company budgeted $86,000 for the Consortium in 1998. In addition, $25,000 is contributed in the form of cash donations and volunteerism.

Although a fundamental element to any communication's strategy for a nuclear facility, the WIPP's Speakers Bureau became focused geographically with several direct messages and goals. The goal of the Speakers Bureau is to reach out to stakeholder audiences who may not have an opportunity to visit the WIPP site. Speaker's presentations are tailored to meet audience needs, while focusing on project awareness, national importance, and environmental responsibility.

Collectively, Department of Energy agreements with the Western Governors' Association represent a fundamental partnership important to the success of the WIPP. Although there are similar contractual and partnership agreements with other state government organizations, the partnership with the Western Governors' Association based in Denver, Colorado was the first and continues to be the most productive. The key elements to the Western Governors' Association partnership are:

• Third-party leadership that supports the mission of the Department of Energy as its programs relate to the western states.
• A historical perspective that can be shared with other partners.
• A financial partner and broker. States work with the Western Governors' Association to identify reasonable funding requests that match the resources of the Department of Energy. This partnership in turn influences the funding levels negotiated with tribal governments.
• A key feedback mechanism. Important, and sometimes festering, issues are quickly identified and communicated to the Department of Energy for resolution. Without its communication channels to the Western Governors' Association, many state issues would quickly become road blocks.

The WIPP minority outreach programs are implemented through a dual strategy. The first strategy is a traditional approach to informing and involving key minority organizations in understanding and accepting the purpose and benefits of the WIPP.

The second, and more important, strategy is to join and actively participate in Mexican American organizations. The profile for New Mexico shows a 40 percent regional Hispanic population ranging from recent immigrants to families whose land was granted and deeded by the King of Spain.

The WIPP minority outreach leader, for example, is president of the local chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). He also is a member of three Hispanic Chambers of Commerce in New Mexico, and is an active participant with the company's human resources department in minority recruitment.

In January 1997, the Department of Energy's Carlsbad Area Office established a low-profile public information and outreach office in Santa Fe. There had been significant opposition in that community to plans for transporting waste through or near the city. The WIPP public affairs team developed and implemented a series of strategic stakeholder outreach and media relations plans designed to help remedy the concern.

Since the Santa Fe Public Information and Outreach Office opened, there has been a significant change in public and local government acceptance. The Carlsbad Area Office heralded the Santa Fe outreach to stakeholders as being pivotal in changing Santa Fe's opposition to the WIPP shipments.

Recently, the Department of Energy, the State of New Mexico, and the Santa Fe City Council signed a negotiated agreement to permit transuranic waste shipments through the city. Twelve months ago it would have not been possible to discuss the issues, let alone reach acceptable closure.

Among many successful partnership initiatives originating from the Carlsbad Area Office's Santa Fe Office was a strategy to become more involved with key homeowner associations. Representatives systematically met with the management of each association. They made presentations to their memberships about the purpose of the WIPP. They discussed the existing risks and the benefits of removal of risk by opening the WIPP.

The DOE and contractor management team listened to the transportation issues unique to Santa Fe. Representatives of the Santa Fe office attended key business meetings to become further involved and ensure immediate availability to answer questions. In addition, a team of representatives from both the Santa Fe office and the WIPP attended all hearings of the New Mexico Highway and Transportation Department.

As a result of the active partnership with key land owners, a recent headline in the Santa Fe New Mexican read: "Las Campanas gives up land for bypass." The Las Campanas Development Company states: "We recognize the critical issues of timing and the importance of the bypass for the safety and convenience of the citizens of Santa Fe." The homeowner organization agreed to dedicate 62 acres "without condition, at no cost."

A key tactic tying the site's active media relations program to a national stakeholder outreach strategy is the use of SprintFAXÒ to distribute news releases to stakeholders. The WIPP stakeholder data base contains more than 11,000 active names and addresses listed by state.

When a news release is distributed to the news media it is also simultaneously sent to every stakeholder in the state selected. According to Sprint, SprintFAXÒ has the capability to distribute news releases to 2,000 recipients within 45 seconds.

Through computer links using e-mail, both the news release and letterhead are transmitted to Sprint, which uses its trunk telephone lines to broadcast the news release to both media and stakeholders. This tactic puts breaking news in the hands of stakeholders before they "read it in the papers," which is a frequent lament of stakeholders.

Building acceptance for transuranic waste disposal at the WIPP has relied on nurturing partnerships at all levels within all stakeholder groups. This strategy has proven to be the most effective in comparison with other public affairs strategies.

Twenty years ago the public relations industry provided "public information" as the mainstay of communications. The marketing industry emerged, and the "never let a price hang" philosophy evolved. Next, scientific analysis was loosely applied, leading industries to seek "informed consent" while informing the public of what they had already done. Caring statements have emerged as the buzz words of today.

The success of the WIPP shows that the most successful strategy is to constructively and innovatively build public affairs partnerships at all levels.

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