Smurfit Stone watchdogs: EPA brewery meetings are fluff
Laura Lundquist
(Missoula Current) For close to a decade, the Frenchtown Smurfit Stone Community Advisory Group has been watchdogging the federal cleanup process at the Smurfit Stone mill, but group members are concerned that federal employees are no longer listening.
The agenda for the February meeting of the Frenchtown Smurfit Stone Community Advisory Group, or CAG, didn’t have too many items, but during the meeting, community members still raised a number of questions. However, representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency weren’t there to provide answers.
A year ago, EPA project manager Allie Archer announced that the EPA would finish a remedial investigation report for the Smurfit site without completing some promised sampling work. Since then, CAG members have noticed that EPA representatives have either not attended the monthly CAG meetings or they attend remotely on Zoom but keep their video cameras off and didn’t really participate. Before the Trump administration took over, Archer would usually attend meetings in person to answer questions.
In addition, the CAG is still waiting for sampling results from 2024 and is disappointed that a climate resiliency study of the mill site has apparently been abandoned during the past year since the Trump administration took over, said CAG member Jeri Delys.
“The climate vulnerability assessment is key to flooding and channel migration. But the EPA never ‘publicly’ finished it because of the change in administration. It’s important to have the information, but we don’t know where it went. Those are the questions that come up in CAG meetings,” Delys said. “But those opportunities are missed when you have a meeting at a brewery, because people don’t know about climate vulnerability studies.”
The “meeting at a brewery” refers to random “community conversations” events at the Old Bull Brewery in Frenchtown that the EPA announced in a September EPA newsletter. EPA representatives occasionally drive over from Helena on a Tuesday evening and sit at the brewery to answer questions. Delys called it a distraction, because most of the time, few people approach their table. The ones who do ask questions are likely to be asking basic things like “When will the cleanup work start?”
“I have had some heartburn over those. It’s at a brewery, they send a state car over with three employees, and there’s no published agenda. And nobody is fact-checking them,” Delys said. “And it’s sporadic at best, since they didn’t show up in January or during the (government) shutdown.”
Mackenzie Meter, the most recent EPA community engagement coordinator, told the Current in an email that she and Archer attend the CAG meeting “when we have technical information to share.” She added that the EPA holds community conversations at other Superfund sites across the nation, and during their Feb. 10 event at the Old Bull Brewery, more than a dozen residents talked to EPA representatives.
“A significant number of residents we spoke with are not interested in attending CAG meetings and appreciate the opportunity to ask questions in an informal local setting,” Meter wrote in the email.
Delys said sending EPA representatives to answer questions in person at the brewery and not at the CAG meetings sends the wrong message and raises mistrust. It’s only in the CAG meetings where various aspects of the cleanup are raised and questioned, although sometimes the discussions can get rather technical.
Over the years, the CAG - which includes representatives of Frenchtown, Missoula County, the state of Montana and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes - has repeatedly pushed for more sampling, either on the mill site with groundwater or soil or in the Clark Fork River. The EPA has often balked, because the “potentially responsible parties” or PRP’s - MLH Montana, WestRock, International Paper Company and M2Green Redevelopment - resist having to pay for a lot of sampling. But it was only because of additional sampling that the state of Montana learned a consumption advisory needed to be issued for fish in the Clark Fork River due to contamination from wood-processing chemicals.
The EPA’s responsiveness to CAG requests and questions has also changed with presidential administrations. Some of the promises the EPA made under the Obama and Biden administrations were reduced or eliminated under the two Trump administrations, such as former EPA Regional administrator KC Becker’s promise in February 2023 to conduct additional sampling using EPA money. Regional directors have been repeatedly replaced in Denver’s EPA Region 8 headquarters.
Delys said she appreciated that Montana Department of Environmental Quality employees remained engaged and are still coming to the CAG meetings and answering the CAG’s questions to the extent they can.
“The CAG - we exist to be the trusted, consistent forum where the community can receive information. They can ask questions, and they can meaningfully participate in discussions related to cleanup. We feel (the EPA are) fragmenting the opportunity for the community to get information,” Delys said. “I would have loved to have had a community conversation about how can we get more people to the CAG meetings. We agree we need more people there. Had they come to us and said ‘Let’s try something else,’ but they didn’t. Mackenzie briefly mentioned (the brewery meetings) in the fall, and then we heard about it in an EPA newsletter. That’s how we found out - they didn’t tell us and they didn’t mention the CAG in the newsletter.”
The next CAG meeting will be this Thursday at 6 p.m. in the Frenchtown Rural Fire Hall. The public is urged to attend. According to a March 2 post on the CAG Facebook page, “Critical decisions about the cleanup of the former Smurfit-Stone Mill site are approaching. If Frenchtown residents are not actively involved, those decisions will be finalized without meaningful community input, and our community will live with the outcome.”
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.