ENV-17-24 Preparing your Community for Fenceline Monitoring Data

Description:

With only a few months to go until the January 2018 compliance deadline for fenceline monitoring, is your refinery prepared? Does the community you operate in and the stakeholders concerned with your facility have the tools they need to understand the results they’ll see? Do you have stakeholder relationships today that position you for a productive conversation with the people and organizations who care the most—and potentially understand the least—about what this data means? Consensus among refiners is that managing the public’s reaction to benzene levels in the air they breathe may prove the most challenging aspect of the fenceline monitoring requirement. With the public disclosure of data approaching in 2019, planning, communication and nurturing stakeholder relationships must start now to lay the foundation for managing public perceptions, reactions, and risks to your business. To begin, there are a number of steps you can take now to assess your situation: • Gauging the health of your key external relationships: How often are you in conversation with local officials and state agencies, your CAP and community groups, NGOs, academic institutes or departments that study air quality and public health? What is the level of trust that you share? Do they come to you for information, or rely on others’ portrayal of your facility, operations, and how you behave in the community? • Who’s contributing to the conversation and message development: What does the public know about the rule and what the data mean—and don’t mean—for public health? Where are they getting their information? What messages are circulating in the public space? Are you prepared to distill highly technical information into a form the public can understand? Who is best placed to deliver the message—you, a strategic partner, or someone else? • Tools used by communities that help or hurt the conversation: How prolific are commercial air samplers in your community? Are NGOs, community groups, or others using them? Have you thought about how to explain the differences in the results they may see from those that you will report? • Planning engagement: What’s your engagement plan? Who will you speak with, when, and in what content? Who will speak for you, if a third party could be more effective? This paper brings together two public affairs professionals with years of experience in refinery community relations and a refinery fenceline monitoring national technical expert to lay out the fundamentals of managing stakeholder risk in public reporting of fenceline monitoring data.