Oral History

Narrator: Ronald Bunn
Narrator: Chee Choy
Interviewer: Donna Sinclair
Date: May 19, 2000
Place: Portland, Oregon

Transcribed by Melissa Williams

[Begin Side A, Tape 1 of 2]

DS: This is Donna Sinclair for the Center for Columbia River History, today is May 19, 2000. I’m interviewing Chee Choy of the Bureau of Environmental Services for the Columbia Slough Oral History Project and we’re at Portland State University.

DS: Can you tell me your date of birth, your ethnic heritage, and where you came from, and how you got to Portland.

CC: Ok. My name is Chee Choy and my date of birth is June 5, 1958, and I came to U.S. in 1985, I grew up in Guadalumpur, Malaysia, and I was working for the Malaysian Department of Environment–which is similar to the U.S. EPA– for like four and a half years, or five years or so, after that I quit my job and came here to Duke Graduate School at Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, and then I did more graduate work at Oregon Graduate Institute out in the suburbs of Beaverton [laughs], and I’ve been working for the city since 1992.

DS: What was your graduate work in?

CC: My undergraduate degree is in [?] studies, and then my graduate degrees are around the science of engineering. I have two masters, the second master was supposed to be Ph.D., but I never finished my dissertation, I thought “Too much of this to write,” and it got tiring [laughs].

DS: Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with the Columbia Slough. How you first became involved with slough and…

CC: Um hum. It’s kind of a long story so you can cut short at any time. I was working for the city at the time, providing technical support to many different watershed managers, I think this was way back in ’93, and there was a threat to sue the city from the Northwest Environmental Advocates, they let their intent to sue the city and I think DEQ as well, about the sediment contamination in the Columbia Slough. So while we’re deciding as to how to proceed with the project– the city was at the time– because they wanted to control the sources because they allow combine sewer overflows, or CSOs, on the slough and they allow different sources, they thought that they would like to deal with the sources first before they deal with the sediment contamination. Because of the threat to sue they accelrated the Sediment Project a couple of years ahead, because eventually we will do it anyway. So we tried to approach DEQ to do the Sediment Project and it took some time ’cause DEQ at the time did not have expertise in sediment remediation and so it took some time to convince DEQ to do the project, and finally when they agree to do the project it was just a couple of weeks before the ninety day [indistinguishable] was going to be up.

DS: So that did accelerate the studies, otherwise some of this wouldn’t have been done as quickly. How long do you think it would have taken otherwise?

CC: Probably a couple years because they really wanted to go to the sources. The way I explain it is like, you know I like to use cooking ’cause I like to do cooking, it’s like when you’re cooking and you always spill the soy sauce, you don’t start cleaning the floor, you put the bottle of soy sauce back up first before you wipe up the mess because no matter how much you wipe it’s an endless job ’til the bottle is empty. So that’s what the whole thing is about, we thought – you want to deal with the sources first before we start clean-up, see how big the spill is. So it would probably be a couple years because the CSOs, in fact it’s gonna be offlying most of that virtually by end of this year, 2000, and so I suspect the city will have done something after CSO would go offlie; so probably about two to four years or so before they would start do something I think. So I got involved in the project because of that threat to sue the city and because of the most technical background of the group– my supervisor at that time, Dick Cleaver, and still is, suggested I be the project manager and that’s how I got involved with the Columbia Slough Sediment Project because I do have background in hazardous waste management and disposal and a lot of chemistry and biology, and hazardous waste management in general, and some waste assessment background as well.

DS: So then you were involved in the Sediment Project…

CC: Right, since November ’93.

DS: And what did they find in the project, just briefly, I mean we have the study, if you could talk a little bit about…

CC: One of the major problems is that this is a large-scale project. All the waterways of the slough is thirty-one miles. So one way is how do we study, nobody knows how to study such a huge waterway, so what we did is what we call a screening level reassessment, or the acronym is SLRA, and the screening level reassessment is to help focus the city efforts on the back sites, on the sites that are most contaminated, so that’s the first level. Then once we have the back sites in, you rank them according to risk, then you start with the top most contaminated sites first and look more in detail as to the extent the contamination is and how bad the contamination is and how it effects different animals and people. So the first step in the screening level reassessment we found that obviously the sediments are contaminated, there’s no question about that, the surprising thing is it’s not as contaminated as we imagine it to be, we thought it was gonna be very hot, and it’s bad but it’s not something that we have to go in the next month or next week to dig it up, that’s not what we found. The screening level reassessment found– so the sediment contamination wasn’t as bvad as we thought, but at the same time we still could use the information to rank the sites according to the risk. We already got three hundred sampling points that we did all along the slough and then we classify those sites according to priority class A, B, C, and D; A being the most contaminated, D being the least contaminated. Then we went in and looked in more detail at those A and B sites because our approach is “worst things first.” I wanted to say more about the approach, this “worst things first” approach because a lot of time people do some of this work for large systems, they spent many many years just doing studies and spend a lot of resources and they don’t get to action, and we hope by doing a tier approach we will be doing investigations and also trying to take actions on the worst things first, try to focus our resources on the worst things first so that there’s always be thing we hope to be doing.

DS: So what the lawsuit did then was help initiate the investigation portion of it a little more quickly than it would have happened.

CC: Right. Although I work for a government agency and for the city, throughout my life, even in Malaysia, I believe that citizens groups are very important in pushing government agencies to do more. Sometimes people have definitely had to– they’re very dedicated, they’re very committed to what they want to do, but sometimes because of many different barriers and funding, people get– I won’t say complacent, but disillusioned to some extent, and so like an incentive to be pushed forward, and sometimes with the citizens’ help the top managers have to do something and that’s where it gets the energized people back, the employees, and I think it gives the employees their energy and the interest to really move on projects. So I really think that the role of citizen watchdog groups is really important, I mean there has to be a balance what’s reasonable and what’s not reasonable, but I think that they have a right to function in getting government to do more than they should, and also just to look out– government has to be accountable to tax payers and rate payers. So basically it is a citizens group that pushes the city to taking more assertive action, to doing more work on the Columbia Slough in terms of contaminated sediments.

DS: Can you tell me about your first introduction to the slough itself. Not to studying the slough or to the contamination while you’re in your office, but actually going out to the slough?

CC: Well, I think I first started going out to the slough I said “This doesn’t look like a slough,” a lot of the times it’s pretty linear, the dikes and then no trees along the banks and it looked like ditch to me. The Lower slough looks different, looks more like I imagine it to be �� a river system, at least have trees and it’s much wider; but the Middle to Upper Slough looks like ditches to me and I was thinking “These are ditches” [laughs]. So I was not very impressed. I was also very surprised at the condition of the slough in terms that there’s a lot of algae and it doesn’t look great because they looked like ditches and so people don’t treat them like rivers; if they’d look more like rivers, and we have the dikes hiding them away from people, then will [draw] more attention. . . the more attention, I think, it gets, more people will say “Hey wait a minute, this is a natural resource that we need to protect,” but they are kind of like tucked in somewhere, hidden away, it’s not on people’s mind, which is one of the reasons why in terms of my co-worker Susan Barthel and other people, with the help of citizen groups are doing is they’re trying to focus more attention on the slough; taking people on canoe rides and the Regatta and all kinds of stuff that we’re trying to get people to say “Hey, there we have a very important natural resource,” it doesn’t look like a river in some parts, but still there��s a lot of wildlife there, otters and blue herons, so close to the city, I mean how many cities in a country of this size can boast of having river otters within a couple miles from downtown. To answer your question, I was not impressed with the slough, I thought it was a ditch in many parts, I wasn’t surprised that it was seen as the most contaminated waterway in the state because I think people use it as a ditch in many ways, see it as a ditch.

DS: Has your personal sense of the slough changed since you started this in 1993?

CC: Yeah. Because I’ve been on more trips on the sloughs, whether in canoes or just going out there, seeing the river otters in the ditch in the Upper Slough, Middle Slough, seeing great blue herons and being people from Audubon, Mike Houck, and all other people, and they’re talking about different kind of birds and my opinion of the slough has changed, I definitely can’t see it as a ditch, I see it as a waterway which is overly managed for urban purposes but still has a lot of potential for natural resources to a certain extent, for wildlife. So I see that it is worth preserving, it’s worth doing more work on the slough despite the fact that it looks like a ditch [laughs].

DS: What factors do you think have affected communities on the slough the most, in relation to the slough?

CC: What factors? Can you elaborate on factors?

DS: What do you think in terms of policies, or groups, or industry what do you think has been the most critical thing that communities, the people in the communities have had to deal with? Maybe I’m not framing this question very well.

CC: Um, I can attempt to answer that and you can focus me. I think that one impact is that there’s more attention on the slough as I was saying just now; that people are seeing it less as a ditch in their backyard and that they can dispose of things, I mean people still do it probably, but people are getting more attention on the fact that it is a natural resource very close to the city and so people are working harder to try to do more work, there’s more support I feel in the last several years to try to improve the general quality of the slough. I think that even the Columbia Corridor Business Association, CCA, Edna Cahoo is I think the executive director or director, they have been working– I’m surprised, I always expect them to fight us tooth and nail on many things but they have been very supportive and then they have to protect their own business interests, but they have always met us half way, or more than half way, on trying to be good around the [indistinguishable]; I’m very surprised at that. There are issues of disagreement now and then in general, but for me I didn’t expect a working relationship with the Business Association.

DS: How do you think that came about? Someone said something to me about BES “being in bed with business,” that’s the way it was framed. What do you have to say about that?

CC: I think that’s a wrong perception probably. I think that the business people say that BES is [indistinguishable]. We have to work with the businesses to– we need to treat people as human beings. Businesses are there because of a certain reason, they want to make profits, they want to do this, they have products; you know, we may disagree what our land use should be, but the fact is they are there so I think we need to work with them to get them to be responsible. So unless you respect them and don’t see them as the bad people, the villains, and really– I don’t know how to say it– it’s just respect, everybody has a certain amount of human dignity, and we may disagree in our values in life, but we need to accept that basis first, and then from there try to work on their values. I think all of us have the same values even though it looks different, because we all want a better quality of life for ourselves, and for our children, and for our future generations; everybody wants that, and if you can appeal you can gain trust and then you can get away from the defense– if people see you as a [indistinguishable] government they will throw up their arms and be real defensive and just be against, but if you can get past that and then talk to them as people and get them to see we have the same base values, you might be a Republican I might be a democrat, but we have the same base value, we value family, we value future generations, we value a good quality of life, and how you achieve that quality of life sometimes is different, but basically that’s the basis. So I think regardless of who you are, you’re a business, you’re an environmentalist, some people call some people extreme environmentalists, you need to respect they’re coming from a space based on their life experiences to pursue such an interest and you need to respect that. We need to come to a common understanding, I don’t know, maybe I’m optimistic, I just feel that people once they respect each other and have a good trust among each other you’re not here to attack each other and downgrade each other, that we can work on common goals. It’s about moving our lives in general . . . about improving our lives.

DS: So what is the common goal for the slough? The one, or more, things that actually helps to draw all of those various groups together so that they can work? What would you say that is?

CC: Common goal I think, well it sounds very corny and tacky, is just to improve the quality of life, whether you’re a person working in a business there, whether you’re a kayaker who likes to kayak the slough, someone who lives there, it improves the quality of life. I think the common goal is people who live there don’t want the slough to smell like shit [laughs], or the algae and stuff like that, they don’t don’t like to look at it and see this huge brown mass of stuff. People who work there I think, you ask them would you rather be smelling fumes and have dust in the face, and breathing toxic chemicals in the air, they would probably say no, even though they’re working for a business. So I think the common goal is people can see there is a way to get a better quality of life regardless of who you are, I think that’s the basis I think that has to be the basis, otherwise people will not be able to work together. I’m not saying it’s ideal, that everybody works so well together, but they’re working much better together than the way I envisioned it. In Indonesia the [indistinguishable], all fractionized, really defending their own self-interest, and now there’s a lot of trust around different groups, and then with that trust they can start to look at the common values.

DS: Have you been a part of that, Part of the Watershed Council, or…

CC: Very marginally, I’ve observed the process, I’ve been to a few meetings of the beginning process but I really like to give the credit to a lot of community activists, Susan Barthel, my co-worker, who really worked tirelessly on trying to bring groups together. I think it’s also a belief, I mean in the beginning it was so [indistinguishable] that I was sure it would never work — the Watershed Council– I predicted, maybe I’m an optimistic pessimist [laughs], I thought “This will never work,” and if people continue to take defensive stance and defractionize and nobody’s going to give up their self-interest and listen to what the other person’s saying. So I think that it’s a belief that things could work together and I think a lot of people have that belief, that they can work together, and stuck to it, the persistence and tenacity of that common goal that you talk about, about the quality of life in general, it’s really making it successful on many points. I don’t think that’s an ideal but it’s more successful that I could imagine it to be. There are a lot of other people who work very hard to achieve that.

DS: So what part have you played in the community? I know that you’ve worked in outreach with people who fish along the slough. Maybe you can start talking a little bit about that part.

CC: Well, one of the problems with the slough, in terms of the sediment contamination problem, is the fish is contaminated and there is a certain amount of human health risk to people who eat large quantities of fish many times a week and for many, many years. Many people who tend to eat this fish tend to be from immigrant communities– a lot of Hispanic communities, Eastern European, especially a lot of Russians and some Romanians, used to be a lot of Southeast Asians. . . and still are a lot of African-Americans who fish from the slough, and the thing is they don’t fish for recreation, they fish for subsistence and most of them are low-income families, people who need this inexpensive protein source for their families. My project is to really try to do education about contaminated fish to these groups of people and it’s very challenging because there has to be a balance between telling people that it’s contamination and knowing that they also need the protein, and also if you don’t eat the fish how could it backfire and they seek other sources of protein, or go fishing elsewhere which is more contaminated – like the Willamette or Columbia River; eat hamburgers which could be more problematic in terms of other– not contamination but could be other health risks. So we did some fish consumption surveys because for my project we need to find out how much people eat so we can evaluate what the health risk is. So we have people who speak different languages just going out working with International Refugee Center of Oregon, IRCO, as well as community activist Don Francis. We went out with people who speak Spanish, and [indistinguishable], and Russian, and Romanian and talk to people who fish along the slough and ask them what are they doing, and then after that telling them about the health risk due to eating fish. My philosophy’s a bit different from some people, there’s a disagreement around activists or even around different people what I should be doing. There’s one group that thinks I should always be telling people never to eat the fish at all. Then there’s another group that says well, maybe they can eat the fish a bit, things like that. My approach is that the health risk, I think it’s only ethical and it’s a moral obligation of the city to go out there and give people the information, provide people with the information, not only technical information, just tell that there is contamination and you tell health problems and then people have the choice to make the decisions for themselves and for their family. I think information is power to a certain extent, and just giving information to people, that and us bureaucrats deciding it’s not too bad for them, let’s not educate them about it…

DS: Or saying “no fishing on the slough.”

CC: Not fishing at all. Some people tell us well “You should go tell them go to buy organic nuts, organic nuts for proteins,” I mean, these are poor people [laughs], you know. Eat organic food is sometimes not a choice…

[Begin Side B, Tape 1 of 2]

CC: … and I was gonna talk about fish contamination issues and health risks to eating fish. There were not many people there, a lot of Russian women there, maybe like six to ten people. Before my presentation, everything was done in Russian so I had to have interpreter with me, and I was scheduled last, and the first speaker was a Russian physician who, I suspect she works for OHSU, and she talked at length about the high incidence of heart disease around the Russian community and that it is mostly due to the diet of eating very fatty foods and hamburgers and fatty meat, and she talked at length and then she even did a cooking demonstration in how to reduce the amount of fat, and then she talked at length about how studies have shown eating fish has done wonders to reduce– because it’s good cholesterol and fish fat in general can be good, it’s a different type of cholesterol– and help lower heart disease, so I was sitting there like “Oh my God, she’s gonna be mad at me,” because she is doing this big job of convincing people to eat fish and then the next speaker, I’m gonna go up there and talk about “Don’t eat the fish.” So it was kind of awkward position for me, but I was there and I have to provide the information, I did not push it, and I just say it’s true we need to watch out for what we eat and things like that, but fish from the slough do have these contaminants and there could be health risks, so we need to kind of balance how you eat and when you eat. Always decreasing the amount of fat intake is always the best option, because a lot of these toxic chemicals are fat-loving chemicals, they call hydrophobic – means they hate water and so they are stored mostly within fatty tissue of fish, fatty tissue of animals, they’re mostly in fat, and fat in general is not good for you anyway. So my message has been reduce– cut away the fatty parts, you can eat just filet, don’t eat any organs, don’t eat the head.

DS: You told them that in this meeting?

CC: Yeah.

DS: Is that when you started talking about it in that way, instead of saying “Just don’t eat the fish.”

CC: Well, partly that’s one of the reasons, and then the other reason is the health advisory message from the Oregon Health Division is that in the very beginning we did go tell people not to eat the fish because we thought that was the message. Then kind of half way thorough the project– after more experience and talking to community and things like that, I got a better sense of the problem, and then the Health Division came back to us saying our new health advisory is not “Don’t eat the fish. It’s eat less fish. Don’t eat the fatty parts of the fish.” So we wanted to be consistent too with the Oregon Health Department’s actual advisory, the correct version of it, so there was that part of it. The other part of being able to work with the community is that, as much as we can, we try to do a lot of grass roots type education and outreach because I think a lot of these immigrant communities, it’s — how do I say this– they come from countries or come from life experiences which sometimes do not– they’re very authoritarian, that do not really value individual input, I can’t find a word for it, but…

DS: Choice?

CC: Choice maybe. You know they were immigrants here, first of all, and they are also ethnic minorities a lot of times and there is this around justice and around to racism issue people don’t feel comfortable going to [indistinguishable] the issues and concerns. ” What if the government deport us? Immigration could deport us somehow.” They don’t trust government, and also they don’t feel like they have. . .the power to change government, so a lot of times they are put at a disadvantage in a sense that they really feel powerless because they’re ethnic minorities, because they’re immigrants, and because they’re low-income; government doesn’t have a good record of protecting disadvantaged groups and communities. People who speak the loudest, who have the most resources get what they want; landfill never gets sited in nice neighborhood [laughs], it gets sited in neighborhoods which people feel powerless. So I think that to hold public meetings — they expect people to come so we can do education, outreach, is not the way to do it– you have to go knocking on people’s doors. You have to go to community– you go to youth community resources and community groups that work very closely with the communities themselves, I mean it could be a Hispanic community service groups, it could be International Refugee Center of Oregon, any community groups that have a lot of credibility with the community, has very good relationships, and can be trusted, and who fight for the needs for the community, so you need to work with those groups, and provide information, you need people from the community themselves to collect information because there are a lot of cultural barriers in trying to do outreach. I think the best person is really a Russian person or Eastern European person to talk about this message, someone from their community who knows the cultural barriers and obstacles and who can work around it to provide that message, that would be best. So I think really grass roots education outreach needs to be in. Unfortunately, my bureau has doe quite a lot of work in this, but I still feel that it’s not enough. It’s always been a hassle trying to convince people within the city to look at resources, money and whatever to do this stuff, outreach and education.

DS: ‘Cause it’s not happening anymore, is it?

CC: What’s not happening?

DS: The outreach.

CC: Yeah, they’re doing very minimal right now, and we have some money allocated to do it, but it’s not as much as it used to be.

DS: ‘Cause wasn’t there a grant to the Asian Community Center? I know they said that their part in it ended last year.

CC: Right. We still have some money to do some outreach, whether or not in the same form I don’t know.

DS: You said that you still think more needs to be done. What do you think needs to be done, ideally?

CC: Ideally, I think first of all more money needs to be allocated to do outreach. We need to subcontract with community groups as I was saying, to do outreach and who really cares about– who have really a self-interest for the community to provide funds to those groups to provide the right information, whether it’s a fish advisory or any project that my bureau, the city’s doing actually, to the communities. Outreach is still I think in general is let’s have public meetings, and let’s have poster sessions and let community come to us, that’s not gonna work for a lot of this disadvantaged, in some of these communities, we have to go to them and we have to take time to build relationship and credibility, we have to demonstrate that we’re not using them as tokenism, that we really are interested in their well-being and we have to build that trust and build that relationship, and if you don’t spend enough time, resources to do that you not get anywhere. So basically I think you have to be continuous, you have to not be “These next two years I’m gonna look at money and after that not look at money for it,” it’s not gonna work, you have to have a long-term commitment to gain any trust and to build a relationship, and first few years you may not even see results because people are still suspicious of you “Who are you coming here trying to give us this information?” We have people from Eastern European countries saying to us “Oh, you’re just telling us not to fish here or to eat the fish here because government wants to keep all the fish for themselves.” We’ve been told that, and that we have ulterior motives in giving this message. We need to gain that trust which is why I think we need to use community organizations, people who can trust.

DS: What kinds of responses have you had from people you’ve talked to on the slough, or at their doors? What other kinds of responses?

CC: The response has been pretty measured. Meaning that people are listening and people are nodding their heads and I think that people are thinking about “So what do I do now about fish?” I don’t know how to say this. One time, for instance, we went and we talked to some people fishing on the slough who are Hispanics, and they were really nice, they kept nodding their heads and they say “Oh yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh,” and they would politely pack up and move away, so we thought “Oh great!” we’re successful in telling people this information, and then we went along our way to different parts of the slough, and then you come back to the same spot again just to kind of check and see whether new people are there, and then we find that the same old group of people we just talked to have just moved across the slough, the other side of the bank, and fishing from another bank. Many people may think that we have good intentions, but people, based on experiences, I don’t think not truly believe us, but people think that sometimes some of these things are very luxury, they’re like just luxury concerns of Americans, I think that’s what it’s seen as. Again, Russian people have told us, “As long as the fish doesn’t have two heads and are glowing green I’ll eat it.” People from Southeast Asian communities, they say “You know, we fish at the very, very worst areas, far worse than this. This is nothing.” Regardless of what the response is we still, as a government agency, a person working for the city, we still have an obligation to provide information and it’s really up to the person how to use the information, but I think we should not use people’s response as an excuse not to provide information. So the response has been very measured, some people nod their heads and things like that, and hear us, but I’m not sure how actually if they are reducing their intake or not, that’s my honest opinion of it.

DS: So do you think if there were an alternative, so if you came along and said “Don’t fish here, but we can provide some protein source for you here” that people would be more likely…

CC: Possibly, yeah, I think so. Also, we were talking about immigrant communities a lot, but I think in the African-American community the response is different, I think, because they have in the U.S. for hundreds and hundreds of years, and so they have a different response. I think their response is “Oh my God, how is this affecting my community,” and I think their response is more to us like “Maybe I should listen to this advisory.” I think that’s a big difference between the African-American community and the immigrant community responses.

DS: So their response has actually been more, you’ve had more positive response from the African-American community than you have in the immigrant community. Less suspicion?

CC: Less suspicion and it’s more outrage I think, that this is happening. Outraged that there is pollution and that they didn’t have a choice, they have to deal with this contamination, which is fine, the more people that’s outraged the better [laughs]. What was the question again?

DS: We were talking about the responses to your outreach, and then the question before that was about how much outreach is taking place.

CC: Right. Well, we are working with one hundred and ten different community groups, most of them are ethnic and immigrant community groups, they’re very small groups and we have worked with a hundred and ten groups, we really go door-to-door and we sit at each group and talk to each group, to either the person in charge of something, we also work a lot through community programs, which [indistinguishable] have services, the county or whatever, [indistinguishable] child programs and things like that because a lot of these different communities go to these programs and so we provide a lot of information through those programs as well and they’ve been very responsive and helpful, these county programs, really great, they really did a great job, they help us a lot. I think that most positive responses have come from that, just educating the women in those programs because they’re the ones who prepare the fish, cook the fish.

DS: So educating women through the various kinds of programs. Aren’t some of those programs cutting back? People can only get WIC for example, until their children are a year old.

CC: I’m sure. I don’t know the details, I’m sure that is. I mean, some of the community programs have been cut back, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case. Going back, about women and educating women, one of the interesting [things] we found, we’re not as effective providing a message to the men who are out there fishing, so they listen to message but don’t bring it home. Which is why one thing is we’re also targeting a lot women and women organizations or church programs which is why there’s outreach to beauty parlors and knocking on doors, WIC programs and programs that serve predominantly women, because they’re the ones that actually cuts the fish and cook the fish that their husbands or sons bring back. We find that they listen more carefully to this, also they’re nurturing, the nurturer so to speak, in the family they’re the ones who care for the children and when you appeal to them about damage and how they affect a tissue…

DS: What are the effects? Can you talk a little bit about that? The potential risks.

CC: It’s kind of complicated but I can talk about it [laughs]. I wish I had my brochure with me, that would be helpful.

DS: I do have some brochures. I have most of the literature that Susan Gave me, I don’t know if I have everything that you may have.

CC: Well, one of the things that we talk about is that there is a potential excess cancer health risk due to eating these contaminants. Which means to say that, excess cancer health risk the highest we have predicted, by eating lots of fish for many, many years– thirty-five years– is one in a thousand. That means to say that of a thousand people who eats the fish– a certain amount every week for thirty-five years– one of them could get cancer because of it.

DS: What’s the risk in the general population?

CC: One in three.

DS: One in three?

CC: One in three, or in four, yeah.

DS: But just specifically associated with the fish it’s one in a thousand?

CC: Um hum, right. I don’t really like to talk a lot of science because I think that — I mean, it’s good to give people that information if they have the technical knowledge to evaluate it– because it seems to down play… for me it’s a contamination issue, and it’s a health issue. Assuming the health risk for the general population is one in four, which means to say the risk is 0.25, and this fish risk is 0.251– is one in a thousand– so “Now is this .001 increase in health risk important to me?” you know, “Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it,” you know, and things like that. So it’s also “What’s a margin of error in estimating these health risks anyway?” So…

DS: There are a lot of factors that contribute to whether or not an individual gets cancer.

CC: Right. The EPA acceptable health risk for excess cancer is one in a million, which means to say if 0.25 it should be 0.2500001, or something like that, so it’s very down there. But regardless of if it’s one in a thousand and according to EPA that’s very high for excess cancer risk and it’s not supposed to be acceptable.

DS: When you can identify a single contributor.

CC: Right. And there can be other health risks. From the brochure you can see the health risks to the central nervous system, to the circulatory system; it’s not good for women of childbearing age because it could affect fetal development, also people who might be pregnant, nursing mothers as well. So, as I said, good idea to target women, childbearing age, nursing mothers, and pregnant women.

DS: Don’t many of those toxic substances amplify? Is that a possibility? Especially if you’re breast feeding then that’s going from the mother to the child.

CC: Right. It’s definitely transmitted that way and it also amplifies through the food chain which is why it’s bad. Another problem I think is there is enough information about toxicity and health risk, but there’s still not enough information. A lot of times health risks are evaluated due to excess cancer risk, but the non-cancer risks are not as well documented, a possible health risk due to endocrine disrupts, people don’t know how those really truly affect humans and there are a lot of deductions made from animal studies, and observations from natural animal populations, but there’s still a lack of information of how other chemical and other forms of chemicals may affect health in general, whether it’s human health or wildlife. So as a scientist, when there’s no information, you can’t put it in, but also for me it’s this little gnawing feeling. We suspect there are problems but we can’t necessarily put it out because there’s no set of evidence to back our suspicions, so there are potential health problems that have not been measured well and documented. The fact that these are contaminants and the fact that these are problems, mostly pesticides, PCBs, they’re supposed to be made to be persistent and to kill off certain parts of the insect and it could have same problems to humans as well. The other challenge I have is we don’t have enough– there is still not a lot of toxicity information to human health, but there’s not been a lot of death. I suspect there are a lot more health effects that are not documented.

DS: What about swimming in the slough. Is that something you talked to people about?

CC: No, in general my project has concentrated on chemicals and not on bacteria. I said no because I don’t go out and tell people about swimming due to bacteria, when people ask me “Should I swim in the slough?” I say well the chemicals in the slough will not necessarily [indistinguishable] is not known to effect you when you’re swimming, we did a risk assessment of that– how people swim they drink water, ingest as they’re splashing around, eating sediments and things like that; we found that the mouth, the contaminants they would get through swimming, that they’re getting into the body, is not enough to cause the health problems that they could get from eating fish. So that I know, I would say there’s a very negligible health risk due to swimming because of the chemicals, assuming there’s no major spills or major source near by, but there are health risks because of bacteria. There are still combined sewer overflows that discharge into the lower slough and could cause problems. I think that we do talk, when you talk of swimming, is when we do observe kids swimming in the river at say Kelly Point Park, say it’s not a safe place to swim, there are a lot of undercurrents, several people have died there in Kelly Point Park because of the currents in that area. So we do talk to people about swimming but it’s not because of the chemicals, but because of other factors.

DS: What do you consider your greatest success in the work that you’ve done over the last seven years on this project?
CC: Well I think that on a technical level the greatest success has been doing all the investigation of sampling and finding out that there’s contamination in the slough, and even though the contamination was not as bad as we originally thought, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to do anything about it, and that we have done a lot of work, a lot of investigations and sampling in a very short period of time, in a matter of five to seven years we completed a lot of work, which I think a lot of public agency it’s ten years or more to do [laughs], sometimes I feel they’re too slow. So my greatest success is getting a lot of technical work done. We did it in a short period of time, we are not completed, there’s still a lot of work to do. A lot of successes in trying to do outreach to people, I think that was very successful. I wish we could continue at the same intensity level every year for many more years to come. I think there are a lot of successes in working with the state agency this Department of Environmental Equality, there has been a lot of collaboration and trust between the two agencies that they know that we have the right intentions and want to do the right thing and that really helps doing a project, and I think the energy spent in being productive and proactive rather than…

DS: What do you contribute that to? Because, as you said, a lot of government agencies aren’t very productive, there’s often bureaucracy that holds them back…

CC: There’s still a lot of bureaucracy [laughs].

DS: … so is it because, from the administration? Is it because of the individuals who are involved that some things have actually been accomplished on the slough?

CC: There are a lot of factors. One factor obviously is the initial reason why we did this project – they tried to sue the public agencies for non-action. I think that always has been a good selling point to speak to our managers. And then individuals, staff, from the bureau really work very hard on it, and DEQ has assigned great project managers, very productive project managers, to look on the projects. We have lots of help from Susan, from activists you know; some activists just distance themselves from the city, which is fine that they need to keep that distance if they want to, but some activists have been very cooperative, they’ve helped us in moving the project along as well and looking with us. I think those are main factors, I think individuals, citizen groups, funding is a major issue, I think that a lot of projects get [indistinguishable] when there isn’t money allocated

DS: So because of the citizens suit there is money allocated?

CC: Right.

DS: I don’t want us to run out of tape and I think it’s almost over, but…

[Begin Side A, Tape 2 of 2]

DS: So what is your vision for the future of the Columbia Slough?

CC: Well, the ideal vision, the one that I’m not sure whether it’s totally accomplishable within an urban area, is that the slough would be an area for the people to be safe to swim, to fish, to eat the fish, and to be in the slough, and that the slough would support a good urban natural center of wildlife, refuge for wildlife as well, and that the environmental issues affecting the slough would be very small and minimal, that would be my vision of the slough. More tress on the slough, more native vegetation on the slough, businesses and property owners and residents really working for same goal and really working together and really working well together. So that’s one of my visions for the slough. My other vision for the slough is maybe that there be less contamination on the slough, less because there can never be no contamination, and that people are more educated about the health dangers of the slough; people from across different communities understand the dangers of eating from the slough, and that the city provides enough funds to provide education to diverse communities about the environmental issues around the slough. Again, people working together towards a common goal. I think that’s achievable to a certain extent. Definitely more native plants and trees and shrubs around the slough.

DS: I’ve been told they can’t plant trees on the dikes.

CC: Yeah, that’s true, but I think there are ways to get around that too. I think if the Corps of Engineers put their good engineering caps on, I’m sure that if you can build huge dams and dikes they can find a way to plant trees. It’s a matter of getting them out of their normal box of engineering solutions, that’s what I think. So I guess the thing is, getting back to [indistinguishable], that the contamination of the slough is not specifically a health risk, would be the health risk is manageable and to a level that is acceptable by the community.

DS: Is there anything that you’d like to add to this?

CC: In general I think I want to add that one of my biggest challenge and obstacles is trying to convince bureaucrats, so to speak, whether they are the city or the state, and I’m sure the federal level as well, that more needs to be done about the outreach, or in education, to diverse communities– to ethnic minorities, to immigrant communities, the low-income communities. That’s my biggest challenge. I don’t understand, I want to say it’s some kind of racism to some extent, but I just…

DS: So you would say that there is environmental racism?

CC: Oh definitely, oh sure there is [laughs], and sometimes they’re not intentional, a lot of times we, you know as a man I am always a sexist regardless of whether I want to accept the label or not because as a man I have privilege as a man, so in a way the institutions support me as a man makes me a sexist, I may be very pro-women on many issues but regardless of that I’m still a sexist; just the fact that I’m born a man I have that privilege and institutions has always been sexist. There’s the same way, whether it’s intentional or not intentional, people…

DS: So being born white is a privilege is this country that is not recognized?

CC: It’s in a way of thinking. A lot of good people with good intentions in government, but they see one way of doing things and they’re not able to expand or see other ways of doing things. I call the well-intentioned people the colorblind people because there’s no color, they see colors but they say “Oh, but everybody’s the same.” But everybody is not the same because of the way institutions are set up and the way institutions protect certain groups of people, or give power to certain groups of people and not other groups of people. So that’s my biggest obstacle and challenge, I…

DS: So that’s a bigger obstacle than getting small community groups in to work with you?

CC: Yeah. I really want to challenge any government groups– city, local, state or federal– to do more. I think a lot of lip service is paid to want to be inclusive, to be compliant around justice issues, but I feel it is a lot of lip service. No resources coming towards that at all, minimal. I want to see more actions and more resources committed to it, I don’t mean millions of dollars, but I’m saying more than what there is now and I think a lot of times agencies and things like that want to do things and, although they don’t want to admit it, it’s all our tokenism, “I want the numbers to say there are five Asians in the meeting, ten African Americans,” things like that, you know “Go recruit them to come to my meeting,” you know.

DS: What are the numbers like now?

CC: I don’t know what the numbers are like. They’re almost nonexistent I think, there are still very few, and I think we need just new ways of doing things, new ways of reaching people, new ways of education. There are many established ways of public outreach and education and those work very well in certain communities, but not in all communities and we need to think outside the box, we need to go to the communities. Sometimes I refuse to recruit for a certain meeting just because I think that the way things set up are not safe for– say someone asked me, it could be my bureau, it could be any community group, community organization, they ask me to recruit Asians and Southeast Asians to a meeting, a workshop, and I say “Well, I would help you in this, you do it in a way which is safe and which appeals to the interest of the people I’m recruiting to attend this meeting. If you’re gonna have a very fixed agenda format that is not gonna help them get their feedback, I’m not gonna recruit them. They would just sit there and listen to people fight.”

DS: Is that the tokenism that you’re referring to? So if we have this many Asians at the meeting we can say that we’ve included them, but they’re not allowed to give feedback.

CC: It’s not the correct way for them to give feedback.

DS: Because of cultural differences?

CC: Right. A lot of times, I know that a lot of my Asian friends and I talk about this, we sit in a meeting and we see, in general, Americans just being very vocal and firing away and just talking and we feel like there’s so much noise and they’re just fighting and they just not let each other speak, people want to speak more than the other person, and we don’t want to participate in that, it’s just not our way.

DS: How would it be different? How could it be different?

CC: I think less confrontive, more casual, more like, “Hey let’s come together,” more relaxed, less of a fixed structure agenda, more of a one on one thing in a sense of– first you need to build a relationship, that’s key, build a relationship, credibility, and trust, after that then you go to them and you’re more like, very casually, you want there to be some structure in a meeting but otherwise more like really sitting down and just saying “We are doing this. What do you think?” So it’s more one on one to some extent, and not have many different groups of people where one group’s more vocal than the other, that’s not gonna work, and you have to appeal to their interest, you know. Sometimes I’ll be asked “Oh, does that mean Asians are not interested in environmental issues?” I say no, that’s not…

DS: So maybe that’s why there– I didn’t see any Asian people in the Watershed Council either, and that’s how those meetings are structured.

CC: Right. It’s a very American way of doing business. I won’t bash Watershed Council ’cause I think they’re doing an excellent job, but not to be exclusive we have to have a different form to reach out to other communities. If you want to include Asians and you wanted an Asian person from whatever neighborhood to be in the council, then that’s tokenism. There are ways to be inclusive, I don’t think that the present structure would be a good structure to have people, feedback from the Asian community, you would have to be a different way of updating feedback. But the process itself works, Watershed Council process, for our purpose, it works well, it just needs [indistinguishable].

DS: So if there were outreach from the Watershed Council too to include– because there weren’t any African American, maybe there was one African American person there.

CC: Maybe, but there’s definitely one Native American person there.

DS: I haven’t talked to him yet either, I would like to.

CC: There are a few names of a few people you should talk to as well. I would like to give you names of those people, and they will have probably different views of what the city’s doing and things like that. I’m not gonna be defensive, but what they say is probably correct. I think that’s it very important, as a city employee, I look at things differently and a person outside may see that we’re not doing squat and that’s probably true. To me I think that we do more [laughs], we’re working with crumbs and to us [indistinguishable] are like “These crumbs are not enough,” and they’re right. So I think there are people you should talk to.

[Interview Ends]