TechLaw has assisted BERC with its Brownfields Assessment Project since March 2006. Funded by an EPA Region 9 grant, the project focused on bringing small business and landowners into the redevelopment process, particularly properties potentially or actually contaminated due to petroleum-related activities. This included extensive community outreach across Sacramento County. Specific tasks for the Petroleum Brownfields Project include:

• Community Outreach throughout the county has included initiating personal contact with neighborhood activists, local and regional environmental groups, chambers of commerce, business organizations, and local elected officials. This, in addition to telephone calls, E-mails, and door-to-door distribution of fliers, allowed TechLaw to reach deep into communities that may not have been reached by less personal methods.
• Development of workshops to present complex environmental and regulatory issues surrounding Brownfields redevelopment in easily comprehensible language. A PowerPoint presentation, handouts with notes, and visual aids were developed and used to assist in the presentation of material at workshops.
• Tailoring of each presentation to each of the diverse neighborhoods. Six workshops, from April through June 2006, were presented in the unique neighborhoods of Oak Park, Florin, Orangevale, Rancho Cordova, Downtown Sacramento, and North Highlands. Each presentation incorporated Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Data, a local case study, and neighborhood photographs taken by TechLaw to illustrate Brownfields concepts using local sites familiar to residents.
• TechLaw Brownfields experts and community outreach experts made personal contact with workshop participants, answering questions and referring attendees to appropriate BERC personnel for follow-up services.

TechLaw provides pro-bono assistance to Contra Costa County’s Environmental Justice Team on Air Quality. TechLaw personnel answer questions, pose technical questions to experts, translate complex environmental information into an easily accessible format for non-technical audiences, and facilitate a greater understanding of environmental regulations and policies. The EJ Team facilitates meetings with local industry to provide assistance to the community with planning for and addressing air quality issues in Richmond via symposia, workshops, and planning meetings. The Scope of Work includes:

• Participation in meetings;
• Evaluation of the risks of various herbicides and pesticides used at a nursery school, which may impact children at an adjacent school; and
• Providing input into the grant-writing process.

Efforts have included a number of valuable local initiatives. For example, TechLaw and the EJ Team are working with the BNSF railroad to address air quality issues.

TechLaw conducted an independent audit of the San Francisco Department of the Environment Environmental Justice (EJ) Grant Program to measure its successes and challenges, and accumulate the effect of grants awarded from 2001 to 2005 on the Bayview, Hunters Point, and Potrero Hill communities. The programmatic evaluation focused on goals, outcomes, and short- and long-term impacts. The following tasks were included:

• Development of an evaluation tool by TechLaw to measure outcomes.
• Administration of the tool to grantees and grantor, and analysis of results.
• Generation of a report based on the results. The report answered the following questions: Did grant recipients meet proposed objectives; did recipients leverage EJ grant funds to obtain additional funding support for the project; and what were the short and long-term impacts of the projects funded by the EJ grants on the community, participants, and public?

The evaluation tool was based on a program evaluation model that examines the work in stages (assessment, planning, evaluation, looking forward, overall performance, and grant administration). By asking the same questions of both grantee and grantor, the evaluation tool enabled the depiction of clear results, and highlighted differences in opinion, reporting, and interpretation. The audit process itself was an evaluation tool that allowed the SF EJ Grant Program staff an opportunity to discover strengths and weaknesses in the grant process. TechLaw sought to discover clarity of process, as it is critical to be mindful of both the process and outcomes in program evaluations—to establishing why implementations work. The goal of this report was to provide additional evaluation tools to be used to improve the EJ grant administration and implementation process. The results of this evaluation indicated the most frequent scores provided by both the grantees and grant program staff, on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 indicating all goals met), were between 4 and 5. These self-reported results show a concurrence between grantor and grantee about the positive impacts the Grant Program has made in Bayview, Hunters Point, and Potrero Hill.