The final Community Guidelines for Determining End Uses of Contaminated Land and Water on the Oak Ridge Reservation were approved on June 11, 1998. The final version is presented on page 15 and page 16

The Community Guidelines were developed through a cooperative effort among EUWG members. Membership of the EUWG was diverse, and members came to the Group with their own values and beliefs on how DOE should act with respect to remediation decisions on the Reservation.

The Group examined the following documents to identify ideas that were important to other citizen groups:

• Vision, Critical Success Factors, and Principles of the Oak Ridge Reservation Environmental Management Site Specific Advisory Board,
• Consensus Values of the Fernald Citizens Advisory Board,
• Values of the Hanford Future Site Uses Working Group, and
• Values of the Hanford Advisory Board.

Members presented their individual values to the Group. Similar values were combined and grouped in the following categories:

• General values;
• Making end use recommendations;
• Institutional and long-term controls;
• Environmental values;
• Social and human values;
• Economic values; and
• Other community values.

Once the values were grouped, several common underlying principles became evident. Thus, the original values were separated into principles and values. Eventually, the principles became the preamble of the Community Guidelines. Members also realized that the "values" were better described as "guidelines." Thus, community values became the "Community Guidelines."

A volunteer Community Guidelines committee worked to clarify sentiments within each statement to limit the likelihood of misinterpretation. The committee consisted of members of the EUWG and several other citizen groups. Using the following criteria, the committee evaluated the guidelines for their applicability to the EUWG process:

• All remediation will be performed in accordance with the nine CERCLA criteria; therefore, guidelines that merely restated these legal requirements were eliminated.
• Guidelines should focus on making end use decisions; therefore, most guidelines not directly relevant to end use decisions were eliminated.
• Guidelines portraying identical concepts were combined.
• Guidelines with multiple concepts were separated.
• The EUWG would prioritize the guidelines; therefore, qualifying language was eliminated, and all statements were made equal in strength.

Using these criteria, final guidelines were selected and a prioritization process was used by members to rank the guidelines. This prioritization provided an overall sense of the most important issues. Guidelines receiving few votes in the prioritization process were still important, but did not carry the weight of guidelines that received more votes.

The Community Guidelines were considered a living document throughout the EUWG process. Two additional guidelines were added during deliberations of the individual end use recommendations. Guidelines for the end use of groundwater and surface water were also developed and added to the overall Community Guidelines.

The Group prefaces the Community Guidelines with principles developed as part of the guidelines process. These principles include the need for an open and honest relationship among DOE and stakeholders; the need for remediation activities to be protective of human health and the environment; and several other broad cultural, economic, and social considerations.