The prioritization of environment, safety, and health activities

Abstract

Federal facilities, including the national laboratories, must bring existing operations into compliance with environment, safety, and health (ES H) regulations while restoring sites of past operations to conform with today's more rigorous standards. The need for ES H resources is increasing while overall budgets are decreasing, and the resulting staffing and financial constraints often make it impossible to carry out all necessary activities simultaneously. This stimulated interest in formal methods to prioritize ES H activities. We describe the development of an approach called MAPP (Multi-Attribute Prioritization Process), which features expert judgment, user values, and intensive user participation in the system design process. We present results of its application to the prioritization of 41 ES H activities having a total cost of over $25 million. We conclude that the insights gained from user participation in the design process and the formal prioritization results are probably of comparable value. 19 refs., 3 figs., 9 tabs.