GLOWING REPORTS

To help him keep his head above water at quarterly HAP meetings, Julin brings along account manager Lisa Sigler ($110 per hour), technical consultant Katherine Hunninen ($100 per hour) and account executive Marty Schechter ($85 per hour). A second technical consultant, Diane Short, who punches in at $75 an hour, attends monthly meetings of a HAP subcommittee. And when the MGA/Thompson team members drive to HAP meetings, they faithfully charge the state 20 cents a mile.

"We need to be there listening very carefully," Julin explains. "We have to understand what is being said so we can communicate it to the public."

But MGA/Thompson hasn't been eager to communicate everything about the health study to taxpayers. When Westword asked to see how much the firm's employees were billing per hour, MGA/Thompson urged the health department to keep the information secret, arguing that the information was "proprietary." State officials refused.

The Rocky Flats health-study contract is just the latest in a series of lucrative assignments MGA/Thompson has received to help adjust public attitudes about its clients' environmental woes.

The PR firm helped put the best face on the pollution of Denver's Globeville neighborhood by a century of smokestack fallout from an ASARCO smelter. When asbestos manufacturer Manville Corporation found itself beset with a potentially ruinous spate of liability suits, MGA/Thompson helped engineer damage control. Aerospace giant Martin Marietta called on the firm to train its public relations department in the art of dealing with outraged citizens after its Waterton Canyon plant came under fire for allegedly contaminating the drinking water of thousands of residents in the southwest metro area.

The firm continues to work on behalf of petrochemical giant Shell Oil at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, where Shell's pesticide operation helped turn the Army facility into one of the most polluted pieces of ground in the country. During a convention of PR firms held last fall in Denver, the company touted its success in "winning public acceptance" for a toxic-waste incinerator at the Arsenal. (Citizens who opposed the incinerator say the firm is taking credit for something that never happened. "Nobody was won over. People were steamrolled by the health department and the [EPA]," says Adrienne Anderson, a longtime local activist who now teaches a class in "environmental ethics" at CU-Boulder.)

Greg Marsh, an environmental chemist in Arvada who also serves as president of a citizens' watchdog group called the Rocky Flats Cleanup Commission, terms the information given to the public by MGA/Thompson "watered down statements written by slick-talking liars." Marsh's charge provokes the slightest wrinkle in Julin's composure. "I absolutely disagree," Julin says.

In public Julin does not raise his voice. He does not squirm or fidget. His gaze is level. "We don't do `happy news' material," he says. "We do material from the study. It is what it is. To call it `happy news' is inappropriate." In fact, Julin readily admits that the study he's been hired to promote has been plagued by significant gaps in technical data--a position echoed by several HAP panel members. "The data's not flawed," says Julin. "It's missing."

The HAP "doesn't know how much plutonium was released in accidents at the plant," says panel member Niels Schonbeck, a chemistry professor at Metro State University. "There are data gaps, but that's the nature of the beast. There was a lot of bad record-keeping at the plant and many documents were classified and unavailable to us in Phase I." Still, Schonbeck says the study's first-phase finding that hazards posed by the plant were extremely minimal is accurate, "as far as we can tell from the news we have at this point."

HAP member David Albright, a physicist and veteran anti-nuclear advocate with the Federation of American Scientists, faults an estimate made by the study's Phase I contractor--ChemRisk of Alameda, California--of the amount of plutonium released during a massive building fire in 1957. The blaze began when plutonium ignited in a glove box one night and burned uncontrollably for thirteen hours. The building's billboard-sized bank of filters, dusty with a four-year accumulation of plutonium particles that had escaped from processing operations, were completely burned away. ChemRisk concluded that while as much as thirty grams of the potentially deadly radioactive metal may have escaped, it is also possible that a mere fraction of a gram got out.

"That wasn't a good answer," says Albright. "There are photos of the whole filter plenum gone. Intuitively I felt there's got to be more than a gram that got out. And if you want to say that exposure offsite from that fire was that low, you've got to prove it."

In the meantime, however, the full HAP has formally approved the Phase I findings. And MGA is doing its utmost to publicize them.

In an article on risk communication he wrote for a public-relations magazine, Jeff Julin noted the usefulness of "third parties" in delivering a chosen message. Interaction in a small group setting builds familiarity and trust, his firm observed in its proposal to the health department. And Julin acknowledges that MGA/Thompson is now using HAP members as "third parties" to spread the word about the health department study.