April 1978 RAIN Page 5 Office of Equal Opportunity) is responsible for channeling NCAT's 53 million to Butte, and they make things difficult by stringing the funding along month by month without ap· proving the current year's budget. Ironically, the concurrent development of the successful DOE Small Grants Program, which does do part of what NCAT was set up to do, shows that a workable simple operation is possible. A board of directors that won't give the staff space or authority to do its work is a major problem. The most trivial day-to-day decisions apparently require board approval, and board o.k. on all but the smallest grants is necessary. A great deal of the staff's time is taken up preparing reports for the board rather than doing what they're supposed to do. A similar power/control problem seems to conttnue on up into CSA. The newsletter grants apparently vanished for several months on the desk of Dick Saul, the CSA staff person in charge of the NCAT project- lost, sat on or forgotten while awaiting his approval. The size and rapid growth is.probably another cause of difficulties. 50(?) people are now on NCAT's payroll. which ironically seems both too largc and too small for its taSk. Il appears too small bccause its job isn'l getting done well, yet it's too large for the collective decision-making that many of rhe staff people bave invested time and energy to set up. It is also too large to be managed with just a good vision of what to do, and finding a direclor with both the right vision and management skills is a pretty hopeless task. The planning committee recommended a staff of five to seven people. Six people run DOE's comparably scaled small grants pilot program, and fourteen people are planned for DOE's whole Office of Small Scale Technology, which will remarkably parallel NCAT's activities. We would guess that fifteen people could operate NCAT's grant-making and information dissemination functions-based on staff needs for similar activities elsewhere. Staff competency appears to be another difficul [y. Entangling bureaucratic regulations, Butte's remoteness, and hassles by the board exist, but don't account for people on the staff who are too frequently unaware of the work that has been done in their field or unable to check any of the b~ic references in the field that would bring ..hem at least halfway up to date. NCAT contracted with a person to explore thc potential of homemade windmills wilh apparently no realization of earlier efforts by Windworks, Helion, New Alchemy and many others and why they had been abandoned. The two technical publications we've seen prepared by NCAT (on heating with wood and furnace efficiency) are ge!1erally worth· less for this very reason . Both NCAT staff members and board members point the finger at inadequate management by the director as a major problem. We know too little of the day-to-day operatIons of the organization to evaluate that situation, but we do know that it is easy to make a scapegoat of someone caught in the middle of an impossible situation. There is probably a mis match between the director's skills and the kind of organiza tion that has emerged after these three years, but that can't be the whole problem. Another dimension of NCAT's problems is its rcIation with CSA and the Community Action network. Although originally proposed as an indcpendent institute, restriclions on its initial funding from CSA forced it to totally serve the CAP network. Tbe board today is dominated by the CSA world. Local CAP ageneies get priority on grants, and other groups must get a "sign-off" from the local CAP agency on their proposalsall guaranteed to scare away more viable independent proposals. Those biases in part explain the failure by NCAT to attracl any other funding which could give it independence and help it gain a more equitable representation of the various constituencies involved in a.t. aT0und the nation. What has resulted is what I feared while on the planning committee. It's easy to see NCAT as merely a covert CSA structure set up to channel other government funds into CSA programs. That is a far cry from a real "national center." This is not necessarily to criticize NCAT for trying to get appropriate technologies into anti-poverty programs. As we see it, the problem is that they are not doing this well because of their tendency to hire/contract with less than thc best expertise available and thc roadblocks they have set up against attracling that expertise. The criticism also stems from the fact that they bill themselves as providing networking for the a.t. world and local community development- a function that we have not seen well carried out to date. Adding to all these operational problems is an underlying spirit of di.strust and divisiveness-on the board, between board and staff, and bctween the whole operation and its various constituencies on the outside. This is in part a legacy of CSA and MERDI representatives' failure to be honest with the planning committee about what under-the-table agreements they had made. There existed an implicit agreement to locate NCAT in Butte and to pump a lot of money into its minedout economy regardless of whether that would help or hloder an effective operation. And there was agreemc:nt to put NeAT under MERDI's administration and contTol. When the planning committee was brought together these agreements and assumptions were not revealed and were dragged out only after repeated dcnials. The mistake that those organizers made was to pull together a strong and articulate planning committee that was not willing to blithcJy go along with these "business as usual" policies of filling institutional coffers with our tax money instead of accomplishing the real work nceding to be done. Many of the group, originally operating under the assurancc that the situation was wide open, fought long and hard to make it a truc a.t. center that would begin to deal with the problems of gettlog new technologies to poor people. MERDI still ended up with a huge hunk of the money for "technical support" money that was originally LO go as small grants to local projects. What public good has resulted from all that money? The distrust and acrimony created by this situation still underlies relationships today. None of these problems is insoluble. NCAT has to decide what it is and wants to be, to be honest with the rest of the world and communicate with it, and focus on doing well whatever it decides to do. It ain't easy, but it is possible. It seems that the greatest loss overall has been the incredible amount of good energy that people all over the country have put into getting NCAT going and making it a success-and the effort of some of the involved governmental bureaucrats to ignore rather than usc that energy, to set up an organization to serve their own ends rather than the dearly expressed needs and opportunities that have been laid out for them. We need to work together, and almost everyone from CAP directors to a.t. loventors to state agencies to Montana dirt farmers have reached out to try. But it won't work when a few people are playing power politics and preventing us all from coming together on an equal and cooperative footing. CSA and the board need to let go of NCAT. It needs to be simplified so that people can make conract and cooperate with it, and it with them without people's worst fears being realized, as they have been to date. Or it won't work. - Tom Bender
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