Because CCST was created in part to respond to the loss of national facilities to other states, it quickly became involved in discussions involving other major facilities. Council members and staff played roles in decisions to site a combustion dynamics research facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories/ California at Livermore, an engineering education coalition at California State University, Northridge, and a particle physics facility known as the B factory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto. The success of these efforts was an early demonstration of CCST's ability to help strengthen California's science and technology infrastructure. One of the first formal requests for CCST's assistance came from the California Integrated Waste Management Board. In 1992 the Board asked CCST to create an independent panel of experts that could identify research priorities and develop a ranking system to evaluate research initiatives. The panel held six meetings, conducted two public forums, and gathered information from federal, state, and local officials, industry, public interest groups, and researchers. In its November 1992 report the panel recommended establishing a process to review research programs and a system to access information in both open and company publications. It evaluated 12 research programs and described how to arrive at a prioritized research agenda. It also suggested that 20 to 25 percent of the Board's research budget be set aside for innovative research "modeled after similar programs that have been operated successfully by other mission-oriented research agencies." This kind of practical advice for state agencies would become a hallmark of CCST's work.