Greenversations

Marcus Peacock is EPA’s Deputy Administrator.

My mother was born two weeks before Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. She has witnessed amazing changes in her life: the advent of air transportation, the proliferation of television, the near eradication of scourges like small pox and polio, men walking on the moon, the internet. Yet when I asked her how she felt about these changes, I did not get the response I expected. She shrugged. “Yes, things have improved a lot.” That was it.

Deep in middle age, I now understand that answer. The time scale our brains work with is easily swamped by the broader march of technology. After a dash of initial wonder, we just assimilate advances and move on. A few decades ago, every Christmas Day my family would crowd around a phone in our house and have hurried static-filled ‘long distance’ conversations with relatives in other lands. Two weeks ago one of my kids got a call from a friend. My daughter was walking in the woods. Her friend was sitting in a cafe in Florence, Italy. This does not amaze them. It no longer amazes me. In fact, I can’t really remember how we got to this place. It just happened.

Today the Administrator signed a proposed rule modifying how EPA determines the Air Quality Index for fine particle pollution. As proposals go, it is not terribly notable. And yet . . . this will be the first proposed rule issued by a federal agency that will allow the public to comment on the rule using a blog. The blog will be open from March 2 to March 11 which corresponds to public hearings on the proposal. Stay tuned to Greenversations for more information on how to participate. Mark it as a small step on the way to what I believe will be a dramatic change in the way the federal government crafts rules and regulations. A small step, but one that, with others, will accumulate to the point where the government will be able to produce better quality rules much more quickly than in the past.

We live in the Information Age. It is sweeping over us like advancing waves on a beach. Federal agencies can either seize the tools that are coming from this change or just let the tide pick us up and deposit us in a new place. EPA is choosing to seize the day. We are not doing this because we want to amaze people with whiz-bang Web 2.0 technology. We do this because when someone in the future is asked about the changes they have seen in the environment, they will just shrug their shoulders and say, “Yes, things have improved a lot.”

About the author: Viccy Salazar joined EPA in 1995. She works in our Seattle office on waste reduction, resource conservation and stewardship issues.

Recently, we launched a new program to help federal facilities reduce their carbon footprint called the Federal Green Challenge. It helps federal facilities meeting their Executive Order requirements to green up their operations by focusing on Energy, Transportation, Waste and Water. When given a framework to act, it is amazing how much the federal community wants to make an environmental difference. Facilities across Region 10, Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, have committed to reduce their carbon emissions by over 9 million pounds in 2009 alone. In addition, the program will be helping federal facilities during the year by hosting 12 webinars on topics including the four target areas – energy, transportation, waste and water and several others including green meetings, sustainability, and implementing you EMS. It is wonderful seeing the government begin to lead by example.

Even though the program is only open to federal facilities, all the information is public and hopefully, other organizations will use the information to measure their progress. On the website there are tips for making changes, tools for measuring your results, and examples of how others have done it. Let me know if the information is useful and what else would be useful.

About the author: Rob Lawrence joined EPA in 1990 and is Senior Policy Advisor on Energy Issues in the Dallas, TX regional office. As an economist, he works to insure that both supply and demand components are addressed as the Region develops its Clean Energy and Climate Change Strategy.

I recently attended a meeting that serves as an example of how EPA collaborates with state agencies, including those agencies with functions not contained within the traditional state environmental agencies. In December 2002, then EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman and then Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee entered into a Memorandum of Understanding between EPA and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC). The MOU was subsequently revised and renewed twice and currently runs to May 2009.

The IOGCC was congressionally chartered in 1935 as an organization of the governors of the oil and natural gas producing states with the mission to promote conservation and efficient recovery of the nation’s oil and natural gas resources while protecting health, safety and the environment. The states are represented by officials from energy and minerals agencies, public utility commissions, oil & gas conservation commissions and natural resources departments. Examples of the participating agencies include: North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, and the Railroad Commission of Texas.

The MOU created a Task Force made up of seven states (currently Texas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Arkansas, Kansas, Alaska, and Montana) and six EPA units (Regions 6, 8, & 10, Office of Water, Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, and Office of Congressional and Inter-agency Relations) and meets a couple of times a year. The Task Force works to better understand the differing missions of the parties; conduct in-depth explanations of positions, regulations and policies; seek opportunities for greater cooperation, and generally to improve the working relationship between EPA and the state oil & gas regulatory agencies.

As a participant in most of the Task Force meetings held over the last 5 years, I can say that having regular, face-to-face meetings has improved the dialogue between the agencies in both substance as well as demeanor.

About the author: Marcus Peacock is EPA’s Deputy Administrator.

Loretta Lynn once mused — to paraphrase — while everyone wants to go to heaven, nobody wants to make the trip.

It may not be everyone’s definition of heaven, but I carry around a punch list of my goals for 2008. It comprises ten numbered items.  When a goal is reached, I punch a hole in the list next to the appropriate number.

I say it is the list of my goals, but it is really a list of goals for a large team of people at the Environmental Protection Agency.  There is nothing on this list I could do alone.  For instance, I have little idea how to establish a best practices system or create an electronic dashboard.  Nonetheless, I am able to punch items off the list because people are willing to do the hard work necessary to make EPA a better agency and better protect human health and the environment.

I sat down with some of these team members almost a year ago and went through the goals.  When I got to item number 7, there was a groan.  Number 7 seemed impossible.  It was something that no agency had ever achieved and, it seemed likely, no agency ever would achieve.  I said, “That’s okay, we’ll leave it on the list and consider it a stretch goal.”

You see, in the many years it’s been available, only two agencies have ever won the President’s Quality Award for Overall Management Excellence. Think of it as a supercharged Malcolm Baldridge Award for the federal government.  It’s not like winning an Olympic Medal.  It’s more like winning 8 gold medals all at once.  It’s possible, but very rare.  And, certainly, no agency has ever won this award two years in a row.

And yet, last night, thanks to this team of EPA employees — employees who not only wanted to go to heaven, but were willing to take the trip — I took my hole puncher and punched out item number 7.  EPA won the President’s Quality Award for Overall Management . . .again.

Of  all the Cabinet and Cabinet rank agencies, EPA is the:

• first to publish quarterly performance data;
• first to have an ongoing public blog;
• first to broadcast management meetings throughout the agency;
• first to achieve and maintain the highest possible rating on the President’s Management Agenda; and, now,
• first to receive the top award for management excellence . . . back-to-back.

Not a bad pattern to keep going.

(Find out more about how we did it at http://www.epa.gov/pqa.)

About the Author: Marcus Peacock is EPA’s Deputy Administrator and Transition Leader.

EPA’s main headquarters building is located at 12th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. At this same intersection in the mid-morning of April 15, 1865, Andrew Johnson slipped into what was then called the Kirkland House hotel. About two hours later he re-emerged. He went in as Vice President. He came out as President.

Andrew Johnson ‘transitioning’ at Kirkland House, 1865.

It is miraculous that during one of the most emotive and disturbing events in our history, Lincoln’s assassination, we handed off Presidential power so peacefully. We have been through 42 Presidential transitions under both banal and extraordinary circumstances and have never encountered angry mobs swarming the Capitol or soldiers marching on the White House. We take this consistently placid process for granted. Just ask anyone living in Zimbabwe, Burma or Thailand.

That said, some transitions are better than others. I believe the current transition may turn out to be the smoothest on record. The current Administration started working with the campaign staffs weeks ago to prepare for this changeover and that advanced planning is already paying dividends.

One reason is technology. We can now communicate more information more quickly to more people than ever before. For instance, if you are at EPA and have any questions regarding the Agency’s transition you can go to an intranet site and get answers. If you don’t see an answer to your question there, you can ask your question and get an answer later. In addition, on October 20, 2008 we broadcast a briefing regarding EPA’s transition throughout the agency on internet protocol television. If you missed it, you can replay it at your leisure.

When the President-elect designates an EPA transition team – and we have a clear process in place for the President-elect to notify the Agency of who is on this team — we are already prepared to give them the infrastructure and information they will need to seamlessly take the reins in January. 12th and Pennsylvania was the location of one of the most chaotic transitions in history. It will now be the site of one of its smoothest.

About the author: Marcus Peacock is EPA’s Deputy Administrator.

Congratulations. Here are ten suggestions from a former Deputy:

1. Be your agency’s Chief Operating Officer. No one else has the scope of authority to do this job.
2. Listen. Within the first 15 days interview 10 to 20 people who know the agency well. Ask them:

• What are the best things about the agency?
• What are the top few things that should be changed?
• Who are the most respected people in the agency? (Make sure you interview these people.)
• If you were in my shoes, what would you work on?
• What are the major obstacles to successfully finishing the work you suggest and how can they be overcome?

3. Plan. Take what you learned from the interviews to your boss. With your boss, write down what you will accomplish in your first year. Include items 4 through 8 below. Include specific mid-term goals. This is your personal performance plan. Your inbox will relentlessly try and knock you off your plan. Don’t let it.
4. Learn. Have key agency performance measures reported to you at least every quarter (shoot for every week). The measures must reflect the President’s priorities. After two reporting cycles you will know more about the agency than anyone else.
5. Get help. Establish a team that can help you interpret the performance data. They should look for trends, anomalies, and best practices.
6. Manage. Regularly meet with the head of every major office (e.g., the Under Secretaries) to review the office’s performance. Use performance data to improve operations, formulate budgets and make policy decisions. Measures for reporting don’t mean much. Measures for managing are vital.
7. Motivate. Link awards, promotions, pay increases, bonuses, and other recognition to the agency’s performance. Personally recognize people who exceed expectations.
8. Show the world. Publicly release performance data at least every quarter (shoot for every week). Accountability is your best friend.
9. Be honest. In Washington DC, reputation is the coin of the realm.
10. Have a blast.

One last thing, if a former Deputy calls, always take the call.

About the author: Caleb Shaffer joined EPA’s San Francisco office in 2002. For the past three years he worked with southern California tribes on solid waste issues. He is currently manager of the Waste Management Division’s Information Management Office.

For the last three years I have been pursuing a Master of Business Administration from the University of San Francisco. While the mantras of business school such as maximizing profit and creating efficient systems are directly applicable to the business world, they are also valuable lessons to my current job at EPA. Organizing a group of diverse individuals and rallying around a common cause to achieve tangible outcomes are results of successfully applying classroom theories to real life situations.

The Torres Martinez Reservation in southern California has historically been a magnet for illegal dumping. With rapid development in the area, large migrant worker population, and commercial agricultural operations, the open land of the reservation was seen as an easy place to dump illegally. The problem became so bad that operators on the reservation started collecting money to accept waste on their property, creating environmental and human health hazards from ill-managed and exposed dumps, which often caught on fire. The business school concept of “maximize profit and minimize cost” needed to change to “maximize human health and minimize harm to the environment”.

In April 2006, the Tribe, EPA and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs formed a collaborative consisting of over 25 federal, state and local agencies. This was the first time these organizations, which have very different missions, came together to recognize a common problem and develop solutions. As an organizer of the collaborative, business school principles I had learned in the classroom, such as group dynamics and organizational development, offered valuable tools to manage a large group of diverse stakeholders. After the first meeting and a very eye-opening tour of the existing dumps on the reservation, members of the collaborative went out of their way to offer the resources needed to solve this unique problem. To date, 24 dumpsites have been shut down and cleaned up, dump fires have been virtually eliminated, and a rigorous outreach campaign and enforcement program has been created. Most importantly, community members have seen a real change in health and an improvement for their environment.

The collaborative has created a model of how federal, state and local agencies can come together to combat a decade long problem. Creating a cohesive group, building trust, and challenging that group to perform are textbook models creating real human health improvements and environmental results. It’s a tangible example of business school lessons playing out in real world situations.

About the authors: Bob Dyer and Ella Barnes, Office of International Affairs, have managed work on the reduction of toxic and hazardous wastes in the Arctic under both the multilateral Arctic Contaminants Action Program (ACAP) and the Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation (AMEC) Program for over 10 years. Bob Dyer chaired the ACAP Working Group under the Arctic Council from 2004 to 2008, and Ella Barnes is the U.S. Representative to the ACAP Working Group.

If you stood with me at the northernmost point of the Chukotka Peninsula in Russia, on the shores of the frigid Arctic Ocean, what would we see? A star-filled sky, the Aurora Borealis, whales, walruses, perhaps a lost polar bear… But there is something that the eye cannot see: high concentrations of contaminants, from radioactive materials to pesticides.

A Chukotka family has set up residence in an abandoned hazardous waste tank.

The Arctic is fragile, and is an early warning indicator of the state of the larger planet. Almost all Russian rivers flow to the north, where contaminants accumulate in seaweed, fish, birds, and mammals. Through the subsistence food chain these contaminants quickly find their way into the bodies of indigenous people where they stay for years. Native Americans in the Arctic, who neither produced nor used these chemicals, are at risk.

Since 2004, EPA’s Bob Dyer has chaired and I have represented the U.S. at the Arctic Contaminants Action Program (ACAP), which includes the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia. Working together with our partners, EPA is helping to greatly reduce environmental contamination in the Arctic.

ACAP, under EPA leadership, organized the effort which to date has resulted in inventory, analysis and safe storeage over 4,000 metric tons of obsolete and prohibited pesticides in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of Russia. Prior to this project, the contaminants were released directly into those northward-flowing Russian rivers and transported to the Arctic.

Thanks to the pesticides management program we initiated, Russian regions are now contributing their funds and manpower in development of creative solutions to pesticides storage. For example, they have converted an abandoned missile silo in Altai Krai, Southern Siberia, into an effective storage facility for legacy pesticides.

A Pokrovka former missile hangar was dismantled under the US Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. In 2007 it became an interim storage site for obsolete and prohibited pesticides under the ACAP Project.

Bob and I are particularly proud that, during the recent EPA chairmanship of ACAP, the program has created and implements a model environmental justice empowerment program in Russia called the Indigenous Peoples Community Action Initiative. This sustainable and replicable project has already resulted in the removal and safe storage of over a metric ton of PCBs and persistent organic pollutant pesticides from remote indigenous villages in Alaska and northern Russia.

A community elder in Chukotka, Russian Far East, told us that he lived with drums containing spent oils, lubricants, and transformer liquids all his life and they are a part of his landscape. EPA is helping to change that–this summer, through the ACAP Program, over 2000 drums were removed from two Arctic indigenous villages in Chukotka on the Bering Sea across from Alaska.

Residents of Lorino and Lavrentia, Chukotka Autonomous District removing hazardous waste drums.

About the author: Karen Reshkin manages the Web site in EPA’s Chicago office. She’s been there since 1991, and can still remember life before the Internet.

A few weeks ago, I declared that I’d try to diminish my ignorance about some of the things EPA does. Turns out it’s hard to write about things you don’t know! I hope you’ll bear with me if some of this seems a bit elementary. I want to understand better how enforcement works at EPA, so I’ll start with laws and regulations.

EPA is charged with implementing federal environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Statutes like these are passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. They may get amended, as happened with the Clean Water Act in 1972, 1977, 1981…

Those laws look quite, um, legal to me. Why would you need regulations on top of that? Turns out the statutes usually don’t contain the details you’d need to actually enforce them (e.g. allowable concentrations of particular substances in water). EPA is a regulatory agency, which means Congress has authorized it to write regulations that explain how to implement a statute. There’s a whole process for doing that, and it generally includes an opportunity for the public to comment on a proposed rule (regulation).

The Web provides an excellent way for people to get involved in rulemaking. You can view the proposed rule online and provide comments online as well. (More traditional methods like paper mail still work, too.) The collection of documents related to a rulemaking is called a docket and it includes public comments, background reports, Federal Register notices, and other supporting documents. Dockets are accessible to the public and Regulations.gov serves as EPA’s electronic public docket and online comment system.

This didn’t really bring us to enforcement yet, but I’m getting there.

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”– Benjamin Franklin

Last fall, Benjamin Franklin spent a few minutes with EPA and State environmental leaders at a meeting in Philadelphia (No Really!) Ben related how Philadelphia addressed some of the environmental challenges it confronted during his day and noted a number of improvements (see the video to the left, or read the transcript below). At EPA, we also want to know how we’re doing in addressing some of today’s challenges.

The EPAStat Quarterly Report (EQR) (formerly known as the Quarterly Management Report) provides part of the answer. Every few months – quarterly, not surprisingly – EPA produces a report characterizing how we’re progressing on selected performance measures. The report includes both environmental measures and internal management benchmarks. For example, measures about how we’re working with our partners and stakeholders to improve air and water quality and other measures about how we’re running the agency.

OK…so how are we doing? This quarter’s report indicates two important things. First, from a national perspective we’re on track to meet our goals for the fiscal year. Second, a few results really stood out – in a good way and a few in a not-so-good way. Overall, while performance in many areas is roughly the same as it was last year, during this past quarter EPA and its partners have made a number of impressive gains. We have improved air quality, improved water quality and increased land restoration. In particular, the SmartWay program continues to bring in new partners to reduce transportation-related emissions, which results in measurable air quality and/or greenhouse gas improvements and cost savings (Box 30). On the not-so-good front, there are also a few areas where performance is lagging, but we anticipate significant gains during the fourth quarter, which will enable us to meet our targets in areas such as increasing the number of homes along the Mexico border with improved drinking water services (Box 28) and the completion of assessments of high and moderate production chemicals (Box 42).

Also note that this quarter’s report — in keeping with Ben’s advice about continual growth and progress — reflects a couple changes. First, the report has a new name, EPAStat Quarterly Report. The new title more accurately places this report in the ‘context’ of EPA’s overall performance management activities and EPAStat program (our internal performance management program). Second, we’ve improved the web navigation of the report. The new approach, we think, helps readers get to the data they want more quickly.

So if we could talk with Ben …we’d tell him that we continue to grow and progress. We hope you agree. In any case, we’re trying out some new ideas and we hope that you’ll let us know your ideas for ways to keep improving. Please use the “feedback” link on the webpage and let us know what you think!

See you next quarter,

EPAStat Quarterly Report Team

Transcript of Ben Franklin’s remarks shown in the video above
Ben Franklin: But the thing was, we had some real problems in the early days. Pollution was our biggest problem here in Philadelphia. The wells and the privy pits were too close together. You didn’t dare drink the water in Philadelphia. The river was so badly polluted that when we wanted to cut ice we had to cut it from the school hill and bring it across town. Anything beyond 6th or 7th Street was out in the country.

We had a terrible problem with the air. Our city was heated with wood fires for the most part. During the winter you could barely breathe, but even during the warmer months, we were still cooking with those fires. It was a dusty, dirty city, because the streets were not paved. You couldn’t breathe. Most of the people in Philadelphia slept sitting up because the air quality was so bad that you couldn’t breathe if you were lying down.

Now my friends, I tell you that little story because, my friends, you are the drivers. You need to know the best way to do things, the safest places, the cleanest places, because you’re in charge of it. If we are not creative, if we are not innovative, if we are not working towards solutions, we are going to be left behind as all of the new things come on and as they happen. And your agency is responsible for an awful lot. You basically are responsible for the quality of life in this nation.