The (energetic) ambition of Frank Beal

By JAMES KROHE JR.

As founding director of the Illinois Institute of Natural Resources, Frank Beal's challenge is to orchestrate a state policy for the brave new world of alternative energy. Reconciling the conflicting philosophies of traditional suppliers of energy and do-it-yourselfers is one of his most difficult tasks.

WHEN Gov. James R. Thompson and the Illinois General Assembly voted to create the Illinois Institute of Natural Resources (IINR) in 1978, they gave it me of the broadest, not to say most curious, mandates in the state bureacracy. According to the legislation establishing the IINR, the new agency was to "investigate practical problems, implement studies, conduct research and provide assistance" in the areas of environmental protection, energy, natural history, entomology, zoology, botany, geology and natural resources. That charge put everything from prehistoric Indians to coal gasification and solar pig barns under IINR's roomy administrative umbrella.

That umbrella is held by Frank Beal. He is 40 years old, a personable and bright man from Chicago with degrees in engineering and city planning. Beal first came to state government in 1971 as the deputy director of the old Illinois Institute for Environmental Quality (IIEQ), where he worked for two years before leaving for a five-year stint at a similar post for the American Society of Planning Officials. Gov. James R. Thompson brought Beal back to the IIEQ in early 1977, but as director, and Thompson appointed him as the IINR's first director a year and a half later.

The IINR was founded to deal with those "resource issues" (such as the production of synthetic fuels from coal) which, as Beal likes to put it, spill over the accustomed bureaucratic boundaries separating economic development, energy and the environment. It inherited the state's three scientific surveys and the Illinois State Museum from the Department of Registration and Education and the Division of Energy from the estate of the then-Department of Business and Economic Development. It also absorbed the research-minded IIEQ, which with the Pollution Control Board and the Environmental Protection Agency make up the state's troika of environmental agencies.

Though IINR is officially the husbander of all the state's natural resources, energy is the resource that Illinoisans are most concerned with lately. The IINR is the state's energy agency. It administers all federal energy programs, prepares energy contingency plans for the state, runs the Coal and Energy Development Bond Fund to help finance sources of new energy while providing information and help to citizens, businesses and governments who want to save more of the energy they already have.

All this makes Frank Beal the state's man on energy. It also makes what he says on the subject important. "The biggest role the state can play," he notes, "is to aid in the transition period — the transition from cheap to expensive energy, from nonrenewable fuels to renewable ones, perhaps from a petroleum-based economy to whatever it is we end up with next. People want outcomes. They want to be warm. Or they want mobility. I want safe, reliable, practical energy, and I believe that means alternative energies and conservation, which I regard as another form of alternative energy. I believe it is appropriate for state and federal governments to play this role."

When they are very young, bureaucracies tend, like any child, to take on the traits of their parents. Because of this tendency, the disagreements that attend IINR's energy work (and there have been several) often really are disagreements with Beal's own philosophy. "Some people see energy issues as moral issues," he points out. "I don't. I see them as political, social, economic and institutional ones. You have to be

April 1980/Illinois Issues/9

'The societal questions about energy have not been sorted out yet. That's not our role. The General Assembly did not give me a mandate to use energy to change society toward some visionary future'

careful not to mix your personal and your political mandates."

It is Beal's refusal to mix mandates that lies behind many of the disputes about his and his agency's role. One issue over which as much heat has been shed as light is, appropriately, solar power. The IINR's solar program has been developed as part of the 1979 revised version of the Illinois Energy Conservation Plan. The plan (which is paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy) is required by the federal Energy Policy and Conservation and the Energy Conservation and Production acts of 1975. Its purpose is to outline the ways by which Illinois during 1980 will meet the federal goal of reducing overall energy consumption in the state by 5 percent over 1979 levels.

The goals of the solar plan (which should not be confused with a state solar policy, which is still being formulated) are varied. They include the preparation of plans and policy statements, the training of builders and architects in the installation and design of solar technologies, the drafting of legislation providing incentives for such installation and the removal of various legal impediments to their use, and the initiation of 1,000 new solar systems in the state in 1980.

One of the key assumptions behind the program is that "the market place can adequately meet the demands for solar." This emphasis on salable technologies is part of what Beal describes as "institutionalizing" conservation and alternative energies. This the IINR would do via demonstration projects, training courses for solar installers and designers (through both union apprentice programs and vocational schools), computerized energy audits (to be conducted by utility companies) of individual homes, and so on.

Some observers, both within the IINR and from the growing solar community, quarrel with Beal's emphasis on salable technologies. Some prefer programs to disseminate solar technology (and solar financing) to individual homeowners and business people including the poor. Others argue that many of the demonstration projects proposed have already been done in other places. They further argue that big business is being allowed to dominate solar planning and that money being budgeted for testing and education might be better spent on developing new market structures and financing solar installations. In short, critics of the state's solar effort believe it is moving too slowly, or in the wrong directions, or under the guidance of the wrong people.

The dispute is more than a philosophical one, because the outcome will influence who controls access to solar technologies. Some of Beal's critics see him as being overly sanguine about the involvement in solar planning of the traditional energy suppliers which, these critics believe, have one main interest in solar — how to keep people from using it. In Beal's view, however, the debate boils down to the question of delivery, and he believes that 95 percent of Illinoisans would rather buy their solar revolution ready made than build it themselves. Beal clearly believes that most people will use solar technology only when it becomes cheaper than existing energies and not because it is cleaner or beyond the ability of large corporations to control.

"Who controls solar?" is a question of means so profound that it really is a question of ends, and debate on it is as volatile inside the IINR as it is outside, especially among solar groups and the agency's younger, more idealistic staffers who Beal dismisses privately as "do-it-yourselfers." Beal says that the IINR "has a general bias toward decentralized energy sources. I'm a sincere believer in not putting all your energy eggs in one basket." But this preference, he insists, is because decentralized sources are more practical. "If that leads to a decentralized society," Beal concludes, "that's a byproduct." This is not the first nor is it likely to be the last such conflict in the IINR. As Beal noted several months ago, one of the agency's tasks is to "do as government often does, namely internalize and resolve the conflicts" that attend Illinois' transition to its new energy future.

Though it is always risky to reduce complex arguments to concise phrases, it seems fair to say that the more radical energy thinkers see self-sufficiency as the goal of the energy revolution while Beal is content with efficiency, "Is the energy used to light one's home 'bad energy' if it comes from a large utility company and 'good energy' if it comes from a small hydroelectric plant?" he asks. "From an energy point of view it doesn't matter, although from a social view it may. It would be a mistake to underestimate the huge ability of the large corporations to get things done."

It is sometimes difficult to tell in state government when policy shapes administration and when administration shapes policy; ideas, after all, flow through an agency only as efficiently as the paper they're printed on. There have been complaints from outside the IINR that Beal has insulated the agency from outside opinion. At the same time there have been complaints from inside the agency that internal communication is practically nonexistent, that internal policy is unclear and that Beal is rarely seen except by his top lieutenants. There have also been more serious complaints by the press that the IINR has been lax in its use of federal funds and in the awarding of some contracts.

Some of these complaints may be explained by Beal's apparent indifference to the nuts-and-bolts side of running any agency; his critics note that he allows program personnel considerable independence. And some of the complaints may be explained simply by the fact that the IINR is so young; Beal notes that most of the agency's first year was consumed with "defining itself." Beal's chief managerial innovation has been the imposition of a socalled "management by objective" approach which requires staff to budget time as well as money in their pursuit of specific, quantifiable objectives. For example, Objective No. 6 in the latest solar program is to publish 10 fact sheets, five technical reports, 24 newspaper articles and three slide shows

10/April 1980/Illinois Issues

during 1980. It is an engineer's approach to management and reflects Beal's impatience with what he calls "lofty" goals — or in other words "immeasurable" goals.

Whatever his skills as an administrator, Beal is acknowledged to be a talented bureaucratic strategist. He is widely credited with having the ear of the governor, although he disclaims any special influence. Indeed, the former assertion is belied somewhat by the record; for example, Thompson has vetoed most of the solar legislation that has crossed his desk in recent years. This anomaly may be explained by Beal's frank acknowledgement that there are a great many voices besides his own shouting into the governor's ear. Besides, it doesn't take many months in Springfield for an intelligent person to learn that the prudent bureaucrat does not start fights he cannot finish. Critics have privately described that prudence as caving in to special interests, but this too may simply be a difference of philosophy, "It is our responsibility to articulate energy policy for public debate," Beal says. "The policy itself is made by the governor, the General Assembly and the Illinois Commerce Commission."

Beal is also sometimes accused of being an empire-builder. About that he says, "Am I ambitious? Yes. Why should I apologize for being ambitious? Am I an empire-builder? No. I have more work than I can do now. I would oppose any attempts to expand the agency."

The controversies that plague energy policymaking in Illinois will not subside. "We are in the midst of a very dynamic period in which we are changing the way we think about a very basic subject," Beal explains. "We only just now have developed a vocabulary we can use to talk about these things. Most of what we're doing today is catch-up. What things will look in the future it is impossible to say. None of the old assumptions are valid anymore. The societal questions about energy have not been sorted out yet. That's not our role. The General Assembly did not give me a mandate to use energy to change society toward some visionary future."

James Krohe Jr. is associate editor of the Illinois Times in Springfield; he specializes in planning, land use and energy issues.

April 1980/Illinois Issues/11