EPA's shifting strategy in Illinois' war against pollution

A picture of the state's Environmental Protection Agency since its creation in 1970, and Illinois' attempt to enforce regulations on clean air and water

IN THE NORMALLY drab world of Illinois bureaucracies, the State Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been an exciting exception. Little grass has grown under the feet of the agency, which has endured in nearly five years of existence more turmoil, assaults and internal intrigue than many bureaucracies would encounter in a century.

The agency is the policeman in the apparatus set up by Illinois to fight pollution. If the unending backlash against the agency is any indication, the EPA has taken its role seriously. More than the Illinois Pollution Control Board, the agency has been the frontline soldier in the hot war on pollution that Illinois declared in 1970. From the field personnel who track the sources of filth in air and water to the sometimes tough-talking directors at the top, the agency has borne the brunt of attacks by industrialists, farmers, municipalities and others against enforcement of the antipollution program.

A sweetheart relationship exists between Illinois regulating agencies and those regulated in many areas. Little friction is visible, and name calling is rare on both sides. The situation is commendable for everybody concerned — except the general public.

Little time to relax
But this has not been the case for the EPA. The agency, along with the board, has had precious little time to relax because vigorous thrusts by the state coal industry, the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and other forces have kept the antipollution program as continuously imperiled, it seems, as the heroines in old movie serials. The controversy has yet to produce a winner. It still remains to be seen whether effective environmental protection is possible in a highly industrialized and mechanized farming state such as Illinois. Divided public opinion further complicates the question. Advocates of a more healthful environment are confronted by others who see energy self-reliance as a more important priority. Finally, those who believe the nation's economic woes to be all-consuming point out that both environmental and energy costs are extraordinarily high.

Legislators on list
Pressures from outside are not the EPA's only worry either. The General Assembly has been flooded in recent years with bills designed to restrict or impair the antipollution program. The hostility of some legislators to environmental legislation has been so strong that the Illinois League of Conservation Voters was prompted a year ago to designate 12 Senate and House members as "the Illinois dirty dozen." Those listed were said to be in the vanguard of opposition to passage of a scenic rivers act, a litter control law, strong land use planning provisions and other environmental measures. Most of the dozen were also pictured as backers of efforts to weaken the Illinois Environmental Protection Act of 1970 and the two major agencies that it created, the Pollution Control Board and the EPA.

Ironically, Senator John L. Knuppel (D., Virginia) was included in the dozen even though he has supported legislation on the reclamation of land disturbed by strip mining. Knuppel happens to be the chairman this year of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Energy, which considers most proposed legislation on the EPA.

The 1970 act was passed at the request of former Gov. Richard B. Ogilvie, who supported a vigorous enforcement policy by the agency. Under the act, the agency detects and prepares cases against alleged violators of the pollution control regulations approved by the board. The board, a quasijudicial panel, considers such cases, imposes penalties, or takes other action.

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In the more than two years that Gov. Dan Walker has been in office, though, many observers feel that the administration's attitude toward the antipollution program has not been clear-cut. Morale among the agency's employees has wavered, partly because some believe that Walker has refused to continue the rigorous enforcement policy of the agency's first years.

For instance, the agency referred only 97 cases against alleged polluters to the board in 1973, Walker's first year in office. The number the previous year was 195. Unofficially, the enforcement actions pursued in 1974 totaled 102. Many of these actions were instituted during the last half of the year when the agency went to the board with complaints about industries and other entities that have continued to operate sources of pollution without required state permits.

"We estimate that out of the 19,000 sources which emit air pollutants per year, 9,000 don't have permits," Richard H. Briceland, the EPA director, has explained. "These permits are important. Without them, we have a potentially serious situation." Briceland, a former director of technical support and special projects for the United States Environmental Protection Agency, has restored stability to the Illinois EPA leadership. But he has not brought peace of mind to environmentalists.

The coming of Briceland
In 1973 the Senate refused to confirm Democrat Walker's first choice to head the agency, Mrs. Mary Lee Leahy. Mrs. Leahy, a Chicago attorney, had been a main exponent on environmental matters as a delegate to the Illinois Constitutional Convention in 1970, and some observers felt that she might have continued the tough enforcement policy that marked the EPA captaincy of William L. Blaser in 1971 and 1972. Mrs. Leahy never got the chance. Chicago Democrats joined Senate Republicans in rejecting her, mainly as a result other legal assistance to the dissident Chicago Democratic faction that bumped the regular Chicago party delegation from seats at the Democratic National Convention in 1972. Consequently, the agency was headed for most of 1973 by caretaker directors.

The coming of Briceland, who looks much more like a scientist than a policeman, has ended the musical chair game with the directorship. There is still confusion, however, regarding the role of the agency. Briceland was on board only a short time when he announced the end of what he termed "the big stick approach" to polluters. It is not known whether Briceland was acting at specific instruction from Walker.

Search for middle ground
Nevertheless, Briceland's intention, spelled out early in 1974, seemed to leave little doubt that the kind of crackdown on polluters in which little quarter or favoritism was shown even to major firms was passing. Environmentalists feared a return to the situation of the 1960's, when most major polluters were barely affected by halfhearted enforcement of the weak Illinois antipollution laws of the period. Many felt that the noticeable reductions in the level of particulates and other pollutants in urban areas was directly linked to the strict enforcement of the Environmental Protection Act after its passage in 1970.

The hard-nosed regulation during the Ogilvie administration once prompted a spokesman for Commonwealth Edison Co., the state's largest utility, to remark, "Although the Illinois rules are not the toughest in the nation, they are applied with a very rigid legal yardstick . . . whereas other states have been more flexible in forcing compliance."

Such rigidity was thought by Briceland to give the agency a heavy-handed image. Although he conceded that this may have been necessary in the early days of the EPA to show that the 1970 legislation "had teeth," Briceland has made it clear that now the agency will continue to "search for a reasonable middle ground."

"We are first and foremost a service-oriented agency, not merely a regulatory agency," Briceland emphasized a year ago in remarks before the Illinois Association of Water Pollution Control Engineers. "Our fundamental job is not to keep a scorecard of how many violations we have detected or how many lawsuits we have won. Rather, our job is to deal in the most effective way possible with solving pollution problems throughout the state. This means to me that we need to bridge the gap between regulations on the one hand and enforcement on the other. We must work hand in hand with people who have pollution problems and help them solve those problems wherever possible."

This attitude has upset persons who believe that clean air and water will only result from aggressive enforcement. Critics of Briceland like the Chicago-based activist group. Citizens for a Better Environment, feel that the conciliatory approach was discredited long ago. The early days of the antipollution effort in Illinois, environmentalists hold, should serve as a lesson for the present. When public alarm over pollution reached fever pitch in the 1960's, a handful of public health engineers with miniscule resources shouldered the awesome responsibility of reversing the results of decades of environmental neglect. Sometimes their efforts, often hampered by inadequate statutory authority, hinted of slapstick.

Early days against pollution
Old-timers in this field still recall the first significant attempt at prosecution by the old Illinois Air Pollution Control Board in 1966. Statutory limitations were almost as great an obstacle as "Bud" Brown himself when the board tried with much difficulty to stop open burning at Brown's Midway dump in the Illinois part of the St. Louis area. Midway was infamous as a source of pollution at the time.

Then, in 1968, the Illinois Auto Salvage Dealers Association scored a surprising victory — a temporary one as it turned out — by obtaining an injunction in Sangamon County Circuit Court against any enforcement at all of the old Air Pollution Control Act. Association members contended that the law interfered with their right to do business, which frequently meant unrestrained burning in salvage yards that clearly violated the old board's pollution abatement rules. A year after this decision, the old board was challenged by a legislative study committee created to study the state supervisory role in the implementation in Illinois of the federal

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regional air pollution control program. This was the same year, 1969, that the slate attorney general's office, under Republican William J. Scott, made a full-scale commitment to the antipollu-tion war on a ground that the then existing board on air pollution and its companion agency, the Sanitary Water Board, were not doing the job.

EPA officials contend that moderate steps forward have been discernible in the last several years in combating dirty air and water

The Air Pollution Control Board reacted to all this by hastily announcing that it would seek legislation to permit temporary state control of industries that continually polluted. This far-reaching proposal got nowhere. The desperation of the board's proposal emphasized the need for strong legislation that would replace the old boards with the present agencies.

Clarence W. Klassen, an internationally known figure who had been the chief state sanitary engineer, was the first director of the new EPA. After seven months on the job Klassen was ousted by Ogilvie in favor of Blaser, a management consultant firm president with almost no background in the ¦ natural resources preservation field. Klassen was fired because he regarded negotiation and compromise as the answer in many pollution situations, especially those in which industries insisted that there was not sufficient technology to provide the required pollution controls.

A tiger for Ogilvie
Ogilvie assistants spread the word that the governor wanted a tiger at the EPA helm, and Blaser was not to disappoint Ogilvie. The agency's strict enforcement under Blaser — coupled with the imposition of unprecedented penalties by the Pollution Control Board — was applauded by environmentalists. Others were angry. Angry industrialists and mayors claimed they were subjected to unnecessary embarrassment because the state, they held, insisted on limiting its contact with cities and industries on pollution matters to adversary proceedings.

Blaser well may have been the most unpopular state official in those years, but the eventual target of the backlash was Ogilvie. It may have been a factor in Ogilvie's failure to win re-election in 1972. And, nobody was more aware of this than the man who defeated him, Dan Walker.

There have been no major new offensives against polluters under Walker, but there has been no backing off old fronts either. In one of the bitterest political struggles of 1973, the state coal industry pushed through the General Assembly a bill that would have prohibited for several years, and probably longer, the enforcement of state regulations aimed at limiting emissions of sulfur dioxide from the burning of Illinois coal. Walker vetoed the bill, and when an attempt to override the veto failed, operators of mines, utilities and many large plants were in a stew.

Veto by Walker
The EPA also had a big hand in helping to defeat a drive in 1974 to override Walker's veto of a bill that would have required studies of the economic impact of the state's existing and proposed regulations for protecting the environment. When he vetoed the measure, the governor expressed agreement with the contention of state antipollution officials that the bill was not needed, would be costly and, worst of all, might invite chaos because it could nullify the existing regulations.

The unsuccessful campaign by business and industrial chiefs to obtain a veto override provoked bitter verbal battles which showed that the relationship between the antipollution agencies and those they regulate is still anything but complacent. Business spokesmen left no doubt that the state agencies are considered major enemies of private commercial interests.

But, possibly more significant, the debate also produced signs that Briceland may be re-evaluating his opposition to the "big stick approach" to polluters.

"I regretfully must conclude," Briceland declared during a particularly heated segment of the debate, "that the sincere and good faith efforts which I have made in attempting to work constructively [with businessmen and industrialists] ... have not been successful."

When they were asked to assess the progress of the antipollution program, both state officials and critics of the state effort maintain that a clear answer is not possible. EPA officials contend that moderate steps forward have been discernible the last several years in combatting dirty air and water. However, Dennis Adamczyk, the director of environmental research for Citizens for Better Environment, believes that the conciliatory approach set out by Briceland never will bring about enough reduction in pollutants to make environmental cleanliness a reality.

Ronald O'Connor, an EPA spokesman, has estimated that slightly more than 50 per cent of the roughly 19,000 sources of air pollution — ranging from large factories to what O'Connor called "the big store on the corner with an incinerator" — are in compliance with the state's regulations and requirements. Among other things, this means that their pollution-causing discharges are within allowable limits. Records show that the major sources of air pollution in Illinois remain the industrial complexes in Chicago, Peoria and Madison and St. Clair counties. Nevertheless, in spite of a partly unexplainable increase in particulate matter in the Granite City area in Madison County in 1973, O'Connor said that the fight against particulate pollution has progressed in many parts of the state. Adamczyk said that he would not argue with this assessment, but he countered that contamination of the air by sulfur dioxide, aggravated by the increasing conversion by power plants to coal, is presenting a growing, virtually unmet danger.

Water pollution
As for water pollution, the EPA estimates that there are nearly 5,000 major sources of potentially dirty effluent to streams. These include large sewage treatment plants and major factories. In addition, another roughly 45,000 smaller sources of water pollutants are covered by the state program. Of the major sources, O'Connor said that some 20 per cent were in complete compliance with state requirements at the start of 1975. The percentage should jump to nearly 90 per cent sometime in 1976, he contended, especially if the federal government proceeds with its announced plan to release some of the long-impounded federal funds intended for treatment plant improvements throughout the country. 

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