Up in the Air
The dirt on Lane County’s air pollution agency
BY KERA ABRAHAM
T
he air smells good on
top of Spencer’s Butte.
It’s sometimes dense
with humidity, and the
clouds wrap thick
around the butte’s ferny head;
sometimes it’s breezy and dry, and
the sky cracks open a startling
blue. But the air is always clean,
with that crispness that a little less
oxygen brings.
The view from the summit
reveals Lane County in all its geo-
graphic diversity. The Three Sisters
jag the skyline to the east, frizzy
with fog. To the south, the Creswell
farmland makes neat agricultural
squares, and here and there puffs
of smoke rise from rural houses.
The farmland cedes to patchy for-
est, and moving north, the forest
falls into the urban grid of Eugene-
Springfield, with its circuit of roads
and buildings and fuming factories.
Sometimes — especially on hot
summer days — a shimmering disc
of haze, orange-brown at sunset,
hovers over the city. It doesn’t smell
as good down there.
Who’s watching out for our air?
The Lane Regional Air Pollution Authority,
or LRAPA (the acronym is pronounced “el
rappa,” like a Chicano hip-hop artist) is in
charge of keeping the county’s airshed in com-
pliance with all state and federal air quality stan-
dards. It’s currently the only regional air regula-
tor in Oregon; the Oregon Department of
Environmental Quality (ODEQ) Air Pollution
Division oversees the rest. If LRAPA didn’t
monitor Lane County’s air, ODEQ would; and if
ODEQ didn’t, the U.S. EPA would.
LRAPA has stood strong for 37 years, but it
stands on shaky legs. The agency is constantly
scrambling to avoid a fiscal meltdown, relying
on temporary grants and enterprise projects to
stay afloat from one quarter to the next. It’s also
vulnerable to a host of political pressures that
perpetually threaten to shut it down. Some local
residents worry that a recent rash of layoffs,
combined with a dramatic pro-industry shift on
the board, has obscured the agency’s mission to
protect the public health.
Eugene and Springfield taxpayers pay more
for air quality control than other Oregonians
because taxes from the state, county and city
help to fund the agency. Now, with LRAPA at a
crossroads, Lane County faces a difficult ques-
tion: Is it worth it?
Balancing the Banks
LRAPA, like all agencies, runs on money.
And all of that money flows through Sharon
Banks. When LRAPA is short on funds, Banks
scrambles for grants. When the budget shortfall
is so great that it may require a layoff, Banks
makes the call. After 15 years with LRAPA, she
has one of those run-on titles that denotes
someone who holds a crumbling agency
together: Finance/Human Resources/Special
Projects Manager.
On a cool, drizzly day in early April, Banks
greets me at the LRAPA office in a navy blue
business suit, neat with no frills. Her steady
blue eyes and a serious countenance make me
stand up straighter. She leads me to Public
Affairs Officer Kim Metzler’s office, where we
all sit down. Metzler is disarming and warm,
with long blond hair and an “organic mom”
vibe. Like Banks, she has been with the agency
for more than a decade, and she is intimate with
LRAPA’s nuances.
Banks ticks off the agency’s primary func-
tions like she’s done so many times before, at
so many board meetings during so many Power
Point presentations: LRAPA’s clean diesel proj-
ect reduces vehicle exhaust, and its outdoor
burning program has significantly cut back on
the region’s wood smoke emissions. The
agency regulates industrial air emissions
through permitting and inspections, maintains
nine air monitors throughout the county and
posts a real-time air quality index of particulate
matter levels at www. lrapa.org
As much as she stresses LRAPA’s good
works, Banks makes no bones about the current
state of the agency. “We’re under-staffed and
we’re under-funded,” she says. “We’re trying
the best we can with what we have.”
At the root of the problem is LRAPA’s lack
of secure and consistent funding. For one,
Banks says, the agency doesn’t get its fair share
of the state general fund. Excluding self-fund-
ing programs, the ODEQ gets 15 percent of its
annual budget from the state coffers, while
LRAPA only gets 3 percent – $58,000 (see
chart). Banks feels that because Lane County
has almost 10 percent of the state’s population,
In my previous jobs, we actually
issued violation notices. At LRAPA,
we’ve morphed from enforcement to
compliance assistance, if you get my
drift. — Brian Jennison, former LRAPA Director
LRAPA should get an according share of the
state general fund earmarked for air quality
control — about $180,000. That alone, she
says, would solve LRAPA’s chronic budget
problem.
Where the state general fund comes up
short, local contributions fill in. The city of
Eugene pays LRAPA about $123,000 annually;
Springfield, $51,000; and Lane County,
$99,000. These amounts, however, are arbi-
trary, and all three jurisdictions have threatened
to reduce or eliminate their contributions. If any
of them follows through, LRAPA could lose its
EPA grant of $128,000, which is contingent
upon a minimum local contribution. The effect
would be too much, Banks says; LRAPA would
probably fold.
Fining polluters doesn’t help the agency,
either. Although LRAPA levied $90,000 in fines
in 2004, the state statute requires the agency to
hand over citation money to the county general
fund — a provision intended to divorce enforce-
ment from LRAPA’s bottom line.
One way that LRAPA has tried to make up
the difference is by creating enterprise projects.
Airmetrics, a special department that manufac-
tures portable air samplers, earned the agency a
profit of $40,000 last year. Another project —
Banks’ brainchild, called Everybody Wins —
allows local truck drivers to lease mounted gen-
erator sets that reduce fuel loss during idling.
The project is expected to net the agency
$130,000 during the 2005-06 fiscal year.
The largest source of LRAPA’s operations
revenue is industrial permit fees, providing
more than $1 million of the agency’s $1.8 mil-
lion budget. And so, even as LRAPA is sup-
posed to enforce air quality regulations on
industry, it appears beholden to it.
“If we had funding that didn’t depend on the
cities, the industries, the state,” Metzler says,
“if we had stable funding that was from a tax
base … ”
“Then we could focus on so many more
things,” Banks finishes. “[The funding prob-
lem] makes us vulnerable to industry because if
they start making waves with some of the polit-
ical powers that be, we all lose our jobs.”
That pressure may have been a factor in a
string of layoffs that occurred between
November 2004 and February 2005, and it leaves
some staff members wondering who’s next.
Survivor
A running joke among LRAPA staff is that
the agency is like the TV show Survivor: peo-
ple keep getting voted off the island. In the
span of three months, five of 19 staff mem-
bers were terminated or laid off. It started
when former Director Brian Jennison fired
former Operations Manager Robert Koster.
“He and I didn’t get along,” Jennison says.
“We didn’t communicate, and our styles were
radically different. Other than that, we had a
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10 APRIL 21, 2005