wonderful working relationship.” He raises
his eyebrows sarcastically. “That was the
beginning of the end for me, and I just didn’t
know it.”
Jennison tells me the story of his profes-
sional demise during his last hours in Oregon,
on March 31. We sit at a booth at one of his
favorite breakfast spots, Deb’s Diner in
Springfield, where he enjoys a breakfast of
pancakes and bacon before leaving the
county for good. He’ll head home
to his native New Hampshire.
Jennison, who worked
at local air control agen-
cies in San Francisco
and Reno before taking
the job as LRAPA
director in 2000, was
disappointed by the
agency’s pro-industry
bias. “In my previous
jobs, we actually issued
violation notices,” he says.
“At LRAPA, we’ve morphed
from enforcement to compliance Sharon
assistance, if you get my drift.”
Jennison suspects that his willingness to
enforce air quality laws rather than to only
“assist” industries with compliance got him
fired by a heavily pro-industry board. As
Jennison describes it, LRAPA needs the big
polluters’ permit fees to stay afloat. But if
enough industries are unhappy with the agency,
they can petition the state’s Environmental
Quality Commission to relegate permitting
authority to the ODEQ.
The LRAPA mission is to protect the public,
but agency literature and board minutes repeat-
edly refer to industries as “customers.” That
rhetoric, Jennison says, reflects misplaced pri-
orities. “I consider the citizens of Lane County
to be our clients,” he says. “LRAPA as it’s
presently existing considers industry to be its
clients.”
Shortly after Jennison fired Koster, LRAPA
Advisory Committee Chair Russ Ayers, a
Weyerhaeuser employee, and Advisory
Committee Co-Chair Doug Brooke, a Hynix
employee, surveyed Lane County’s most-pol-
luting industries, the Title V sources. They did
this on their own initiative, without collabora-
tion from the rest of the committee. The majori-
ty of survey respondents indicated that they
would rather be under the jurisdiction of the
ODEQ than LRAPA, and a recurrent reason for
their dissatisfaction was Koster’s termination.
Ayers gave the survey results to LRAPA board
chair Dave Ralston, who made no secret of his
desire to fire Jennison and used it as ammunition
against him.
What Ayers didn’t disclose, Jennison says,
is that he is a personal friend of Koster’s, a rela-
tionship reflected in e-mails recovered from
Koster’s old hard drive at the office. “Ayers
implied that my dismissal of Koster would
make LRAPA unable to function and that we
would then not meet Weyerhaeuser’s
needs,” Jennison says. “And I
think that’s ultimately what
cost me my job. Russ, in
trying to defend his fish-
ing buddy Koster, char-
acterized me as being
out of control and
damaging
the
agency.” Ayers’ only
response: He has
known Koster since
1995, but he has nothing
against Jennison.
In December, Ralston
motioned
to ask Jennison to resign,
Banks
but the motion failed with three in
favor, three opposed and one abstention.
Instead, the board put Jennison on a three-
month probation. But January’s meeting
brought a new board member, and the motion
passed. Jennison was forced out.
Banks says that the official reasons given
for Jennison’s dismissal — chronic tardiness
and fraternizing with the junior staff — were
symptoms of a bigger problem. She describes
Jennison as a weak manager who eventually
lost control of the agency, unable to unite a staff
that split into two allegiances: the Koster camp
and the Jennison camp. “Smart guy, great guy,
but not a leader,” she says. “He had three years
of declining staff evaluations. He avoided con-
flict to the point that he avoided the office. I felt
that he was easily manipulated, and that was
probably his Achilles’ heel.”
The financial fallout of Koster and
Jennison’s dismissals was steep. The added
costs of Jennison’s severance, legal fees related
to Koster’s ongoing appeal, interim director
Jim Johnson’s $85 hourly fee and the recruit-
ment of a new director contributed to a shortfall
of almost $100,000 below budget by February,
leading Banks to declare the need to lay off
three more employees. Permit writer Drew
Johnson had been on staff for six years; public
affairs officer Morris McClellan, for 14; and
part-time receptionist Mari Miller was a new
hire. All three, incidentally, were allies of
Jennison’s. Jim Johnson told them that they
were laid off on the morning of Feb. 10, and
they had to be out by 5 pm that same day. The
locks to the building were changed that night.
Baxter
The LRAPA board gave a slew of reasons
for firing Jennison, but none of them is what
Jennison called “the 800-pound gorilla” that he
believes contributed most to his dismissal: his
treatment of J.H. Baxter, a wood-treatment
plant in northwest Eugene and one of the coun-
ty’s biggest polluters.
The Baxter plant uses noxious chemicals
that have been fouling the air in nearby neigh-
borhoods for more than a decade (see “Making
a Stink,” EW, 2/3). In 2004 alone, odors emit-
ting from the Baxter plant provoked 762 com-
plaints from more than 100 households. A clus-
ter of recent cancer cases among Baxter’s
neighbors stokes fears that the plant’s emis-
sions are downright dangerous.
Angry residents demanding that Baxter be
fined or shut down are standard fare at LRAPA
board meetings, but they can’t prove that
Baxter is breaking the law. Although the EPA
considers several of Baxter’s emissions proba-
ble
human
carcinogens,
LRAPA
doesn’t have enough air sampling data to deter-
mine whether or not Baxter’s emissions are a
human health hazard.
The frustrated Baxter neighbors argue that
regardless of the science, the plant’s emissions
stink. They say that should be enough to trigger
the state’s nuisance ordinance, which allows
the agency to fine odor-emitting companies as
much as $10,000 per verified complaint. If
LRAPA had levied the nuisance fines against
Baxter in 2004, they could have been upwards
of $7.6 million.
But LRAPA has not fined Baxter. Instead, it
has been working with the company to incre-
mentally reduce the odors, a step prescribed by
the nuisance ordinance before the agency can
issue fines. In February, Baxter and LRAPA
signed a Best Works Practices Agreement, which
details a series of engineering fixes that the com-
pany will implement to improve the odor prob-
lem. As long as Baxter complies with the agree-
ment, it is immune to citations for eight months.
LRAPA may be reluctant to slap Baxter
with a nuisance fine regardless. The day before
the agreement was signed, Banks wrote an e-
mail memo to the LRAPA board stating, “If a
precedent is set for enforcing the nuisance rule,
other neighborhoods will come forward and
DOES LRAPA GET ITS FAIR SHARE OF THE STATE GENERAL FUND?
OREGON
GENERAL
FUND
15%
L
A
ER
EN
G
N
O
G 3%
RE D
O UN
F
FEDERAL GRANTS
23%
LOCAL CONTRIBUTIONS
(EUGENE, SPRINGFIELD,
LANE COUNTY) 15%
TITLE V PERMIT
FEES 27%
OTHER PERMIT
FEES 32%
TITLE V PERMIT
FEES 29%
FEDERAL GRANTS
29%
OTHER PERMITS
AND MISC. 27%
LRAPA Revenue, FY 2005-06 Budget
ODEQ Air Quality Revenue, FY 2005-06 Budget
(excluding self-funding enterprise projects)
(excluding self-funding vehicle inspection program)
LRAPA
HISTORY
Lane County’s local air pollution
agency may seem as entrenched as
the hills rimming the valley, but it is
actually quite vulnerable, an anomaly
in the state.
The city of Eugene opened its first
independent air pollution control office
in 1957, mainly to control smoke from
wood burning. In 1963 Congress
passed the Clean Air Act, offering
states federal money for air pollution
research and encouraging them to cre-
ate local air control agencies.
In 1967, the Oregon Legislature
authorized the formation of regional
air pollution authorities, and in 1968,
the governments of Eugene,
Springfield and Lane County joined
together to create the Lane Regional
Air Pollution Authority (LRAPA). Its mis-
sion: “To protect public health, com-
munity well-being and the environ-
ment as a leader and advocate for the
improvement and maintenance of air
quality in Lane County.”
Two other regional air agencies
formed in Oregon: the Columbia-
Willamette Regional Air Authority and
the Mid-Willamette Regional Air
Authority, covering the Portland and
Salem areas. Meanwhile, Washington
and California began to craft networks
of local air agencies that would even-
tually dominate those states.
In 1969, the state Legislature creat-
ed the Oregon Department of
Environmental Quality (ODEQ) to reg-
ulate air and water pollution. Its poli-
cy-making board, the Environmental
Quality Commission (EQC), holds the
charters for the regional air control
agencies. The Clean Air Act
Amendments of 1970 established
national air pollution standards and
created the Environmental Protection
Agency to oversee the states’ pollution
regulators.
By the mid-1970s, the other two
regional air pollution authorities in the
state shut down, leaving all of
Oregon’s air except for Lane County’s
under the auspices of the ODEQ. The
reasons for the closures are unclear;
theories range from a lack of funding
to a shortage of specialists to political
maneuvering. LRAPA survived largely
because local governments were com-
mitted to maintaining local control
over air pollution regulation. But today
that commitment is fading, and chronic
funding shortages compounded with
external pressures and internal turmoil
are calling the agency’s future into
question.— Kera Abraham
APRIL 21, 2005 11