Steve Owens, ADEQ director

Steve Owens came aboard as director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality in January 2003, appointed by the newly elected Governor Napolitano.
After graduating from Vanderbilt Law School in 1981, he was staff attorney for a U.S. House subcommittee to the Committee on Science and Technology. He was schooled on environmental issues as chief and state director for then-Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee from 1985-1988. Mr. Owens twice ran for Congress, losing to Republican J. D. Hayworth in 1996 and 1998. Mr. Owens practiced environmental law in Phoenix for 14 years before succeeding Ed Fox – now a vice president with Arizona Public Service – as ADEQ director, a job that pays $129,284 a year. He is married and has two sons.
Mr. Owens recently sat down with the Arizona Capitol Times and discussed his agency’s plans, accomplishments and a close call with the Legislature.
What is environmental quality?
For us, there’s really two pieces of it. One is preventing the deterioration in the quality of the environment in the state of Arizona, but then secondly, improving the environment to the greatest extent that we can, given the various tools we have, whether it’s legislative or regulatory or budgetary.
When you deal with environmental quality, you’re talking about clean air and water and the like. You don’t deal with ecology – wildlands and habitat.
The way we’ve set it up in Arizona, we have an air, water, waste and tanks division – underground storage tanks. We’re not a department of natural resources. We don’t deal with forests. We have a state forester here, the state Land Department, the Department of Agriculture and others. The federal government has a lot of that here. We don’t deal with forest health issues. And we have a Game and Fish Department that deals with other pieces of that as well. We certainly do worry about ecological issues when we worry about the effects of contaminants on animal life and plant life, because those are some of the things that we’re taking into account when we’re setting standards.
For your agency, environmental quality is geared toward what affects people. Is the air safe to breathe? Is the water safe to drink?
The vast majority of the work that we do here at DEQ is regulatory in nature, which involves both setting standards and issuing permits and doing compliance work, as well as enforcement work, to make sure that those standards and those permit requirements are met. And a lot of those are geared toward human health. A lot of air quality regulations for example will deal with the human health effects because they tend to be based on what air quality standards are, and when EPA develops those standards, they are based on studies that are done on the carcinogenic effect of air contaminants or the other health impacts. And the same thing on drinking water standards. Those are all health-based. So that really is our primary focus.
What did you set out to accomplish coming into the job? And, the flip side of that is, what needed fixing?
One certainly was putting a focus on children’s environmental health, so we established our children’s environmental health project. That was one of the early things that we did in early 2003. It’s on our Web site. The other was having the department do a better job of what we call outreach to the community – not only in terms of the regulated community, but also the public at large so the department could be more responsive to the needs of the public. Our enforcement priorities were sort of backwards. The department spent an awful lot of time picking on little guys, not enough time focusing on the repeat offenders, larger entities that should know better when they are violating the law or certainly have capability of knowing better, either because they have resources to hire consultants and lawyers and everybody else to tell them what they ought to be doing.
Do you have an example?
One of the first things that happened when we came in – there was a facility in south Phoenix, not to far from here, called Innovative Waste Utilization, IWU for short. They were a hazardous waste treatment facility. What they did was take chemicals that were seized from meth-lab busts. It was discovered that, rather than properly handling and disposing of those materials, some employees of that entity – IWU – were instead selling out the backdoor. Certainly it was an apt name. It was an innovative way to use the waste.
When [law enforcement officials] did the bust against the company and did the proceedings against the company, that left the issue hanging out there. OK, what do we do as the environmental regulatory agency? We issued an order revoking their permit. It was one of the first big things we dealt with here, and to me it was sort of a no-brainer. A facility like that shouldn’t be allowed to operate. It was the first time in the history of the department that we’ve ever revoked a permit.
Was there an opportunity for the previous director to take this action?
I don’t know about this facility or not, but the previous administration had given the permit to this facility over the opposition of the neighborhood.
Rep. Leah Landrum Taylor, D-16, has often complained about environmental hazards from industry in south Phoenix.
I’ve known Leah for a long time. She’s certainly one of many people who have talked to me when I first became director, but even before, over the years, it wasn’t just Representative Taylor. It was other people out there, just neighbors and people I would practice law with.
On the other hand, some legislators on the other side of the aisle probably think an agency like DEQ ought not to even exist.
Yeah, they voted to shut it down. There was a vote in the Senate in 2005 that was our sunset year. The state Senate, whether they meant to or not, actually voted to not renew the Department of Environmental Quality. They quickly reversed that, after Sen. [Carolyn] Allen got back in town.
But you only got a four-year renewal, instead of the usual 10?
The department’s never had a 10-year renewal. The initial statute created it for 10 years, and the assumption was always it was going to be 10 years, and one [time] it got two years; another year it got five years.
So you’re up for a sunset vote in…?
It would be the end of June 2009.
Auditors from the Auditor General’s Office appeared to give the agency pretty high marks in 2005.
If you talk to those guys, it was the best audit the department had ever gotten. We worked very close with the auditor. We actually made a number of changes when we first came in, which the auditor general very much approved of.
Working with the Legislature – apparently it involves a certain amount of tact?
I think we have a good working relationship with the Legislature now. I think that there are more legislators who are generally supportive of what we do here than are not – and there are many legislators who have things that they want us to be doing. For the first time this past year since we’ve been in office the Legislature fully funded the state superfund program.
Back to the children – what are you doing specifically in your focus on children and the environment?
There are a number of things. One, as a broad proposition, incorporating a focus on children’s health concerns in all things we do with the department. For example, in issuing a permit, we look specifically to see if there are schools in the vicinity, and we’ll take that into account. If it’s a waste-disposal facility, what we’ve been doing is including in the permit provisions the need for emergency response plans. If there’s an incident at their facility, how the school will be affected? In addition, we now have more than 150 school districts throughout the state participating in our school-bus idling-reduction program. To put it in shorthand, it’s just telling the school-bus drivers to turn the buses off when they’re picking up or dropping off kids. I think everybody’s seen it. You go by the school, and the buses are all lined up. Everybody’s standing there waiting to get on the bus, and these black fumes are coming out of the tailpipes. And the kids are just sitting there breathing it in. We are also working very closely with the Department of Health Services and some of the local public health organizations and agencies here to assess the impact of bad air days in the Valley on children’s respiratory health.
A report last year by the Arizona chapter of the American Lung Association gave Maricopa County an “F” in air quality – for high levels of ozone pollution and particulates. Is that a fair grade?
Without quibbling whether it’s an F or an F-plus – even on that list [of cities with bad air] the Phoenix metropolitan area has moved further down the list each year, and that’s a list where the further down you are the better off you are, so you don’t want to be at the top of that list.
You said there is a new tougher standard to measure ozone pollution. The old standard measured the peak pollution for a one-hour period. The new standard measures levels over an eight-hour period.
All the health data was showing that exposure to lower levels of ozone pollution over a longer period of time is just as bad, if not worse for you, than exposure to the peak levels. We were declared in non-attainment for that, along with virtually every other city in the country. We have to meet that new standard by, I think it’s June 15, 2009. The biggest reason we have an ozone problem is because we have a lot of people in a lots of cars driving a lot of miles every day. Ozone is predominantly the product of all these tailpipe emissions being cooked in the heat in the summer in the Valley. And that’s how ozone is created. It’s a colorless odorless pollution. You got all that and you have more people driving more miles. It’s called VMT – vehicle miles traveled. There is data that show it’s an exponential rate — that the number of vehicle miles being traveled is increasing at a substantially greater rate than the population of the Valley. The population growth is pretty extraordinary.
So why don’t you just throw up your arms?***

Because it’s our job. Well, what you have to do is we declare high-pollution advisories and things like that, which then require large employers to implement their trip reduction programs. And we do a lot of education to try to get people to telecommute, carpool, to use flex times – all kinds of things to cut down on the number miles traveled every day; and then other things like not using the gas-powered mowers in the middle of the day when it’s 115 degrees outside.
What about the climate change report?*
We ought to then come back and talk about particulates.
Why don’t we do particulates first?
Particulate pollution, it’s primarily dust, and we have large and growing particulate pollution in the Valley, due in part to the amount of construction activity taking place, home building and commercial development. That’s slowed a little. We’ll see what happens this winter. Last winter was the worst winter particulate pollution season we’ve ever experienced. Because we’ve been in a prolonged drought, the big challenge in the winter months is keeping down the dust levels – hoping for rain … and making sure that we’re doing everything we can in conjunction with the counties.
Do you have a hope-for-rain division?
As we said last winter, you really can’t rely on good luck and good weather as your pollution control strategy, so you really have to make sure you have policies and mechanisms in place.
Back to the climate change advisory group. A report is due out soon. Are you satisfied with the work?
It was a very productive process, a very high-powered group of people who spent a year looking at this issue and came up with very strong set of recommendations. During July and now into this part of August, we spent time actually writing the report, circulating the draft among the members … and that’s going to go up the Governor’s Office, as I said, sometime in the next couple of weeks. We started with a list of over 200 recommendations that other states had looked at, had implemented and then it got whittled down to this list of 49.
Single most important recommendation?
The report will show that one of the most effective thing you can do, especially in a state like Arizona is to have these renewable portfolio standards. … Currently we have a 1 percent requirement in the state — that 1 percent of the energy produced in Arizona comes from renewable energy sources. The Corporation Commission has a proposal pending … it goes to 15 percent by, I think it’s by 2020. That’s going to have substantial impact. This group recommends that it go up even more over a longer period of time, I think recommending 26 percent by 2025.
What about the Route 66 cleanup of pollution from underground storage tanks?
Towns like Winslow, Holbrook, all these towns there were along old Route 66 used to have gas stations. Some of them still do, but there were a lot of them that went out of business when the interstate came through. In the days before a lot of new regulations came into effect for moving tanks or things like that, well, all these tanks were just abandoned in the ground. The old saying used to be there were two kinds of underground storage tanks – those that are leaking and those that will. We created a tank program division a couple of years ago – this was a big problem in Arizona. So we go in and we yank the tanks, If there’s contamination, then we’ll clean it up, using the funds that we have available to us. The elected officials and the business leaders in those communities are ecstatic, because it’s really making a difference in those communities; and it’s been such a big success that the EPA is now copying it. They’re in the process of trying to launch a national Route 66 initiative.
What if the governor loses the November election and her replacement replaces you? Any plans for your next job?
In all honesty, I have not given a lick of consideration to what I would I do after this job; I suppose I could wake tomorrow and get a phone call from the governor, she’ll say, ‘Steve, you’re out of luck.’ But it hasn’t happened yet. You know the governor and I are very good friends. We’ve known each other for over 20 years now. The good thing about this job – again, I don’t mean to sound corny – the good thing about this job is that every day when I get up and come in; I tell myself – and I have the expectation – that I’m going to do something today that’s going to make a difference.
So you don’t have any other plans?
No, I don’t. I think in some respects that would be inappropriate. I don’t mean that in bad sense. I just focus on this job.