Curt Fransen was expected to fill in for Toni Hardesty until Gov. Butch Otter picked a permanent director of the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, then retire.
And Gov. Butch Otter was expected to carefully vet candidates for the job, at least until the Idaho Legislature left town.
But on Tuesday, Otter made Fransen the permanent director and Fransen explained it this way to the Idaho Statesman: “The director is very persuasive.”
Fransen, deputy director since 2007, shares with Hardesty the ability to navigate the thin line between what the Idaho Legislature can tolerate and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires.
“Along with Director Hardesty, he’s helped establish a high level of respect for the agency with industry, the environmental community and federal regulators,” Otter said.
Hardesty officially leaves Friday to become director of the Nature Conservancy of Idaho. She leaves just as the EPA has agreed to Idaho’s request to dramatically scale back its cleanup of the Superfund site in the historic Silver Valley mining district in North Idaho. The federal cleanup will be reduced from 100 years to 30 years, and from $1.3 billion to around $730 million.
“It’s a tremendous amount of progress,” Fransen said.
Fransen will head the $61 million, 358-employee agency that protects the air we breathe and the water we drink. It oversees waste disposal. How efficiently it operates determines the success of state businesses large and small.
Hardesty was the point person on negotiating the Silver Valley agreement, first for Gov. Dirk Kempthorne and then Otter.
But Fransen has had a long history of working on the issue, first as a deputy attorney general and then representing state agencies on mining cleanup and other North Idaho natural resource issues in Coeur d’ Alene from 1997 until becoming deputy director.
Hardesty leaves with an enviable record. The Idaho native — she’s from Kimberly — pushed through emissions-testing programs in Canyon County that reduced air pollutants from cars by more than twice what the science predicted.
She led Otter’s inventory of the greenhouse gases emitted by state agencies, a move that unleashed a drive for energy efficiency that has saved the state and industries millions of dollars.
She quietly found funds for her department to test and monitor the mercury blowing on the wind from mines in Nevada, which forced state and federal officials there to make the industry clean up.
But Hardesty’s success in a state that often fought environmental protection came mostly because she made it work for industry.
She reformed the air quality permitting process, reducing the time needed to get a permit from 300 to 90 days.
She negotiated agreements that kept Lake Coeur d’ Alene — one of the state’s top tourist destinations — off the federal Superfund list for toxic contamination.
And working with the Coeur d’Alene Tribes, she found the funding to do the cleanup together.
Otter inherited Hardesty, who was named to the job in 2004 by Kempthorne. But she quickly gained his trust when she and Agriculture Secretary Celia Gould worked out a deal between North Idaho grass growers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that kept the state in control of field burning.
“Nobody thought that was something that could be worked out,” said Otter’s press secretary Jon Hanian.
Fransen’s test will be to continue to manage the divide between the state — its industries and the Legislature — and the federal government. That has become the defining characteristic of the DEQ director since the agency became a separate department in 2000.
Several times between 1980 and 2000, the EPA came to Idaho and began enforcing the federal environmental laws itself when it decided the DEQ wasn’t meeting the minimum standards. Hardesty and her predecessor Steve Allred were able to make sure that didn’t happen again.
In Allred’s case, he angered a few of the state’s powerful industries as he fought to bring the state’s air enforcement program up to EPA minimums.
Hardesty has been able to achieve the same balance with charm and results.
“There is value in the kind of skill that helps you to breach the gap between Idaho and EPA,” said Trent Clark, government affairs director for Monsanto Co. in Soda Springs.
Now some industries are pushing the state to take over wastewater discharge permitting, which EPA does for free.
Sen. Jim Hammond, a Post Falls Republican, introduced a bill to have an interim committee study the issue. He said the slow, bureaucratic nature of EPA’s handling of the program threatens growth and development by holding up new projects.
But to take that over would cost the state at least $2.5 million and require DEQ to hire 21 new people.
For industry, environmental regulations aren’t always bad things. For some companies, stricter, broader rules end up protecting their interests.
Treasure Valley companies like Amalgamated Sugar were spending millions of dollars on equipment and updates to meet federal air rules. If the region’s pollution had exceeded federal ozone standards, the companies would have faced even stricter, more costly rules.
They pushed the Legislature to enact emission testing for Canyon County — over the objections of residents and county officials there.
After two years, it’s working — twice as well as predicted, Hardesty said, because there were more older, dirty-running cars there than estimated.
The result: The Treasure Valley avoided exceeding the ozone standard, saving industry and the region the millions of dollars it would have taken to remedy the problem, Hardesty said.
“That’s good for people’s health and economic development,” Hardesty said.
Because new cars are getting cleaner, Hardesty predicted Ada and Canyon counties may be able to justify ending emissions testing and moving on to other measures to keep pollution down.
These successes mask the biggest challenge Fransen will face: money.
The agency is running on a budget at 2001 levels — and Hardesty expects money to get even tighter.
Sixty percent of DEQ’s budget comes from the federal government and environmental budgets have been among the hardest hit. With tight budgets, Hardesty said, she has been unable to reward her staff for the great work they’ve done.
As the economy improves, many may leave for better-paying jobs elsewhere. That will make it even harder to meet the needs of industry and the public, Hardesty said.
Fransen said he’s ready.
“I appreciate the support of Gov. Otter and look forward to maintaining and advancing the high standards established at the Department of Environmental Quality by Director Toni Hardesty,” he said.
Rocky Barker: 377-6484
