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EPA mood
Q: When you returned to Washington, what was the mood at EPA? Did it surprise you?
MR. ALM: After Bill had come back, the mood was pretty upbeat. I came back as kind of a known commodity, as did Jim Barnes, Howard Messner, Jack Raven and Phil Angel.
What always concerned me was that the mood was too upbeat - that expectations were going to be very high. When expectations get high like that, there is a great chance that they become unfulfilled, and people become very cynical. So I told Bill that I thought we ought to move pretty quickly, and we did. We made virtually all of our main appointments within a couple of months. We had ten task forces going almost immediately - in the first full week I was there.
So we moved quickly and got a lot of people working. I thought it was very important to initiate a lot of action and involve a lot of people. And that is what we did. In those ten task forces, with God only knows how many people on each task force, we were dealing with many hundreds of people who were now participating in revitalizing the agency.
Q: Would you consider those the measures you took to restore faith in the agency, among both staff and outsiders, or was there something more that you did?
MR. ALM: In terms of instilling faith in the agency, I think being honest and open was important. I think Ruckelshaus certainly created that image of honesty. But another part of building faith was creating confidence that we were getting work done. The one area that was being most questioned was the enforcement record.
Bill and I thought that we would just come back, and it would turn around. But actually, over a period of time, people had gotten used to a pattern in which enforcement was not used as a compliance tool that often. I certainly spent a lot of time pushing to reach a point I would call the enforcement threshold - a point at which there is a pervasive sense that it pays to comply. I think that is very, very important, because I am convinced that most industries want to comply, and want to be in a position where, from a competitive point of view, compliance is not a negative factor.
In order to ensure that everybody could comply, without suffering major competitive disadvantages, we needed a strong enforcement program - strong enough to convince industry that there was a very high likelihood that noncompliance would be the subject of enforcement action.