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Challenges for the 1990s
Q: What are the most significant challenges facing the agency in the 1990s, substantively, politically, and managerially?
MR. ALM: Well, one of the biggest challenges is to speed up agency processes. Promulgating a regulation now takes over four years, and sometimes up to eight years.
A second challenge is to transition into results-oriented management. In the early years, we were very results-oriented - especially in the water program and the air program. That orientation is responsible for the big changes in those areas. In those media, we are now dealing with the intractable kinds of problems - nonpoint sources, various sources for air pollution, etc. These really require a different kind of approach.
We are now at the point where we have so many environmental problems that we need to begin to deal with them geographically. That means that EPA is going to have to decentralize in some creative ways. For instance, we have technology, through geographical information systems, to plot all the environmental problems, by state, or county, or whatever. So we need to begin the process of thinking through, and transitioning to, an entirely different management structure for the environment. I am convinced that it is going to happen someday. What we have, right now, is going to be unrecognizable. It may take a long time, but one needs to plan for that transition and to assist it.