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Advice to Successors and Public
Q: What overall advice would you give your successors and the public?
MR. REILLY: I can recall being at a senior EPA staff review we had on the Eastern Shore of Maryland when someone was delegated to complain to me that I was just imposing too many burdens on the Agency, too many priorities. I remember responding to that. In fact, Linda Fisher, Assistant Administrator for Toxics and Pesticides, told me recently that she was shown by Gordon Binder, my Chief of Staff, a note that I had written and handed to him as I left the meeting where I had listened to that complaint. The note read, "Kick ass and take names, there will be more priorities."
In my oral answer to that concern, I used a little more diplomatic language. I told the Agency's senior executives that in the lives of organizations, there are periods of retrenchment, consolidation, reaction, and sometimes quiescence. And there are also great moments of opportunity, energy, excitement, and innovation. I very much believed that during my time at EPA we were riding a flood tide and that we had the obligation to make the most of our moment, not knowing how long it would last or whether or when it would come again. EPA has always been at its best when it viewed its role as not just custodial but as cutting edge, as formulating leadership, as prescribing the answers to problems, as directing to the Congress what needs attention, as communicating to the country what the big issues are and how they should be addressed.
One sometimes hears, and some of the current Administration seem to reflect this, that it is the job of the Agency to take Congressional priorities and implement them. Lord, that is just wholly impractical because Congress has given EPA totally diffuse and disconnected priorities. There's no way that you can possibly respond to all or take them all equally seriously. The Agency is in a unique position to function as the conceptual cockpit for environmental leadership not just in the United States but in the whole world. That is the role that I aspired to and I would encourage my successor to keep that standard high.
Q: What about the public?
MR. REILLY: The public needs to see and hear EPA. It tends to respect the mission but has a fairly uninformed view of what's involved. It's remarkable how little the public understands about the Environmental Protection Agency. It's not like the Park Service where the mission is obvious. Anybody who visits a park will run into a Service that interacts regularly and directly with people.
Education is a large and important part of the job. It required a great deal of outreach, a lot of attention to the message, a lot of effort to cultivate the press and television, and simply to explain. I used to do a lot of that - not just why it's more important to take my approach than someone else's, but exactly what the nature of the problem is, the issue itself - whether it's the Great Lakes or the Chesapeake Bay or the reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, or the acid rain problem that impacts on the Northeast, or the consequences of our energy choices or the border problems with Mexico. The public needs constantly to be reminded of the fact that we all do make choices, and many individual choices have consequences for the environment that people don't fully appreciate. Maybe we don't really want to change some aspects of our behavior - conserve water, or have the car regularly inspected, or car-pool, or refrain from developing our wetlands, or leave our used oil at an approved collection center - because all these are inconvenient. I used to talk about things like inspection and maintenance of automobiles, something the public resists and that is very badly run in most states. Every buyer of a new car spends $800 or so on the pollution equipment alone, on the computers, catalytic converters and the rest and can lose the air pollution benefits of this investment totally by failing to maintain those systems. The nature of wetlands is a subject I used to talk a lot about. (I seem to have hit the really popular programs hard, eh?). It constantly amazes me that for 25 years at least American conservation groups have tried to publicize the very important contribution of this diminishing, rich resource we have, its importance to commercial fisheries and ducks and for filtering pollutants. Yet, every wetlands fight we got into, we at EPA were on the defensive, with much less public support than it seems to me the resource would warrant if it were better understood.
To me, that is evidence of the need for more interaction, more communication. The public is smart. I think that when they are exposed to this kind of information, given the general positive feelings toward the environment, they will get it, they will understand. To some extent they do, and that's why you see support for clean air and clean water holding high. But, there's more to be done there. The EPA Administrator is far more than a regulator and should see himself or herself as a major source of information, of encouragement, at times of inspiration, for the public at large. Someone who is known, is trusted, can communicate - sometimes to reassure people about the safety of the food supply, other times to raise a little hell because there's too much wasted oil being dumped down the toilets and down the drains and getting in the groundwater and finally into the bays and estuaries - it's all part of the job.