DNR Official: We don’t have enough air quality inspectors

Posted on Nov 17, 2009 by Admin.

A clear sky can be deceiving, and could be hiding a lot of pollution in the air.

“You really don’t see it until you get airborne, and once your airborne you really notice it,” said veteran pilot Terry Koehn.

Koehn flies nearly every day as a flight instructor at the Green Castle Airport in Johnson County.

“You can see the difference in the blue that’s in the clouds, just come down towards the horizon and you can see the haze layer right there,” said Koehn as he pointed out the pollution during a trip over Eastern Iowa last month.

That haze is everything from dust to chemicals. It’s not all from Iowa, but the Department of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency say Iowa adds its share.

Joe Sanfilippo is in charge of one of the state’s six field offices for the DNR. He worries that Iowa is adding more than it should, and he says we can’t prove we’re not.

His inspectors are supposed to check out any business with the potential to pollute the air in a 15 county region – all of Northeastern Iowa, except for Linn County.

“Yeah, we have more facilities now than we did in the past,” said Sanfilippo.

In his region, there are more than 600 businesses, everything from hospitals to paint shops at car dealers to a coal power plant. Sanfilippo said they don’t have enough staff to do enough inspections.

“I will give you an example, coal fired power plants. We used to try to inspect them quarterly to semi-annually, and we’re not able to do that right now.” When asked if his inspectors were close that mark, Sanfilippo responded, “No.”

Sanfilippo’s office inspects 561 minor sources of pollution like hospitals and other smaller factories. To do that, he said they only have the equivalent of one part-time person, technically 0.5 FTE.

Each inspection takes about a day, said Sanfilippo. Simply doing the math, that means some places go years without inspections. Although, Sanfilippo won’t ,confirm that. He said he doesn’t want businesses to take advantage of the state’s situation.

But, he’s sure that’s already happening, and he said he just has a hard time proving it. For example, he said one place they’re missing is mobile asphalt plants.

“We’d be there every time they set up to try to make sure that hey, everything is going right and working and we used to find some problems. We’re not able to do that now days,” said Sanfilippo.

That concern isn’t showing up in the state’s records. Sean Fitzsimmons with the DNR in Des Moines said monitoring sites across the state show the numbers aren’t getting worse, and in the case of Ozone levels in Eastern Iowa, are actually getting better. And, he says the number of monitoring sites across Iowa is comparable to other states.

The problem is, that’s not a complete picture, said Sanfilippo. There aren’t monitors next to every business, or even in every county. Plus, the historical records only go back from one to two decades, in many cases the EPA only started keeping track of some air quality issues in Iowa as recently as the early 2000’s.

Since that time, the EPA tightened standards. Fitzsimmons said Iowa is inching closer to the limits.

In addition to the part-time hours used for inspecting minor polluters, they also have to investigate any air quality complaints.

Sanfilippo said each complaint delays some inspections even longer. Front April to October this year, Sanfilippo said his office has responded to 42 air quality complaints, conducted 52 inspections on those complaints, and have provided assistance 87 times.

The fix, according to Sanfilippo, is more staff. However, he doesn’t expect that with the recent state budget cuts.

Justin Foss, KCRG-TV