Environmental Progress - Spring 2000

Agency's Hearing Officer Retires After 22 Years

John Williams, who served as the IEPA's hearing officer for more than 22 years, retired at the end of 1999. During those years he literally and repeatedly traveled the length and breadth of Illinois, conducting hearings that once in a while attracted only one or two participants and occasionally drew a thousand and more citizens, many of them angry.

As hearing officer, it was John's job to see that everyone had a chance to be heard in an orderly fashion. At the same time he had to keep attention focused on the specific issue at hand, not always easy when emotions are high. Deeply involved hearing participants can easily lose sight of a fact the hearing office must always remember; final decisions must conform to what state and federal regulations allow, rather than what various factions think they should allow.

Joe Svoboda, left, manager, Division of Legal Counsel at IEPA presents hearing office John Williams with a plaque at Williams' retirement lunch last December.

While most of the hearings he conducted were fairly routine, John says a few stand out. A hearing on an NPDES permit at Woodstock drew more than 800 people, and lasted until 3 a.m.

Another was held in a hall with a capacity of 1,000 but some 1,500 people showed up, so approximately 500 had to stay outside. In addition to conducting proceedings inside, John had to then go outside to address the overflow crowd and keep them informed.

"As some people would leave, others would be able to move inside," he said, "so gradually most of them filtered in, and I made sure everyone understood they could submit written comments if they weren't heard at the time of the hearing."

At a South Chicago hearing, security included police dogs, but "I never had anyone get out of hand," John says. "The important thing was to let people have their say. I did have one person get out of line, but they later apologized."

John came to the Illinois EPA by a somewhat indirect route. A native of Wales, he was an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and spent time in India, trained police in Kenya, and spent two years in Germany where his posts included the Berlin prison housing German World War II war criminals.

He came to the U.S. in 1962, worked as a botanist, obtained his law degree, and then joined the young Illinois EPA.

"By and large, I've had a good time," he says. "The engineers were all super, everybody I worked with did a good job and made things easier for me. I got great cooperation from all the Bureaus and all the Office of Community Relations folks."

At his retirement lunch in December, Agency Chief Legal Counsel Joe Svoboda said it was indicative of John's skills that "In all those years, I never had a single complaint about the way he handled a hearing."

John, though, remembers receiving one. A woman who'd been at a hearing and opposed a permit sent him a very nice Christmas card. She added a note that said "If you deny this permit you'll go to heaven. If you grant this permit, you'll go to "the other place"," as John phrased it, then she added "Merry Christmas." "We granted the permit," he recalls, "so I guess I'm bound for the other place."

More immediately, he is bound for England, where he and his wife will travel later this year. And he's improving his German skills, planning to spend some time in Germany next year.