Environmental Progress - Winter 2000

Two Veteran IEPA Unit Heads Retire

Bureau of Water Chief, Laboratories Division Manager leave at year's end

Jim Park

Jim Park, chief of the IEPA Bureau of Water since 1991, and John Anderson, who managed the Division of Laboratories for 20 years, retired on Dec. 31. Both had worked for the Illinois EPA since 1971.

A graduate of Southern Illinois University, Park received his Master of Science degree in June 1971. The same month he joined the young Illinois Environmental Protection Agency as a permit review engineer in what was then the Division of Water Pollution Control.

John Anderson

Anderson, a 1961 graduate of Bradley University, joined the Agency as manager of the Division of Public Water Supplies. He subsequently moved to head up administrative programs, then became manager of the Division of Laboratories.

Park served as manager of the Division of Water Pollution Control from August 1986 until August of 1991, when the Division of Water Pollution Control and the Division of Public Water Supplies were merged into the Bureau of Water. He was named Bureau Chief at that time.

During his years with the Agency, Park served on the Board of Trustees of the Great Lakes Protection Fund, chaired the Water Quality Criteria Committee and served on the technical committee of the Ohio River Sanitation Commission, was on the board of directors of the Association of State and Interstate Water Pollution Control Administrations and served as a judge for the National Engineering Excellence Awards of the American Society of Consulting Engineers.

Anderson pioneered computer use in the Agency and is credited with guiding the conversion from a technically excellent but small, manual operation to a state-of-the-art, highly automated, cost efficient and nationally accredited division. Under his leadership, the Agency in conjunction with the Illinois Municipal League launched a community water laboratory testing program that generates nearly $4 million annually. He directed the four year National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program efforts under which two IEPA labs had fewer deviations and were better prepared for NELAP than any of the other 40 labs audited before them, and improved worker safety efforts including an embryo-fetus program to protect laboratory workers' unborn children.