Environmental Progress - Summer 2001

Employees of the Month

Editor's Note: Each month the Illinois EPA recognizes outstanding employees for making quality part of every job they do. Three recent honorees are listed below.

Sandra Bron, Bureau of Land, was EOM for March. Despite design changes, wet weather and a union picket line, she salvaged the schedule to construct a Resource Conservation and Recovery Act cap on the Amoco Chemical Landfill near Joliet, to reduce groundwater contamination for years to come. She worked with Amoco to build the cap in a cost effective manner. Sandy negotiated much of the Amoco Chemical consent decree and all of the construction work plans with Amoco, while maintaining a good working relationship with the regulated community. Last year, Sandy applied her knowledge about landfill design and construction at the Johns-Manville, Ottawa Radiation and Sandoval Zinc sites as well as the Amoco project

Donna Wallace was EOM for April. Donna works in the Leaking Underground Storage Tank (LUST) Section for the Bureau of Land. In the last year, she participated in several work groups including one which involved converting the budget forms to Microsoft Word, a very time consuming and technically challenging task. She stayed ahead of her review deadlines while assisting in training two new employees and served as a mentor to four others. Donna volunteered to oversee a very high profile Brownfield pilot project to clean up an abandoned Chicago gas station that is a public nuisance threatening public health and safety. She will coordinate work with the city of Chicago on the project which is funded by U.S. EPA's UST Trust Fund. Illinois was one of only 10 states nationwide to be selected to receive this brownfields pilot project funding. In addition to promoting safety for nearby residents, the project will foster revitalization of the Chicago neighborhood.

Jeremy Morgan was the EOM for May. Jeremy works for the Bureau of Water, Information Management Sub-Unit. Among his accomplishments, Jeremy developed a database for the Volunteer Lake Monitoring Program that made data handling (i.e. report writing, querying data, data storage, data input) more efficient and less time consuming. The database will be available on the Agency website in the future. Working under a tight deadline, Jeremy helped design and produce new billing notices for the Community Water Supply Testing Program, and helped create a new easier-to-use operator certification tracking system meeting new Safe Drinking Water Act requirements. His is currently working with the U.S. Geological Survey to redesign the BOW ground water database, assessing a USEPA-developed automated NPDES permitting system, and assisting efforts to upgrade the Bureau's financial assistance system and the drinking water permit tracking system.