Environmental Progress - Spring 2002

Environmental Progress : Spring 2002

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.

Heather Nifong was the Employee of the Month for December 2001. Heather works for the Bureau of Land's Office of Brownfields Assistance. She coordinated the IEPA's co-sponsorship of the 2001 National Brownfields Conference, supporting the services that target small, rural communities that would not have been reached through more traditional outreach efforts. Heather also was instrumental in organizing and planning the very successful state All Cities Brownfields Conference.

Jerry Baker, Bureau of Air, Air Monitoring Section, was EOM for January 2002. He supports the ozone-monitoring network by keeping monitors available to replace units that fail in the field, reducing ozone data loss from malfunctioning equipment. In the past five years, no Illinois ozone site has been penalized by USEPA for insufficient data and no ozone violations have occurred because of data loss. Jerry also provides telephone support to field operators. After Sept. 11, 2001, Jerry volunteered to transport large monitoring equipment to regional offices.

Bur Filson, Bureau of Land, Permit Section was the EOM for February 2002. Bur has been instrumental in getting groundwater data changed from an antiquated paper submittal to an electronic format, and helped bring about changes in the Records Management Act to allow the Agency to receive groundwater data in electronic format. Bur oversaw the contract with an outside vender that keypunched previously submitted data to an electronic format. Future data submissions will be in an electronic format. Bur wrote instructions for the regulated community to follow for the new process, placed the instructions on the Web page and presented the requirements to approximately 100 individuals. He continues to answer questions from the regulated community regarding the electronic format. The electronic format will allow permit reviewers and field operations staff to easily manipulate and review the data, which will ultimately result in resource savings for both the permit and field operations sections.