BOSTON – Two of 29 Environmental Merit Awards being presented today by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to people and organizations across New England will go to people from the R.I. Department of Environmental Management.
“Our Environmental Merit Awards are among the highest honors EPA can bestow to recognize environmental accomplishments,” said Robert W. Varney, regional administrator for EPA’s New England Office. “I offer my gratitude to these citizens for their extraordinary contributions in protecting our shared environment. Their work reflects the best attributes of New Englanders working to find solutions to tough environmental issues.”
The Rhode Islanders being honored during today’s 10 a.m. ceremony at Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston are a DEM executive and a team of five staff members:
• Ronald N. Gagnon, division chief of the DEM’s Office of Technical and Customer Assistance, is receiving an Individual Environmental Merit Award for his “vision and environmental stewardship,” the EPA said.
Gagnon “has been a constant champion of innovative cross-divisional environmental programs such as pollution prevention, metric and measurement, and the Environmental Results Program (ERP). To [his] credit, Rhode Island was the first state to apply the ERP model to the underground storage tank sector and is the first to conduct an interstate comparative study.”
• The DEM’s Field Investigation and Remediation Support Team (FIRST) is receiving a Local, State or Federal Governmental Environmental Merit Award for its “vision, ingenuity and success” in improving the handling of contaminated waste sites, the EPA said.
“Through their creative thinking and hard work, the team members garnered management
support to gain and utilize in-house expertise for field investigation work, instead of relying on contract support at clean-up sites. Through in-house training the team gained the necessary expertise and performed extensive field work at clean-up sites – work done previously by contractors. …
“The FIRST team is truly a grass-roots story of staff vision, ingenuity and success, particularly relative to LUST site closures. Their work results in cost savings, remedial actions, and faster site closures, which supports economic growth in Rhode Island by encouraging land reuse and redevelopment.”
The annual awards, established in 1970, honor both ingenious efforts and commitment to preserving the region’s environment. This year’s competition drew 54 nominations.
Additional information is available at www.epa.gov/ne/ra/ema and www.dem.ri.gov.
