After more than 30 years at the R.I. Department of Environmental Management, Dean Albro retired in September as the chief of the Office of Compliance and Inspection. He spoke recently with Providence Business News about the founding of that office, his career and why, like so many other state workers this year, he retired sooner than he’d planned.
PBN: You were the first chief of the Office of Compliance and Inspection?
ALBRO: Right, was created, sometime around September 1996. It was created so the department [could] consolidate all of its enforcement activities.
PBN: When you started with DEM in 1977, what was the state of environmental enforcement?
ALBRO: When I started – then all the enforcement was done by the individual programs that you worked for. I started in the Division of Enforcement as a dispatcher and then got a job in the freshwater wetlands program and the enforcement for that set of laws stayed right with the program. You did all the enforcement right there. Until the Office of Compliance and Inspection started, everybody kind of did their own stuff.
So it’s hard to say what the state of environmental enforcement was when I first started, because you kind of got into these niches.
PBN: When this office was created that isolation changed?
ALBRO: That changed. Well, my understanding is that they did this because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency did sort of the same thing, creating the Office of Environmental Stewardship, joining a lot of their enforcement activities. They would do a lot of what they called multimedia, so they would know what other people are doing. You may be enforcing against the same people or your inspectors might be going out and running into other inspectors going out the same day for two different programs.
PBN: How did the process work?
ALBRO: It was tough getting started, because you were joining a lot of people who were doing what they thought was the right thing and their own thing. So you had to create policies that everybody was going to follow, use the same types of formats for everybody to do things the same way.
Over the years, we got involved in all the inspection programs that were going to be handled in the same fashion, so it was basically joining a whole group of individuals that did things differently and making sure they were uniform.
PBN: Which accomplishments are you most proud of?
ALBRO: I think the number of enforcement actions that we’ve taken and that we’ve tried to make enforcement as consistent and predictable as possible, following good policies, trying to be fair and reasonable to people in our dealings.
[Eds. note: Under Albro’s watch, the office received 30,421 environmental violation complaints; conducted 27,361 inspections; issued 1,038 violation notices that totaled $22.73 million in fines; collected another $7.48 million in penalties; and entered 659 consent agreements with Rhode Islanders.]
PBN: How are you enjoying your retirement?
ALBRO: It’s pretty good. I do miss the job, though, I have to tell you. I really enjoyed the work. It was a tremendous opportunity to take on that office and build it up to something that never had been done before. And it was fairly complex – I had been involved with freshwater wetlands, but when this office was created, there were nine different programs thrown into it. So I was learning a lot of different laws, a lot of different regulations and trying to make sure, from an enforcement standpoint, I was consistent and handling things in a reliable manner.
PBN: Tell me a little bit about the Northeast Environmental Enforcement Trust, where you are now volunteering.
ALBRO: It’s the trust fund for the Northeast Environmental Enforcement Project and I was chairman of that project for the last two years. It’s an organization of 14 states in the Northeast and it’s made up of their environmental enforcement personnel, from regulatory and enforcement to prosecutors. And that project … is all about training … new people who come on about how to be environmental inspectors and enforcement people. It started way back in 1980.
PBN: How does that project relate to Rhode Island?
ALBRO: Rhode Island was involved later on, but most of [its founding principals came from] when hazardous waste was a pretty big deal and nobody knew what to do about it. There weren’t really many laws about disposal and some of the things weren’t regulated, like Picillo’s pig farm, [a superfund site in Coventry where an estimated 10,000 drums of hazardous waste were dumped.] That’s how that group started. A lot of hazardous waste was going interstate … for disposal, coming out of New Jersey and New York and going to places like Picillo’s. A lot of the law enforcement agencies didn’t know a lot about that kind of stuff – dealing with hazardous waste and what to do with it if they found it.
So the whole idea behind it was to get people together who were dealing with this, try to figure out the common things they’re seeing and try to figure out how to address it.
PBN: Do you think you would have retired so soon without the incentive of holding on to your current benefits plan?
ALBRO: No, but it wasn’t just for the medical benefits. There’s a concern about what’s going to happen this year. The economy is so difficult. The state is in such a difficult time, I’m sure there are going to be other reductions coming down the pike. I didn’t want to be here come June and have to be making the same decision as to whether I should get out and retire when I’ve already lost these benefits. I had 31 years in the retirement system and it was time to go, but I would have liked to stay the full 35 years. •
INTERVIEW
Dean Albro
POSITION:Retired from the R.I. Department of Environmental Management on Sept. 27 and now volunteers for Northeast Environmental Enforcement Trust Fund.
BACKGROUND:Hired at R.I. Department of Environmental Management in 1977. In his 31 years with the agency, he was a biologist, supervising environmental planner, deputy chief and chief of the freshwater wetlands program. In 1996, he was named chief of the Office of Compliance and Inspection.
EDUCATION:B.S. in Resource Development from the University of Rhode Island, 1977.
RESIDENCE:Coventry
FIRST JOB:After high school, Albro worked at Seena’s retail store in West Warwick.
AGE:58
While we may need less people, overall, in gov’t, we absolutely need more people like Dean Albro.