This post will likely end up a bit wonkier than our usual posts but I thought it might be worth­while to explain exactly what the Office of Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity is and tell its “ori­gin story”.  In the early months of 2007 newly elected County Exec­u­tive Ulman put together a Com­mis­sion on the Envi­ron­ment and Sus­tain­abil­ity to make rec­om­men­da­tions on, among other things, the tran­si­tion team’s rec­om­men­da­tion that the County cre­ate a Depart­ment of the Environment.

The Com­mis­sion worked through three alter­na­tives.  The first was to do noth­ing (or sim­ply bol­ster exist­ing envi­ron­men­tally focused areas).  This was fairly quickly deter­mined to be not the right course of action.  Not hav­ing a group ded­i­cated specif­i­cally to the pro­tec­tion of the envi­ron­ment was seen as a clear defi­ciency in our orga­ni­za­tional struc­ture.  Most of the sur­round­ing juris­dic­tions and in fact most of the juris­dic­tion like Howard County nation­wide have a Depart­ment of the Envi­ron­ment or some sim­i­lar struc­ture.  The exist­ing struc­ture also had a sin­gle envi­ron­men­tal coor­di­na­tor (at the time – me) who worked out of the Executive’s office, served as a pub­lic con­tact, staffed the Com­mis­sion and worked on a hodge­podge of envi­ron­men­tal projects. The Com­mis­sion did not like this because it relied too heav­ily on the Coor­di­na­tor and on the aggres­sive com­mit­ment of the County Exec­u­tive. They believed the coor­di­na­tor would not be able to estab­lish roots within the County gov­ern­ment and might be phased out by later administrations.

The sec­ond alter­na­tive was to cre­ate a full fledged Depart­ment of the Envi­ron­ment.  This would entail a gov­ern­ment re-organization, likely tak­ing Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices from Pub­lic Works, Resource Con­ser­va­tion from Plan­ning & Zon­ing, and Nat­ural Resource Man­age­ment from Recre­ation & Parks, and Envi­ron­men­tal Health from the Health Depart­ment.  There were sev­eral plusses and minuses to this option but the Com­mis­sion felt strongly that this would be a poor choice for Howard County.  First neg­a­tive is cost.  Despite the fact that many of the pro­gram staff mem­bers would come from exist­ing depart­ments, this sce­nario is costly because it assumes the addi­tion of more pro­gram staff as well as sep­a­rate admin­is­tra­tive, legal, and logis­ti­cal costs.

The Com­mis­sion, in doing their research, found that gov­ern­ment reor­ga­ni­za­tions rarely work as intended, often cre­ate mass staff depar­tures, and recre­ate and even add to gov­ern­ment inef­fi­cien­cies. Addi­tion­ally, the new Depart­ment would be unlikely to quickly com­pete for resources with other well estab­lished, large gov­ern­ment depart­ments. Finally, mak­ing the envi­ron­ment one “team” in a bureau­cratic com­pe­ti­tion seemed unwise, when the true core goal was/is to inte­grate an envi­ron­men­tal ethic through­out all of government.

That leads us to the deci­sion they did rec­om­mend and was in fact adopted (though imple­men­ta­tion is ongo­ing).  Let me go right to the source to explain the ori­gins of the Office.  “This office is mod­eled on exist­ing offices in County gov­ern­ment, most notably, the Bud­get Office and the Office of Law. While both of those offices have rel­a­tively small staffs, they wield high lev­els of author­ity within all depart­ments in the gov­ern­ment. The Office of Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity would join these offices on the Exec­u­tive floor of the County Office Build­ing, with the County Exec­u­tive and Admin­is­tra­tion. The Office would be closely asso­ci­ated with the County Exec­u­tive and would pro­vide over­sight on, and facil­i­ta­tion of, oper­a­tions in the County Depart­ments.”  The Direc­tor is a Cab­i­net level posi­tion and the office and the Office is charged with five roles within gov­ern­ment:  pol­icy devel­op­ment, edu­ca­tion and out­reach, energy man­age­ment, finan­cial man­age­ment, and envi­ron­men­tal com­pli­ance.  At full strength, the office would have around a half a dozen employees.

This is a rel­a­tively new but not unheard of model for gov­ern­ment envi­ron­ment and sus­tain­abil­ity work.  A small office with strong access and author­ity with­out the “bur­den” of day to day man­age­ment is able to bet­ter work with all of gov­ern­ment (and the quasi/no gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies) to bring about a broader cul­ture of sus­tain­abil­ity.  Though not meant to dis­par­age any of our exist­ing gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies, the knock on gov­ern­ment is so often about the large bureau­cratic silos that com­pete with each other and make progress so dif­fi­cult.  This model is an earnest attempt to do things dif­fer­ently.  It may even be a skosh gov­ern­ment 2.0 but that’s alto­gether too wonky to even dis­cuss.  Now 2 years plus into the model and with the begin­ning assem­bling of a staff, the jury is still out.  How­ever, if our accom­plish­ments since the cre­ation of the office are our “mea­sur­ing stick” – things seem to be work­ing.  Of course, I am the Direc­tor so I would say that wouldn’t I?

JD Feld­mark

PS  The attached photo is of one of the orga­ni­za­tional charts devel­oped for the rec­om­men­da­tion of the cre­ation of the office.  I know it’s not any­where near a typ­i­cal org chart and is a lit­tle hard to fol­low (not typ­i­cal and hard to fol­low — kinda like its Direc­tor).  The light green is the Office and the dark green are the many divi­sions inside gov­ern­ment and groups out­side gov­ern­ment that the office is tasked with work­ing with to accom­plish our goals.