BECKY KEOGH: ADEQ chief offends firing of press aide and agency record of reduced enforcement penalties.


Benji Hardy has a great story for the Times
this week about the firing of Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality press spokesman Kelly Robinson. Her apparent offense: Allowing public comments on a website of  facts uncomfortable to ADEQ Director Becky Keogh.

The facts suggest high pay for political appointees and less enforcement by Keogh, who came to ADEQ from regulated hydrocarbon industries.

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The issue was public comments on a rule regulating agricultural pollutants.

The meat of it:

one critical comment, submitted May 2 by former ADEQ employee Ellen Carpenter, also marshaled publicly available figures to question whether the agency was capable of establishing a complex new system.

“The proposed draft Regulation No. 37 introduces an entirely new statewide trading program without considering the costs in terms of resources and staff to ADEQ to administer such a program,” Carpenter wrote. “ADEQ has undergone significant reorganization in the past two to three years. New management positions have been created in the Director’s Office, most of the senior managers who were career employees either are no longer with the agency or are no longer in the program area over which they have extensive experience, and a large number of staff positions occupied by those who perform the agency’s work on the ground went unfilled during 2017[.]”

Carpenter cited budget figures, including a 50 percent decline in penalties assessed by ADEQ since Director Becky Keogh assumed leadership in 2015. Penalties declined from $662,000 in FY 2015 to $328,000 in FY 2017, according to the state’s budget transparency website. Carpenter attached screenshots to her email illustrating these and other numbers, including an apparent increase in the number of employees earning high salaries between 2015 and 2018.

“In 2015, five employees of ADEQ made more than $85,000/year (the director, chief deputy director, deputy director, and two career employees). In 2018, 13 employees now make over $85,000/year. Of these 13 employees, it appears that only 2 have worked more than 10 years at ADEQ,” Carpenter’s comment said. As of June 22, the state transparency website shows 14 employees that make over $85,000 annually.

“Although I hope I am wrong, it appears that a significant portion of ADEQ’s working staff might have been sacrificed to support the management reinvented at ADEQ since 2015,” Carpenter continued. The point of including such information in her comment on Regulation 37, she said, was to raise questions about the agency’s capacity to implement a new program. “ADEQ has no experience with any trading program and creating a trading program before understanding the staffing requirements and costs … places the cart before the horse,” she wrote.

It’s a tangled GOP web over at ADEQ.

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Carpenter’s comment didn’t mention the names of specific employees, but it hinted at a complaint circulating among some ADEQ staffers for years: That veteran employees have been replaced by individuals with personal connections to Governor Hutchinson’s office or the Republican Party of Arkansas. For example, Senior Deputy Director Julie Linck, the agency’s second-in-command, is married to Kelley Linck, a former Republican state representative now serving as legislative affairs chief for the Department of Human Services. Davis, the ADEQ communications director, is married to J.R. Davis, the governor’s communications director. Director Keogh is the sister-in-law of Doyle Webb, the chair of the state GOP.

Facts are in dispute and Hardy chronicles them all, but this is clear: The comment was removed from the website for a time and Robinson was fired. She’d previously had a good employment record, but negative reports rained on her after the comments were published.

Keogh defends the job action, her reorganization of the agency and, well, everything.

A dramatic reduction in environmental rule violations does NOT indicate, she said, a reduced commitment to environmental protection. OK then.

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