Ron Swenson knows his career with the MPCA will end July
8 because he planned it that way. The way it began 36 years ago was more serendipitous.
After graduating from
Bemidji State University with the first Master’s degree in Environmental
Studies awarded by that school, Ron sent resumes and application
letters out to many organizations, including the MPCA, but ended up
getting his first job in Iowa with an agency that merged into the
Department of Natural Resources.
He had been there about a year when he and
his wife came back to Minnesota to visit her family. The
office for the MPCA at that time was nearby so Ron decided
to stop in. He walked into the personnel office and had a chat with a
woman who told him, "Your name sounds familiar." She
started digging around on her desk and said, "We’ve been trying to
reach you for the past year. We’d like to interview you. Would you like
to do that right now?" He said, "Sure."
A few weeks later he received a job offer. “One of those
accidental events that redirect your entire life,” Ron says.
That
was 1978. Ten years later he was named site assessment supervisor in
the Superfund program where he served for several years during the
program’s heyday. At one time the program had a budget of $1.1 million
and a staff of 14.
Eventually the program moved from assessing and
prioritizing sites to cleaning them up. Some of those sites remain in
the news. Ron was involved in the signing of an historic three-way
agreement involving the EPA, U.S. Department of Defense and MPCA that
led to the investigation and cleanup of the Twin Cities Army Ammunition
Plant (TCAAP) Superfund site in New Brighton. So what was the most
interesting case during the Superfund days? “There were so many,” Ron
says, “but for me, what was most interesting is when we got involved
with the Lake Superior barrels.”
Gets ball rolling on Lake Superior barrels
When
Ron started in Superfund, in his new office was a 5-foot high stack of
files of potential Superfund sites. At the very bottom he found a file
on a large number of barrels filled with munition wastes from TCAAP that a defense contractor had dumped into Lake Superior during the 1950s and 1960s. “It kind of blew me away. I had never heard of them before,” Ron
said.
He took the file and met with his counterpart
at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who was starting a new program
called FUDS (Formerly Used Defense Sites) to identify and remediate
sites with environmental issues. “That’s really how the whole Lake
Superior barrels thing got started,” Ron says.
The Corps and MPCA conducted search and recovery efforts that spanned from 1989 to 1994.
That work totaled about $425,000 and identified several dump sites and some
17 different compounds that were leaching from barrels into the lake. Eventually, both organizations concluded the presence of the barrels do not pose a threat to human health or the environment.
Most
of Ron’s career with the MPCA has been in enforcement and compliance,
and one of the things he is most proud of is the difference those
efforts have made in the area of subsurface sewage treatment or SSTS.
Several years ago the state began requiring septic tank installers to pay a fee for
each tank they install. Those fees pay for MPCA staff who make sure SSTS
designers, installers and maintainers are adequately trained and
perform their work according to established standards.
“The
feedback I get from people in organizations like MOWA (the Minnesota
Onsite Wastewater Association) is they appreciate our efforts. More
people in the industry are cognizant of their professional
responsibility to do things the right way,” Ron says. Of course, there
are some who aren’t and that can lead to interesting stories.
“We
received a complaint about a septic pumper, the guys with the trucks
who come and pump out your septic tank,” Ron said. “According to the
complaint, he pulled his truck up to a ravine and emptied septic waste
into the ravine. We set up a meeting with him where he told us, ‘Oh no,
that couldn’t have been me.’ Well, the person who signed the complaint
was a pilot and he was flying over the site and took pictures with a
digital camera and telephoto lens. You could clearly see the man
standing by his truck next to the ravine. When we showed him the
pictures, he basically took out his checkbook and said, ‘What do you
want me to write this for?” It was a Perry Mason moment.
Not
all of Ron’s stories are suitable for print. To hear those you should
join him at his retirement gathering at the MPCA office in Brainerd July
8, 2 - 4 p.m. There will be a second gathering that day with hors d'oeuvres from 5 - 7 p.m. at Prairie Bay restaurant in Brainerd.
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