THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 4, 1997 TAG: 9702040290
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: 63 lines
After weeks of threatening to punish the Allen administration's record on the environment by firing the head of the Department of Environmental Quality, a House of Delegates committee backed down on Monday and decided he should stay.
``The committee was following the Virginia tradition of allowing the governor to make his choice, however weak and ineffective that choice might be,'' said Kenneth R. Plum, a Fairfax Democrat who chairs the House Nominations and Confirmations Committee.
Plum's committee will recommend that DEQ Director L. Thomas Hopkins be confirmed. He already has been confirmed by the Senate.
In recent months, Hopkins, a former corporate lawyer for coal and oil companies, has been plagued by bad press. A legislative report in December accused his agency of coddling corporate polluters. Then in January, a DEQ memo that outlined a campaign to discredit the report was leaked to legislators.
As a result of the ensuing publicity, the writer of the memo resigned, and Hopkins and his aides were summoned before members of the House Natural Resource Committee to explain both DEQ's shortcomings and the memo.
Lawmakers were not impressed.
``Their presentation was as disorganized and disoriented as I perceive their agency to be,'' Galax Democrat Thomas M. Jackson commented at the time.
But by Monday, Hopkins' presentation had apparently improved.
``I want to really commend you,'' Suffolk Republican Robert E. Nelms told Hopkins after the 90-minute session during which committee members questioned Hopkins yet again. ``I think you have shown what true leadership is about.''
Hopkins told the committee that he grew up in the coal fields of Southwestern Virginia ``during the '50s, when there wasn't any regulation.''
His memories, he said, include a river that ``flowed black'' and air that ``smelled of sulfur.''
``As a kid, I swore to myself if I ever had a chance to do something about it, I would do so.''
Hopkins said he was also influenced by a stint as a corporate lawyer for Occidental Petroleum, ``which was responsible for Love Canal - so they had great sensitivity to environmental matters.'' In 1978, hundreds of families were evacuated from Love Canal, N.Y., after it was discovered that Occidental Petroleum had dumped chemical wastes there for 11 years.
Hopkins said criticism of his agency contained in a report issued by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission in December amounted to ``wrong conclusions based on faulty information.'' Criticism of DEQ by the federal Environmental Protection Agency has been ``political,'' he said.
Instead of fining polluters, DEQ ``works with'' them to gain compliance, Hopkins said. He defined this practice as ``incentive and deterrence.''
As for the rare business that won't cooperate, ``I'm one of the meanest guys at DEQ because when we get a bad actor, I really want to put those people out of business,'' he said.
Asked about low employee morale at the agency, Hopkins said he had instituted a new program to solve the problem: ``Table Talk with Tom.''
So far, he said, there have been ``two or three'' ``Table Talk with Tom'' sessions during which he invited employees for lunch and conversation ``off the record'' and ``behind closed doors.''
The committee's vote to endorse Hopkins was unanimous.
``I'd like to thank you for having `Table Talk with Tom' here with us today,'' Nelms said afterward.
KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY