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For the next six months my title will be Title V Permit Engineer. After that, I may return to my normal title, which is Air Quality Specialist.

We have had some employee turnover at work. When some big projects came in, I was put in charge of them. Our director thought I needed some kind of a bonus for doing the work, so he gave me a temporary promotion. At the end of the six months, we will re-evaluate to determine whether the new employees have caught up enough to handle the work, or if I need to continue working as the Title V Permit Engineer.

March 2008 will mark my 25th year with the Air Quality Bureau.

Since we are a county level bureau, we are a small organization. I report directly to my supervisor. I am responsible for quality assurance and oversee the three employees in monitoring specialist positions. Right now I'm also training two new specialists, and I am in charge of reviewing their work.

At the county level, we are small enough that employees do not specialize in one program. We get to do a little bit of everything, which adds variety to our work. Currently, I am a quality assurance officer for the ambient monitoring section. I review our daily worksheets, and every quarter I go out and audit the monitors and ensure everything runs properly. My main emphasis right now is doing construction permits. Any facility in Polk County that is going to install new equipment that emits criteria pollutants – those that the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has established a standard for – or a hazardous pollutant has to get a construction permit from our office. That work entails looking at the control equipment to determine if it is applicable to the process they are running, and making sure it will meet the quality standards when everything is in place and operating properly. Once the equipment is installed, the facilities have to have a manual operating permit, which we also provide. I primarily do enforcement work for Title V facilities, which are the major source facilities. There are only 24 Title V facilities in Polk County. Combined, they emit over 100 tons of one particular pollutant. I visit each facility about once a year, do a full inspection, and make sure everything that we need has been submitted.

Most difficult situations arise when we are handling complaint responses. If someone is doing some open burning or there are dust complaints, people will call our office. We go out and investigate. Normally in a complaint response situation, we cannot make everyone happy. If we find something wrong and take action, the person responsible for the illegal activity is upset. On the other hand, if we find that nothing is wrong, then the person who complained is upset that we didn't do anything. So the only thing we can do is follow the code, use our best judgment to make a decision, and live with the fact that someone is not going to be happy.

Most of the work is done individually. I work with co-workers when I review the specialists' work and give them guidance on new work that is coming in if they haven't been exposed to that type of job before. I also review the monitors' work and help them set up new monitoring stations and equipment.

No.

After high school, I spent two years in community college where I earned two associate degrees and an environmental technician degree. Then I went to Mankato State University (now Minnesota State University, Mankato) and received a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Studies and Biology with a Minor in Chemistry. After college, I worked for a short period of time at the Des Moines site of the University of Iowa's hygienic lab. Then I applied for a job with Polk County and was hired as an ambient monitoring specialist, monitoring for pollutants that the EPA required to be measured. I was promoted to an enforcement position, air quality inspector, where my main job was to inspect minor facilities. Finally, I moved up to air quality specialist doing construction permitting and enforcement of major facilities.

Yes, but I was considering being a wildlife biologist or wildlife officer. Then in college I was exposed to more environmental career opportunities, and that is when I became interested in the kind of work I do now.

When I was working as an air quality inspector, I started doing more work in construction permitting and other work that fell outside of my job description. So I worked with my supervisor to create a new position and title.

My people skills have improved greatly from having to interact with citizens, industries, and governmental agencies. I do a lot more public speaking now than I have done previously.

I intend to start working more with the Title V permits and begin doing some of the modifications and renewals. Then, when the six months is up, I am hope they will make the position full-time for me instead of temporary.

Typically my day begins at 8:00 a.m. and ends at 4:30 p.m.

We have a program on our computers that we use to check in and check out. It lets the other staff know we are in our offices and are available to take phone calls, etc.

If a construction permit project comes in, I spend about five or six hours in the office working on that. Then I will go out and do some small inspections to help break up the work. If no major construction projects come in, I will go out and do my enforcement duties at one of the major facilities. That entails one day of going through file and report reviews and another full day out in the field at the plant where we inspect all of the process equipment, the roof, the stacks, and the control equipment. Finally, we spend another day doing the follow-up work, including reporting and reviewing any additional information we requested at the inspection.

Overall there is quite a bit of variety in my work. For example, I might spend one full day at a tire plant, a couple days doing paper work in my office, and then another day doing audits at the ambient monitoring sites.

I just completed a construction permit project for a Des Moines facility. The company was going to do a major expansion of its plant. The project required 15 permits and permit modifications, and the company wanted to use the new rules governing that type of construction. A facility like that falls under a federal program called PSD, prevention of significant deterioration. The state has been delegated the right of PSD permitting, but Polk County has not. To gain permits covering all of the pollutants, the project was split between the state of Iowa and Polk County. I worked very closely with the Department of Natural Resources (DNR). I had to do a lot of research to find out what was allowed, what was not allowed. I dealt with equipment that is different from what we usually see on a day-to-day basis. It was the first permit in the state that was issued following the new guidelines, so it was cool to be a part of that.

Normally I only work five days a week. Occasionally, I work on Saturdays when we have a major project coming in. Some of the quality assurance work also has to be done on a weekend. As part of my duties as quality air officer for the lab, I rotate carrying a pager with my supervisor after hours and on weekends. If one of our monitoring sites records a high value, our polling computer is set up to send a page out. Once we receive the page, we go in to the office to look at the data and determine if the value is valid. If it is valid, we contact the DNR to send out a press release health advisory alert. If it isn't valid, we send one of the specialists to the site to perform maintenance checks on the monitor. The Polk County Sheriff's dispatch also has my number. A few times a year they will call me after hours or on weekends to investigate open burning complaints.

I do not receive overtime pay, but I do get comp time, one hour of vacation time for every hour of overtime I work. I receive standby pay for carrying the pager, which is 10% of my hourly wage. I also receive comp time when I have to investigate open burning complaints on weekends.

In the Air Quality Division there are three positions. An Air Quality Monitoring Specialist's salary starts at $43,023 and peaks at $56,543. An Air Quality Specialist's salary ranges from $51,879 to $68,285. An Air Permit Engineer begins at $62,617 and caps out at $82,553.

When we do inspections, our work environment changes based on the industry we are going in to and what safety equipment we need such as hard hats, safety glasses, respirators, etc. As far as weather is concerned, we are free to set our own schedules for the most part. So if it is a cold, snowy day out, I can spend that day doing paper work in my office. Then I can do the inspections on nicer, warmer days.

We attend different training conventions a couple of times a year. They are not required, but are usually recommended.

My career has not really affected my family life. As far as my social life is concerned, I have made a number of friends and acquaintances through my job.

There will always be a demand for the work I do. Here in Polk County, we are fortunate enough that the air quality is poor enough that we need a program, but it is not as bad as the air quality in other places like California or Denver, where it might be overwhelming. Polk County has had an air quality control program since 1970.

I receive seven days of personal time a year. For sick leave, I receive four hours for every pay period, which is two weeks. Currently, I get five weeks of vacation time. Our vacation time increases with our years of service. Someone just beginning in the organization receives two weeks of vacation a year. After five years of service, a third week is added. Four weeks are given for ten years of service. And a fifth week is added after 18 years.

Right now we receive a health coverage policy and a dental health care policy.

Polk County is under the IPERS program (Iowa Public Employees Retirement System). So when an employee retires, he or she can receive 60 percent of the average of his or her three highest-year salaries.

On occasion we are asked to give presentations to schools or fraternal groups.

You feel the most satisfied after completing a major project. Also, if you identify a problem and are able to take action or enforce a company to take corrective action to alleviate the problems, you feel successful.

A lot of times we get called in on a complaint where our office doesn't have any enforcement capability. There may not be any regulations that apply to the situation, or we may not have the means to alleviate the problem. In those cases, I try to find an agency that does have some sort of capability or the means to deal with the problem and refer the complaint to them. Sometimes nothing can be done. For example, with private homeowners, there may not be any regulations to be enforced, so those homeowners have to find ways to resolve complaints on their own.

With technology now we are seeing automation in a lot of industries that used to be people-intensive, so there are fewer people involved in the work now. It does not affect our job very much, it is just the way things are getting done. We are seeing an increased level of control efficiency through equipment. There are fewer emissions being released in comparison to previous years. We are also developing monitors now that can detect pollutants at much lower limits than they could in the past. We are finding more pollutants on a smaller scale that we are going to have to start dealing with. We did not have a way to detect them in the past, but now we do. The EPA is going to have to establish levels of what is safe and what is not safe, and we will start enforcing those rules when they come out.

There are a lot more rules now than there used to be, and most programs are more complex. There is not very much a person can do in college to prepare for it, though. The job requires more than it used to, but the majority of it is learned on the job as you go. The EPA and private consultants put on different training programs throughout the year that can also be beneficial to people who are new to the industry.

It is growing because of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments and because of the development of technology for identifying the toxins. We are finding out that minute levels of exposure can actually impact humans.

The contacts I have now would have been a lot more helpful to have when I was starting. Now I have contacts in the EPA, the state, other state and local agencies throughout the country. It would have been nice to be able to draw on their experiences when I was starting out.

You have to be self-motivated. You are given a project to do, and most of the time it is open-ended. Usually there is not a cut-off when it needs to be done by. You have to be able to organize your schedule to get that work completed in a manner that will be beneficial to your clients.

Someone who likes a consistent workload would not do well. We have a lot of variety in the work we do. We have slow periods, but then we might be buried in work for the next three months.

You have to be detail-oriented. A lot of the work you do is very precise. You also have to have good judgment on negotiating things like gray areas in the enforcement field. The construction permits are pretty clear-cut, just mathematical formulas you work out. But when you get sent in to do inspections, there is always a little bit of gray area. You have to be able to negotiate what the real intent of the underlying rule is.

Experience, the level of college education you have, and also the course work that you have taken. Because we do such a wide variety of things, it is important to have a strong science background. We use biology, physics, physiology. When we look at a new hire, it is nice to see a broad base of science. It is also beneficial to have fairly strong math skills. Most of the job skills are learned on the job, so when we are looking at a new hire that is new to the industry, we look mostly at a person's educational background.

Our entry-level positions are the ambient monitoring specialists. Their job is to go to the monitoring stations throughout Polk County at least once a week to make sure the monitors are working properly, take corrective action if they are not, and then file a monthly report to the DNR to show what the monitored levels are. They also perform in-house quarterly audits on our equipment.

To get ahead you would need to do all of the duties that are required of you in your job description. And then in your spare time, look for work you can volunteer to do that is outside of your job description. This will help you build skills so that you are the best candidate when a higher-level position becomes available.

Air quality is one of those programs that swings like a pendulum depending on the amount of federal funding it receives. It is a good time to get into the industry because most agencies are receiving a steady flow of funding due to the Title V program and the Clean Air Act. The job is a lot more stable than it used to be.