Many think Opper’s legacy will be defined by his actions on global warming

When Richard Opper was studying to become an environmental scientist 30 years ago, the talk was all about mining.

Eastern Montana, which sits atop a thick cap of coal, was eyed as a potential energy Mecca for the United States and plans were in the works to dig several large open-pit coal mines there. Cleaning up the footprints of mining seemed like a career with an awfully long shelf life.

Today, Opper (rhymes with copper) heads up the state agency that mandates mine cleanups, along with almost everything else relating to Montana’s environment. But today, mining has taken a back seat to more tenacious environmental problems in the state.

One of the biggest threats facing Montana now, Opper said, is global warming, which affects everything from the shrinking glaciers of Glacier National Park to Montana’s farmers and skiers.

“Nobody talked about global warming back then,” Opper said in an interview in his Department of Environmental Quality office.

Some critics say how Opper deals with that threat now will determine his legacy as director of the Department of Environmental Quality and that of Gov. Brian Schweitzer, too.

Schweitzer named Opper, 55, chief of the agency shortly after the 2004 election. In taking the post, he stepped into a perennial hot seat. Opper’s appointment came with some new baggage: Schweitzer was the first Democrat elected governor in 16 years. Environmentalists and industry supporters alike waited to see how the state’s environmental agency might change under a Democrat.

Debbie Shea, a former Butte Democratic lawmaker and now head of the Montana Mining Association, worked with Opper before the 2007 Legislature on a bill sought by the mining industry and supported by DEQ.

“I think we were both a little hesitant when we started working together,” she said. “I don’t know if he had the idea that he couldn’t trust mining.”

Shea said she, too, was unsure how a mining representative might be welcomed at the agency.

Shea said she was happily surprised. Opper and his agency were very easy to work with. She said mining representatives and the DEQ worked together “as a team” to pass a bill that benefited both mining and the environment.

Opper had never before worked for the DEQ when he stepped into the director’s corner office. Born in Oklahoma City, Opper studied crops and soils and earned an agronomy degree form Oklahoma State University.

“Right after college, I came to Montana for a job in reclamation research at MSU (Montana State University),” he said.

He earned a master’s degree in soils science from MSU in 1979. Ironically, Schweitzer was also studying soils science there. Opper said he knew the would-be governor to say hello, but they weren’t close friends.

Opper’s career has taken him to Billings, where he worked as an environmental consultant, to New Mexico for a few years, Missoula and eventually Lewistown. In 1990, he took the job that has defined his work life: director of the Missouri River Basin Association. That group tries to smooth out conflicts from downstream states that use the river for shipping and upstream states like Montana that use the river for fishing and recreation.

Opper married Sally Mueller, a school psychologist, in 1984. Their son Isaac, now at college in Maine, was born in 1987. Mueller’s career took the family to Lewistown in 1995, when she got a job there as director of the Head Start program. Opper was able to take his job with him from Missoula.

“I loved Lewistown,” he said. “I miss Lewistown. I’m trying not to love Helena so I’ll go back.”

Do a Web search for Opper and you’ll find lots of stuff about the DEQ, but you’ll also find something curious: Opper is a published author. He has written several novels; only one, “Elemental Threat” has been published. It’s a mystery set in the West about two men trying to stop a terrorist hell-bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

Almost no one has read it, Opper said with a laugh.

Opper’s first brush with the DEQ came in the mid-1990s when an industrial pollutant started showing up in Lewistown’s Spring Creek. His son, then a fourth-grader, read a blurb in the local newspaper urging people not to eat too many Spring Creek fish. This outraged the young Opper.

Isaac Opper wrote letters of complaint to DEQ, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the now-defunct Montana Power Co., on the logic that the contamination may have come from one of the energy company’s electrical transformers.

“The DEQ was wonderful responding to his complaint,” Opper said.

His son helped design experiments that pinpointed where the chemicals spiked in the creek, which eventually led to a cleanup of the pollution, which was traced to paint in the causeways of the state fish hatchery.

As head of an agency as politically charged as DEQ, Opper knows he didn’t take this job to make friends. The case of cooking smelting waste to make cement shows how impossible it is for Opper’s agency to make anyone happy.

In April of 2005, a citizen’s group in Bozeman learned that the Holcim cement plant in Three Forks was using slag from the defunct ASARCO lead smelter in East Helena to make cement. The environmental community quickly organized and Opper’s DEQ decided to include the slag in its ongoing study looking at burning tires at the plant.

In the end, the DEQ decided to limit Holcim’s use to 15,000 metric tons a year, arguing that cooking any more than that would be a threat to public health, Opper said.

Jim Jensen, executive director of the Helena-based Montana Environmental Information Center, cites the slag issue as one of the reasons Opper has been a disappointment “exceeding my expectations.”

On the other side stands Don Allen, head of the Western Environmental Trade Association, a Helena-based industry group. While Allen generally has nice things to say about Opper, he cited the slag as an example of the DEQ not doing things right.

The agency, Allen said, “dragged out the whole thing on the Holcim plant. We think they should be allowed to burn and we think (DEQ) moved entirely too slow in letting that happen.”

Industry representatives like Allen are generally complimentary of Opper, saying he fairly follows Montana environmental law, even if industry doesn’t agree with it. Many also compliment Opper for his pleasant style and sense of humor.

“I would say there were a couple of issues and Richard has provided a stabilized, consistent direction, and that’s been comforting,” said Bud Clinch, executive director of the Montana Coal Council and former director of the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation under Republican Gov. Judy Martz.

Clinch said agency directors can only do so much. Opper, like all the others, is bound by the web of laws governing his agency. Even if he aspired to command a major sea change in Montana environmental law, Opper can’t.

“There’s the expectation that the director can just rule as he wishes,” Clinch said.

On at least one occasion, Opper has effectively wielded the control due a department director. In March of 2006, he wrote Schweitzer complaining that the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway has for years hidden behind bureaucracy to avoid cleaning up a heavily polluted former rail yard in Livingston. Schweitzer responded with tough words for BNSF: Either clean up the mess, or we’ll do it and send you the bill.

Since then, DEQ employees say, Opper’s DEQ and the railroad have quickly moved ahead with cleanup.

Jensen acknowledges Opper’s pivotal role in the BNSF cleanup and Anne Hedges, program director at MEIC said Opper was a leader on several environmental bills during the 2007 session.

Like Opper, Jensen lists global warming as the No. 1 problem facing Montana. So it doesn’t make sense, he said, to give permits to power plants that will only pump more greenhouse effect-causing gases into the atmosphere.

“He talks green, but he acts brown,” Jensen said.

In December of 2005, Schweitzer asked Opper to form the Montana Climate Change Advisory Committee to come up with steps Montana could take to eliminate pollution that causes global warming. Jensen said the ultimate test of Opper’s leadership is what the director does with the panel’s recommendations.

“The seeds have been planted for some good policy in that committee,” Jensen said, adding the key will be how or if Opper and Schweitzer put those policies into effect.

Opper said he is committed to reducing carbon dioxide pollution, the main ingredient behind global warming.

“A lot of people say it’s very expensive to address this problem, but it really isn’t,” Opper said. “It makes a whole lot of sense to use energy and to use it wisely.”

The advisory council will come out with its recommendations next month. Opper said the group will have 50 suggestions, some of which state government can put into effect immediately and others that will require new laws.

To reduce his own carbon dioxide pollution, Opper recently bought a scooter to commute to and from work. It gets 90 miles to the gallon.

“People ask me when I’m going to put streamers on my handle bars,” he said. “But I think it feels pretty good to be doing something that uses less energy.”