Memorandum
Date: August 22, 2024
To: The Honorable Lake County Air Quality Management District
Board of Directors
From: Douglas Gearhart, Air Pollution Control Officer
Subject: Notification of Office Closure and Reduction of Services.
Executive Summary:
The Lake County Air Quality Management District (District) has had significant staffing issues for a number of years. We have been notified that our Senior Air Quality Engineer is taking a position with another Air District due to increased pay, benefits, and a lower cost of living. This will leave the District with 2.8 FTE (APCO, Deputy APCO, and a recently hired Administrative Assistant) of 6 positions.
As a result of the loss of staff, the District must implement immediate measures to ensure statuary mandates are complied with. The District's highest priority is to maintain the air monitoring program and our attainment status designation. We anticipate that 50% to 70% of our total staff time will be dedicated to the air monitoring program to ensure we do not lose our attainment status. Monitoring requires regular equipment checks, maintenance, cleaning, calibrations/verifications, data processing (one minute data for 24/7 operations for multiple instruments results in extremely large data sets for processing, review, and certification), and a number of other mandates related to State and Federal quality assurance requirements. With the remaining staff time, the essential basic District functions, budgets, bills, and permitting will take up the remaining staff time.
The result of this is that many non-mandatory activities will be put on hold or dropped until our staffing issue is resolved. These include grants, MOU's with the State, complaint response (general complaints), wildfire/emergency response, non-mandatory air monitoring, and other assistance which is not mandated by law. Effective immediately, all pass through grant programs with funds that are not currently under contract...
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