Ground Floor Opportunity

You could call it the timing of a baby boomer. Or maybe serendipity. Steve Pirner came along at the beginning of the environmental movement in the U.S., and as a result, he can now say he has seen it all. As a civil engineer, he took an interest in water-related issues early in his career and used this as a springboard to becoming an environmental engineer. Now, as Secretary of the South Dakota Department of Environment & Natural Resources (DENR) in Pierre, the 54-year-old sees the progress we’ve made in curbing pollution and how attitudes toward the environment have changed.

“Back when I started in the mid 70s, all this environmental business was new, and we had to figure it out as we went,” Pirner recalls. Congress passed the Clean air Act in 1970 and followed that with the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974. “That was a real challenge. A lot of times, you were required to write permits. You didn’t have any data. Nobody had ever done any sampling. You had to go out and figure out how you were going to even get the necessary background information. You would figure out how to write one of these permits.”

As Pirner tells it, “This business has been challenging both technically and from the standpoint of working with a wide variety of people in different situations. One day, you might be working on a mining operation. The next day, you might be working on one of the larger cities. The next day, you might be working on a smaller town. There’s never a boring day.”

Born and raised in Rapid City, South Dakota, Pirner received his B.S. in civil engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. Having gone through ROTC in college, he began his engineering career as a lieutenant on active duty with the Armored Combat Engineer Unit of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Supporting the 2nd Armored Battalion, the unit engaged in military engineering work geared towards stopping enemy advance or supporting the advancement of his unit. This involved using equipment like bulldozers and dump trucks to erect structures such as portable bridges for transporting armored vehicles across rivers.

“I had always been interested in water,” Pirner reveals. When he got out of active duty in 1974, he took a couple months off and did some pheasant and deer hunting. He started running out of money about the time the government upped the GI Bill, which paid for soldiers’ college education. So he went back to the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology and found they had a new water program in the civil engineering department. “That’s where I got started in the environmental business.” He went on to get his master’s in civil engineering.

As his first environmental engineering job, he became the South Dakota State Engineer for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s office in Denver, Colorado. Congress had passed the Water Pollution Control Act (now the Clean Water Act) in 1972, which mandated the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System discharge permit system. For any wastewater treatment plant, the law said the operators need a permit that establishes water quality criteria for receiving waters such as a river or stream so it wouldn’t have an adverse impact on those waters. The act set up a permitting system for every point discharge in the U.S. “Region 8 of EPA decided they would place one permitting engineer in each of their states to help write permits and get this permitting system established,” Pirner says. He had the job of writing discharge permits for all the facilities in South Dakota.

After two years with the EPA, Pirner moved on to the South Dakota DENR, eventually taking positions as office administrator, division director, and acting secretary. Then, he became Secretary of DENR in June 2000 and has now served under two governors.

Pirner describes DENR as “the environmental agency for the state of South Dakota. We do the whole spectrum of environmental issues.” Their stated mission is to provide environmental and natural resources assessment, financial assistance, and regulation to protect public health, conserve natural resources, preserve the environment, and promote economic development. With 173 people, “It’s a relatively small department, but we work on an incredibly diverse field of things. We work with municipalities, businesses, feed lots. Really, there’s very little of the economy we don’t influence.”

DENR has four main classes of people, including engineers, scientists, hydrologists, and geologists, with a third to half consisting of geological, chemical, civil, and mechanical engineers. They work on environmental projects ranging from water and wastewater plants to landfills and watershed restoration, dealing extensively with engineering firms and municipalities. “Engineers write rules and establish environmental standards, draft permits to implement those rules and establish environmental conditions for different businesses and municipalities to operate under,” Pirner explains. “We review construction plans and specifications for environmental facilities such as wastewater treatment plants or water systems and do inspections to follow up on a construction project, making sure they comply with the permit. If there’s not compliance, we either go back and try to work with the entity, or if that doesn’t work, then we have to take some type of enforcement action. The engineer is involved in all aspects of that.”

In the history of South Dakota’s DENR, only two other engineers have served as secretary, and most secretaries haven’t even had a technical background. While Pirner thinks that works if the person is a good manager and surrounds themself with good technical people, having an engineer as secretary brings an added dimension. “An engineer in charge of the department can ask more questions in trying to make sure a proposed path is technically sound as well as politically viable.”

In his years as an environmental engineer, Pirner has seen the public become more aware of environmental issues. “If you go back 25 years, there were fierce debates on whether you even had to consider any environmental impact or consequences to a project. We’ve evolved now to a point where the public not only demands but takes it for granted that we take into consideration environmental impacts and consequences of a project.” And this has transferred over to engineers. “The engineering profession has acknowledged over the years that environmental issues are a concern to the public. They need to be identified and dealt with upfront when you’re doing a project.”

So how well does Pirner think the U.S. has responded to environmental challenges? ”We’ve gotten a lot better at what we do. And the industries and municipalities have come a long, long way from what was occurring back in the mid 70s. Back then, we had raw discharges of sewage from towns going into streams. We had raw discharges from mining operations into streams. We had almost annual fish kills. All those conditions over the last 25 or 30 years have been rectified. As far as point sources of pollution, we’re in good shape.”

But like many environmentalists, Pirner thinks the battle has only begun. “Now we’re trying to identify the non-point sources of pollution, which are more of the runoff kind of things. There’s been a huge amount of progress made, and now the challenge is to continue making progress, but it’s going to be much harder.”

Once inroads are made into solving non-point-source pollution, Pirner sees another level to strive for. “We’re going to move into the realm of a sustainability. At least in South Dakota, it’s not even a routine issue at this point, but I think as we gain more and more people, as our resources continue to shrink, it’s going to become more of an issue. The engineering profession has to be aware of those issues and public attitudes and continually try to incorporate those concepts.”

Along with America’s movement to a greater awareness of environmentalism and sustainability, Pirner has observed another trend that both parallels and demonstrates it. “We used to be a very young department. Twenty five years ago, there was hardly anybody in this department much over 30. But now, we’re actually one of the older departments. From that standpoint, it’s been an evolution watching us go from where everything was brand new to now where we’ve gotten things down to certain procedures. It’s a much more mature program.”