Protecting the health of Virginia’s environment had, over the years, been the responsibility of many. The environmental agencies had their own staffs, their own agendas and their own responsibilities.

 

But environmental quality, by its nature, extends beyond any single medium. Pollution easily crosses boundaries and has the potential to cause many kinds of damage. As a result, Virginia’s environmental leaders took on the task of breaking down the walls that separated three important natural resources: air, land and water.

 

In 1991, Secretary of Natural Resources Elizabeth H. Haskell suggested to Governor L. Douglas Wilder that Virginia should unify its forces for environmental quality. Two years later, on April 1, 1993, the Department of Environmental Quality was born, combining the Council on the Environment, the Department of Air Pollution Control, the Department of Waste Management and the State Water Control Board. The protection and improvement of the environment became a coordinated effort, combining the best of each agency and setting them on a course to achieve a common goal.

 

The change was one of the most dramatic Virginia ever had seen in terms of environmental oversight. DEQ’s Frank Daniel recalled that the first public announcement occurred during Wilder’s State of the Commonwealth address. Several of the air board regional directors were meeting in Richmond and had gathered in a motel room to watch the speech. “Wilder announced that we should form DEQ, and we almost literally fell off the beds,” Daniel said. “I mean, it was a real shocker.”

 

As planning for the new agency got under way, “there were tremendous turf wars [among the agencies to be consolidated]. It wasn’t a fun time,” he said. “You could see the potential, but it was like, ‘will we ever get there?’ Bringing everyone together made a much bigger agency, but it also made a much broader focus. We started hearing and seeing a lot more from [environmental organizations like] the Sierra Club and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation—not that we didn’t hear from them before, but they came on with a much stronger intensity.”