PROFILE : HENRY M. MORGAN : New Member Has a Clear View of Challenges for AQMD Board

Outside the steak and lobster restaurant where he had just lunched, Henry M. Morgan surveyed the vista of what might be called the buckle of Southern California’s smog belt.

“Not too bad today,” said Morgan, eyeing the midday haze that gave a murky green cast to the hills of West Covina. “But, boy, do you like those days when you can see the mountains!”

Last week, delegates from cities in the eastern half of Los Angeles County elected the 62-year-old Covina councilman to the 12-member South Coast Air Quality Management District board. The Los Angeles County branch of the California League of Cities oversaw the election, held at the AQMD headquarters in El Monte.

Morgan, who represents 61 cities from Long Beach to Pomona to Santa Clarita, replaces Leo King, the former Baldwin Park mayor who resigned late last year to move to Oklahoma.

Talking in rapid bursts and with a no-nonsense style during an interview this week, Morgan cast himself as a can-do man who will approach air quality issues in the pragmatic way that he handles everything else.

His attraction to public matters, he said, stems from an interest in solving problems. “How you solve it or how you sell it--that’s been my business for years.”

Since retiring three years ago after a 35-year career in the technical, marketing and sales areas of IBM, he has made a full-time job of being a public official. In October, he became a board member of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. A Covina councilman since 1978, he is a past president of the Los Angeles division of the League of California Cities.

His resume lists affiliations with an assortment of governmental and quasi-public groups with names such as the Waste-By-Rail Subcommittee, the East San Gabriel Valley Manpower Committee and the Upper San Gabriel Valley Water District.

As a child growing up in La Jolla, “I was always fascinated by how things work,” he said.

When he was a physics major at Pomona college in the late 1940s and early 1950s, atomic energy fascinated him. Even today, during his vacations he visits unlikely spots for a tourist.

“My wife’ll tell you that if I go within 50 miles of a hydroelectric plant, I want to stop. I’ve probably visited every power plant in California. . . . I’ll go to Hawaii and try to visit the waterworks. I have a basic interest in these things.”

He said he pursued the job on the air quality board because it seemed like an intellectual challenge--not because fighting air pollution is a passionate personal crusade. “I don’t have a physical or emotional reaction to anything,” he said.

Still, he recounted a story about the time 30 years ago when he had first moved to one of Covina’s new subdivisions. He was digging a trench at his new house.

“You couldn’t work but a few minutes because the reaction to the air was so strong,” he said. “The air isn’t that bad--that often--anymore.”

The change has resulted from stricter regulations governing air pollution, he said, and continued progress depends on work by the air quality board.

Acknowledging that he is new to the task and that he will be only one of 12 decision-makers, Morgan said he still believes that he can serve as an important voice. On environmental issues, he said, he is middle-of-the-road.

“We agree with the environmentalists that, yeah, we’ve got to do something. But let’s make sure we don’t just say: ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.’ ”

Wil Baca, the Hacienda Heights environmental activist who is on the board of the Coalition for Clean Air, expressed disappointment that candidates backed by his group were not selected for the board. Initially, Baca said, environmentalists supported Duarte Councilman John Hitt, but then he dropped from the race. So their backing shifted to San Dimas Mayor Terry Dipple, who lost to Morgan in the election last Thursday.

But Baca said he believes Morgan will be “open and available to hear the views of the environmental groups.”

“So I’m feeling fairly comfortable with the position he’s taken and the assurances he’s given us,” Baca said.

As a new board member, Morgan said, his job will be to be a good listener to all points of view. And he likens the difficulty of solving the air pollution problem to “trying to boil the ocean: It’s a very tough job.”

The L.A. area’s smog solutions “will be the precursor of what happens with it in the entire world,” he said.

During the weekly meeting of the Covina Sunrise Rotary Club one recent morning, Morgan said, fellow Rotarians congratulated him for a beautiful sky.

“I told them I couldn’t promise that every day,” he said. “If we get the problem fixed in 10 years, we’ll be lucky. And it won’t be perfect by then, but it’ll sure be better.”