New Smog Chief Has Clear Vision

It seemed a typical day, as Michael John Villegas and his Canoga Park High School teammates headed toward the cross-country track at Pierce College. Suddenly, a police car intercepted them.

The officer said they were in danger -- not from thugs or a weapon stashed in a gym bag -- but from the curtain of brown air draped over the campus. The race was canceled because of smog, and the boys were ordered back onto the bus and sent home.

The meet was over before it started, yet Villegas was not disappointed. He would be spared a night of chest pain and wheezing.

“I’d come home sometimes after a race and take a deep breath and cough,” Villegas recalled more than 20 years later. “I’d try to talk over dinner with my parents and just couldn’t help but cough. It was definitely an effect from the smog. Today, I feel for the folks where the air pollution is still significant.”

Villegas now is in a position to help eliminate the hazard, after becoming Ventura County’s top smog cop in August.

For the Southern California native, the path from air pollution victim to smog fighter has been an improbable journey. Riding herd over the 1,200 polluting businesses that are overseen by the county’s Air Pollution Control District was something Villegas never envisioned as an engineering student at UC Santa Barbara. He figured on an anonymous career as a back-shop techie in an aerospace firm.

Besides, environmental protection was in its infancy in the late 1970s, when he started college. By and large, it was a bastion for young, white idealists intent on saving the world.

In assuming his post, Villegas became the first Latino to take over a major air program in California, an accomplishment he downplays, although other air quality officials consider it a breakthrough and part of the growing influence that Latinos exert on environmental issues statewide.

“I go back 25 years in this business and I cannot think of another Hispanic to hold such a position,” said Stewart Wilson, executive director of the California Air Pollution Control Officers Assn. “We’ve seen more women and more minorities in these jobs over the last 10 years and we will see more and more in the years ahead.”

After graduate school, where he studied mechanical and environmental engineering, Villegas moved to San Diego as a civilian engineer for the Navy.

But he had an epiphany of sorts one day when he visited the Trinity site at White Sands, N.M., where the first atomic bomb was detonated.

“When I returned, I wondered what would be my legacy?” Villegas recalled.

As the Cold War waned, Villegas was eager to return to the Central Coast and a new line of work. After the Navy reassigned him to Port Hueneme, his wife, Jeanette, noticed a help-wanted ad for an environmental engineer at the county air quality district. He was hired 14 years ago and was promoted to head the rule-development section before being appointed executive officer last year.

Villegas, 41, is an unimposing figure. A slight man with a youthful face, he speaks in a husky voice. His posture is militarily erect, yet his demeanor remains disarmingly gracious.

Villegas, in some regards, is not what one expects in an executive. There is a lightness to him, different from many of his colleagues who have spent years on the front lines of bruising political battles over California environmental policy.

He’s a Republican who wakes up at daybreak to surf before going to the office and who spends lunch hours jogging. He is deeply committed to a clean environment, he said, but not at the expense of time with his wife or young daughter and twin boys, who live in Oxnard.

“I’m committed to clean air, but I’m not going to lose sight of being a good dad,” Villegas said. “I would not miss a parent-teacher conference.”

His greatest asset, according to his staff and others who work with him, is that he listens. It is a skill he honed while balancing competing interests in shaping some of the county’s landmark clean-air regulations.

“He’s very fair,” said Laura Kranzler, air quality coordinator for Carpinteria-based Venoco Inc. and a former employee of Villegas. “He’s got really good people skills. He’s not condescending. He doesn’t make you feel defensive. He’s on your level. People really like him as a person.”

Barbara Lee, air pollution control officer in Sonoma County, is another fan. “He is quiet, thoughtful, a straight shooter,” she said. “Everyone has a lot of confidence in him.”

Southern California smog is a far cry from the old days, when cross-country meets were canceled to protect the runners. Since the early ‘90s, there has been a 95% decline in the number of days when ozone levels exceeded federal health-based standards in Ventura County.

Last summer, only one bad-air day was recorded in Ventura County. Air quality is so dramatically improved that the county is now eligible to be declared as having attained Clean Air Act standards, three years ahead of schedule.

So what is there left for Villegas to do? Plenty, according to environmentalists and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Despite the improvements, unhealthy ozone occasionally grips Ojai and Simi Valley. Federal clean-air standards permit a few days of unhealthful air each year. In any case, those standards, in force for decades, are widely perceived as too lenient because epidemiological studies show adverse health effects persist, even when the limit is met.

To remedy that, the EPA is poised to enforce a more stringent eight-hour ozone standard. Ventura County failed to meet that benchmark an average of 22 days annually over the last three years, according to the air district.

“Air quality is still a very big issue,” said Joy Kobayashi, who heads the local Sespe group of the Sierra Club. “Our air pollution is not nearly as bad as Los Angeles, but there are times in the east county when we have really bad smog days.”

Other threats to air quality loom. Increased global trade has resulted in more smog-forming emissions, which blow ashore to pollute Ventura County from ships plying the Santa Barbara Channel. In coming years, a new regulatory push will target ports, marinas, petroleum-based solvents, waste-burning, farms, heavy-duty diesel engines, locomotives and outboard motors.

Moreover, those gains will have to be accomplished during a time of belt-tightening for local government, as California attempts to reconcile a massive budget gap.

“It’s going to get tougher because the low-hanging fruit has been picked,” Villegas said. “We need every possible emission reduction we can get. It’s going to be a significant challenge, but my job is to keep us as one of the leading agencies in the United States.”