The year was 1991, Congress had just approved changes to the Clean Air Act, and Chet Wayland was joining EPA.
It was a confluence of events that would prove pivotal both for Wayland and the American public.
For Wayland, it yielded an almost 34-year career that ended with his retirement in December as a top air office manager. During that tenure, largely out of public view, he shaped implementation of a statute that has led to less pollution, even as the national economy continued to grow.
At a time when the federal workforce is derided as unproductive by President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, the White House’s anointed efficiency expert, Wayland offered an implicit rebuke.
Federal employees don’t do their jobs for money or glory, he said during a lengthy interview at his Durham, North Carolina, home late last month, roughly a 15-minute drive from where he once worked at EPA’s campus in Research Triangle Park. “They do it because they want to give something back to the country.”
For Wayland, a youthful 63 whose post-retirement plans include again picking up the trumpet, those accomplishments encompassed spearheading creation of the AirNow.gov website, a widely tapped source of local air pollution data. He also took pride in his work in the complex and contentious field of air quality modeling and, in particular, a willingness to hear out all sides.
“All modesty aside,” he summed up, “one of my greatest accomplishments was just always trying to work with the different stakeholders.”
In separate interviews, two longtime Clean Air Act specialists usually in opposing corners agreed on that point.
“He’s an expert in his field, but he’s always willing to engage with folks on new data or ways to make his program more accurate or efficient,” said Joe Stanko, a regulatory attorney at the Hunton Andrews Kurth law firm with a long roster of business clients.
While Wayland could have undoubtedly earned more in the private sector, he “was driven by a passion for EPA’s mission and helping others,” said John Walke, federal clean air director with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Wayland is also “exactly” the kind of person, Walke added, that Trump administration officials are now seeking to drive out of government. Rather than prizing experience and expertise, Walke said, “they show all signs of devaluing” those qualities.
Wayland said he decided to retire more than a year ago after his wife, who had also worked for EPA, stepped down. He declined comment on the new administration on the grounds that it would be inappropriate to speak for his former colleagues. But, he added, “I feel for them.”
As a veteran of six presidential administrations, “I’ve tried to reassure people,” he added. While others will make the decisions, “be proud of what you do because it is important work.”
‘Class of 90’
Wayland’s own path to EPA was hardly preordained. The youngest of three brothers, he grew up in the southern Virginia city of Danville. His father was a textile mill chemist; his mother worked as a school teacher before managing the home.
Fascinated by natural phenomena like rain and waves, he received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in environmental sciences from the University of Virginia and then went to work as a computer programmer for a contractor that consulted for EPA’s Office of Research and Development.
His code-writing skills drew notice, and he found his agency counterparts “amazing.” After five years in the contracting position, he heard that EPA would be staffing up to help with implementation of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments.
With a degree of bipartisan support almost unfathomable today, the amendments had overwhelmingly cleared Congress and were signed by then-President George H.W. Bush in November 1990. Two decades after passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act, they were crafted to confront relatively new challenges like acid rain, along with long-standing problems such as summertime smog and regulation of hazardous air pollutants.
Wayland went to work for the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards in February 1991. Construction of the Research Triangle Park campus was still roughly a decade away; the office occupied five leased floors of a downtown Durham life insurance company building.
He was part of a cohort of new hires colloquially known as the “Class of 90” because they arrived at EPA in the wake of the amendments’ passage.
And while the 1970 act had led to significant improvements, air pollution in many locales remained strikingly high. Smog concentrations in New York City, for example, were running roughly four times today’s legal limit, Wayland recalled.
“People were trying to figure out, how do we bring those levels down?” he said. Modeling was important in furnishing an answer because it could forecast the impact of specific emission cuts on smog formation.
Smog is mostly made up of ground-level ozone, a lung-damaging irritant formed by the reaction of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds in sunshine. But of the two classes of pollutants, reductions in releases of NOx turned out to be “really the key” to cutting ozone concentrations, Wayland said. “Some of that they learned through modeling,”
His early years at EPA also overlapped with the evolution of the public internet and the spread of personal computers. Those developments helped spur creation of the AirNow site and the associated Air Quality Index, which provides a color-coded ranking of air quality across six categories, ranging from good to hazardous.
“Taxpayers were already footing the bill for the monitoring data,” Wayland said. “So the whole thing was, let’s make this data easily accessible.”
But what colors to use in communicating the data to the public via the AQI? The answer, tested through focus groups, was based on the traffic light. Green became the emblem of good air quality, with yellow indicating a moderate level of concern and red signaling unhealthy pollution levels. At the end of the spectrum, maroon marked hazardous concentrations.
The ultimate goal, Wayland said, was to help people protect themselves.
He fondly evoked testimonials like the note of appreciation from a California high school football coach who canceled practice when the AQI was red or worse.
“What we did mattered,” he said.
EPA air office veteran Karen Wesson has taken his place as director of the Air Quality Assessment Division, a successor whom he called “outstanding.”
Besides returning to the trumpet after a 20-year hiatus, Wayland didn’t rule out consulting work. But with two grown children — one of whom lives abroad — he also looked forward to traveling and enjoying life with his wife.
Upon leaving EPA, he received a “kudo book” made up of tributes from co-workers and associates over the years. Those accolades were both humbling, Wayland said, and “made me feel like my career had meant something to people.”
