By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Brad Espen wouldn’t stand a chance in a popularity contest.
He refused to budge for landowners protesting sewer lines. He stood eye to eye with federal officials delaying cleanup of hazardous materials. He was unapologetic when enforcing smoking bans.
“I made my share of people mad, but when you know you’re doing the right thing, it kind of balanced things out,” said Espen, who will soon retire after 30 years in environmental health at Wood County Health District. “I was always trying to do the right thing.”
Espen may have lacked popularity, but he was never short on persistence. One case in point would be the now demolished Victory Inn, in Bowling Green. After countless inspections and violation reports, the hotel was finally shut down.
“We just never gave up with that one,” he said.
Espen started at the health department doing housing and restaurant inspections. He then went on to solid waste inspections, and eventually took over as director of environmental health.
“I was always interested in the environment,” though he originally thought his career path would lead to work with wildlife and nature – not sewers and hazardous waste.
He grew up in Bowling Green, being the sixth generation of his family here. “That’s part of the reason I care so deeply about my community.”
Espen starts his days early, getting to work around 5 a.m. when the office is still quiet. From his office he has led crusades for sewers to replace faulty septic systems. During his three decades in environmental health, all the villages in the county had sewer systems installed, and an estimated 15,000 septic systems were eliminated.
“That made a big difference in water quality,” he said.
He helped with efforts to shut down all the abandoned dumps in the county. “We got all the tire dumps cleaned up.”
Espen’s team kept pushing for smoking ban enforcement until it became commonplace in the county. “That was quite a challenge,” he said.
He refused to back down as excuses were made to delay cleanup of the old beryllium site in Luckey. “Thank God, we’re going to see something happening there this summer.”
And in Lake Township after the tornado flattened homes and businesses, he was there helping people rebuild their lives.
He worked alongside Wood County Emergency Management Agency Director Brad Gilbert in Lake Township, at an oil pipeline break in Cygnet, and at countless hazardous material spills.
“He’s a wealth of knowledge. He has a passion for protecting the environment,” Gilbert said. “He’s always stood strong for the entire county. He’s going to be missed.”
Wood County Administrator Andrew Kalmar commented on Espen’s calm and rational manner when dealing with potential emergencies. Kalmar said he would call Espen for information on topics like water quality, the landfill or beryllium site, and inevitably, Espen was already working on it.
“You could never rattle him,” Kalmar said.
Espen considered former health commissioner Larry Sorrells as his mentor. And Sorrells, now retired, said Espen was the person he could trust to tackle difficult work.
“If there was a tough job that needed to get done, I invariably assigned it to him and he carried out the assignment to completion without complaint. He always delivered regardless of how difficult the job was,” Sorrells said.
Sorrells recalled the Ohio EPA ordering owners of all old dump sites to submit plans for remediation of methane gas. Espen realized it would be a tremendous cost to each of the townships and villages owning the 26 abandoned dump sites to hire engineering firms to produce the plans.
So with the help of county solid waste district funding, Espen wrote plans for all 26 sites. According to Sorrells, Wood County had the only health department in the state to accomplish this on its own.
“Brad was the most organized, honest and hard working employee I ever had the privilege of working with,” Sorrells said.
Espen, however, was unable to accomplish one major goal – ensuring water quality in the Lake Erie area.
“We need to stop pointing fingers. We need to collaborate,” he said.
His one regret is the loss of $2 million the state had allocated to the health district in 2008 to build a water quality lab with Bowling Green State University. The health district leadership, who are no longer with the county, turned down the funding.
“That was my single biggest disappointment,” Espen said. “We had everybody on board. We were really barreling ahead.”
Though Espen will no longer feel the need to get to the office before the sun rises, he isn’t about to give up on public health. He plans to spend more time with his daughter, do some fishing and enjoy the outdoors – and find some other ways he can serve the public.
“I’m just not going to be able to walk away from public health,” he said.
A farewell ceremony for Espen will be held Friday from 2 to 4 p.m., at the health district, 1840 E. Gypsy Lane Road, Bowling Green.
