By: Andrew Hoekzema, Air Quality Program Manager for Capital Area Council of Governments
This Saturday, the Texas Air Quality community will celebrate the life of Bill Gill. Most of us knew Bill either as Air Quality Program Manager at the Capital Area Council of Governments (CAPCOG) or as the Emissions Inventory Section Manager at the Texas Natural Resources Commission (TNRCC). Bill dedicated his life to public service and improving air quality in Texas, and every day of his 42-year career in air quality put the principles of the Environmental Defense Fund into action – guided by science and economics, he found practical and lasting solutions to Texas’s air quality problems.
His career was extraordinary. In 1972, the State of Texas submitted its first State Implementation Plan under the Clean Air Act. Bill may not have known it at the time, but his career would become a major part of the state’s air quality plans over the next four decades. That same year, he started working in enforcement at the Texas Air Control Board (TACB), which was part of the Texas Department of Health at the time. A decade later, he helped establish the state’s Emissions Inventory section, and later served as the Emissions Inventory Section Manager until he retired in 2002 from the TACB’s successor agency, the TNRCC. In his time at TACB and TNRCC, he built one of the premier programs in the world for assessing emissions and ensuring that decisions on air quality had the best information available. Bill’s work won him national recognition: as the TNRCC’s Emissions Inventory Section Manager, he also co-chaired the national point source committee of the Emissions Inventory Improvement Program for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Read More »
