Purpose and Context
George Frantz, creator of successful partnerships with businesses during the nineties for the Massachusetts Office of Technical Assistance for Toxics Use Reduction (OTA).
With heavy heart I recall the passing of a beloved friend, who made a major contribution to the evolution of a better way of governing ourselves. I had the luck and privilege to work with George Frantz during the nineties when an effort was taking place at both state and federal levels to improve how we do environmental regulation: to provide assistance, and not just enforcement (and to use that assistance to prevent harm, not just clean up messes after they have happened).
This evolution of governance is unfortunately not that well grasped by the public, because some administrations used voluntary programs to replace enforcement, but that doesn’t work. (Also, purveyors of toxics have worked to squelch efforts to reduce their sales). But there is no question that assistance, and working in partnership with the regulated community, can be extremely effective if you first introduce it as a complement to enforcement. In time things improve and you can reduce enforcement, but not right away.
Back when this new movement was just starting, (late '80's, early '90's), the big question was, how do you create friendship between warring camps? At that time environmental agencies were regarding all businesses as potential polluters and companies were regarding the agencies as a threat to their survival. How do you bridge that giant gap?
Without people who can, you don’t get out of the starting gate and all your fine ideas live only in your files. You need people who can earn and keep the trust of other people. George Frantz was a master practitioner of that art and from my lucky seat in this movement, I was a witness to some of the career of this key player, this principal demonstrator of the value of the all-important thing I call relational governance.
I don’t want George (known as Tock to his family) to be an unsung hero of this forgotten and very rich period in environmental policy.
This evolution of governance is unfortunately not that well grasped by the public, because some administrations used voluntary programs to replace enforcement, but that doesn’t work. (Also, purveyors of toxics have worked to squelch efforts to reduce their sales). But there is no question that assistance, and working in partnership with the regulated community, can be extremely effective if you first introduce it as a complement to enforcement. In time things improve and you can reduce enforcement, but not right away.
Back when this new movement was just starting, (late '80's, early '90's), the big question was, how do you create friendship between warring camps? At that time environmental agencies were regarding all businesses as potential polluters and companies were regarding the agencies as a threat to their survival. How do you bridge that giant gap?
Without people who can, you don’t get out of the starting gate and all your fine ideas live only in your files. You need people who can earn and keep the trust of other people. George Frantz was a master practitioner of that art and from my lucky seat in this movement, I was a witness to some of the career of this key player, this principal demonstrator of the value of the all-important thing I call relational governance.
I don’t want George (known as Tock to his family) to be an unsung hero of this forgotten and very rich period in environmental policy.
First of all, he was a natural with people and the vision, which he adopted instantly. Second, he listened to everyone. Third, he never failed to look for those sweet spots where everyone is better off, not that easy quick compromise. Fourth, he helped everyone with him enjoy the ride. When he realized that both in government and at the companies we tried to help no one really grasped the dense and confusing air regulations, he bravely dove in. He helped form an Air Planning Interagency Group, Air PIG, and drew a flying pig, making fun of the skepticism that clarity could be achieved at the same time as this group produced it.
He kept me from being complacent. For many years I had a piece of paper prominently displayed over my desk – it was a note from George – replying to my suggestion that we didn’t have to do something right away – it said LATER IS NOW.
Whenever George gave me (OTA Assistant Director) and the Director Barbara Kelley something he wanted to publish, we always laughed because there would inevitably be something colorful in it. George was a government official but he had to be folksy. We would explain that as a new program seeking to build a reputation for objective, authoritative guidance we had to be neutral and not quirky. In person was one thing, but on paper was different. This always irritated George and he would always try to get in something to soften that distant, administrative speak that Barbara and I were trying to hard to project. He may have been right, who knows?
The term “relational governance” is not one that is bandied about. People don’t usually talk about how important it is to support the transformation of our government from one that seems interested in finding out what we did wrong to one that helps you do what’s right. After taking off in the nineties it was damaged as some places adopted the irresponsible road of cutting investment in environmental matters – as if what we’d already done was enough. That makes it more difficult to expand operations to include new efforts.
Under Bush 2 it seemed assistance replaced enforcement in importance, and was equivalent to going easier on industry. But in the nineties - under Clinton and Gore - that was not the dominant trend, it was more about improving, not weakening the rules. Unfortunately this never was clear to the public or many of the environmental organizations. If it had been, George would be famous now.
When I met George I had had a few years doing outreach to industry for the Massachusetts Office of Technical Assistance for Toxics Use Reduction, trying to convince businesses to let me and the engineers and scientists in our new government agency come to their factory or shop and help them reduce their use of chemicals, help them reduce waste and dangers to their safety and the neighborhood. It took a long time to overcome resistance, but we were having big successes. I would say to myself then that I had found my life’s challenge and I was meeting it. But with some industry sectors, I was getting nowhere. One of them was the printers.
We knew they had lots of problems, and that as DEP wrapped up inspecting the biggies, they could be next. They had air-polluting fountain solution, inks, solvents to clean the inks, rags that got all full of the inks and the solvents, and there were workers who were exposed and costly messes. We could help with all of that! But no one would talk to me. I couldn’t get in the door with the printers. So I reached out to the trade association, and as luck has it, George was there. The next thing I knew he was introducing me as “good people” to all of the printers. This wasn’t the usual business speak. This was personal.
This is a very short story. It was that simple. George’s blessing broke the ice. Companies trusted him and we started getting invitations. Before you knew it we were publishing case studies, because the companies were thrilled with what happened and wanted to share the news with others. We had lots of successes. The Americraft[1] company became a speaker at our conferences after cleaning up their processes, and the story was widely circulated. The case study in the footnote is on a UK webpage that takes from a national program, the Printers National Environmental Assistance Center (PNEAC), that George helped create and which still exists, which used the Massachusetts OTA case study that helped start the whole thing. Another visit produced the Fit To Print story, where they switched to UV printing which doesn’t rely on an evaporating toxic solvent to cure, with amazing benefits, clean air in the shop and faster process - https://www.turi.org/uses/printing/. OTA then spent years helping companies eliminate coatings that cured by evaporation of a toxic solvent carrier, to some form of radiation – electron beam, ultraviolet, that quickly caused the hardening of a solution without any of the air emissions.
You have to picture how I had gone to law school and had had a series of jobs, not too many of them what you would think a lawyer would be doing, and I had finally found something that I loved and was good at. I was launching all these initiatives and they were working and EPA was giving me money to keep trying out new things, and we had this new way of working and it was proving itself, and every now and then I would say to myself that I thought I knew what I was doing, allright.
Not long after meeting George we hired him and for a while I was leading in the work we were doing.
For example, I had the idea for creating a new thing, a Business Environmental Network, and with George to help me (and Cynthia Barakatt) we were able to start something that worked and spread and sparked international interest. It brought MA and NH programs and companies together and before we lost dominance in electronics, and lost other manufacturers, the BENs were growing and widely celebrated. I was thinking I really know what I’m doing and started writing about Good Faith – how you can make a lot happen by tapping reservoirs of good will. I wrote a paper that got published in a prominent legal journal called Good Faith as a Fundamental Principle of Relational Environmental Governance. I was really thrilled with myself, feeling like I had a real grasp of something important.
But what I remember most about that time was coming into work after our hugely successful kickoff meeting of the Merrimack Business Environmental Network, at which kids' paint company president Gabe Paci said he never thought government would do such a thing, and thanked us, and my plan was to just feel good and have an easy morning, and George is working away at his desk. What are you doing? Writing thank you notes! It hadn’t occurred to me. As an expert in relationships, I was a piker.
Then George had the idea for doing the same thing we did with the printers, with the dry cleaners. The dry cleaners were another group susceptible to DEP fines for violations, to many environmental expenses, and harms, including cancer from perchloroethylene, or a costly cleanup. They needed help. It was George who said how about I call the trade associations? The next thing we knew he had gained their trust and we had training set up with the co-hosting of the Northeast Fabricare Association and the Korean Dry Cleaners Association. Instead of the usual way of getting an industry sector to do better, to fine them, this kicked off a long period of cooperation. If you go to the website of the Toxics Use Reduction Institute of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, you will see a great deal of extremely valuable information, including detailed analyses of the cleaner alternatives for dry cleaning. Think of all the cancers that have been avoided. Think of George.
In 1996 I was asked to join the Common Sense Initiative, a national program to innovate in policy, to improve regulation, and I said you have to get George!
There he was able to expand the printers project so that it was national in scope. He also worked on something called Project XL, which was widely misunderstood as just giving companies breaks, and maybe that happened, but the intent was not that, but to work around stupid things in the regulatory system. They are there, and George was on it. What you need for those issues is someone who gets both sides. George listened to everyone.
EPA hired him, because at that time it knew what it was doing.
The great products of that “reinvention” era are not recognized. The next administration either let them wilt or corrupted them, I regret to say. George’s achievements in that realm were very substantial, if you take a “consequentialist” point of view – looking at what they led to.
He also worked in the tribal program, and when I did briefly as well, it was his introduction that got me off on a good foot there, as it had with the printers. He had clearly once again gained that kind of trust that enables you to effectively endorse.
I have a story that really illustrates this. DEP was mightily impressed with our printer case studies, and they said can you help us do a big project with them? DEP did appreciate that the rules were dense and hard to know or follow for medium and small companies. We said my yes that’s a wonderful response (keeping to ourselves that it took years) and George called up his successor at the printing trade association and got them and many printing company heads to come hear what DEP had in mind.
We are in a big room with lots of people and things are going really well and then a high DEP official says you know in order to show EPA we are actually increasing compliance with this project (they will need to see that), we have to have a baseline to measure from, so first we’re going to do 88 inspections.
There was an outcry – I remember it as a kind of shriek – “WHAT!!??”
Immediately every single printer stood up and walked out. The government people were all sitting there stunned, but George, me, and environmental consultant Roy Crystal ran after them to talk them into coming back. I remember thinking this is never going to work, but George made it happen. They listened to him. All the printers came back into the room and the DEP gave up the 88 inspections idea.
The rest is history. The Printers’ Project was the pilot for what became the Environmental Results Project, which then involved several small industry sectors and became the model for how small and medium-sized business sectors can be governed with tailored requirements they can actually understand and follow. ERP is famous. But the sine qua non – the “without which not” – was that without the trust the printers had in George, it wouldn’t have happened. At a few events I witnessed celebrating the birth of the ERP, this story about how it really started was not told, as it was not known to those who developed the program after it had been made possible.
In law we have a concept about causation. It’s called “but for”. Would something have happened but for something? The reduction in poisoning of workers in print and dry cleaning shops, the demonstration of a new, sensible model of governing, the creating of viable and fruitful partnerships instead of enmity, between the population – the people who make up businesses – and their government – the demonstrations that I have seen in my life that have convinced me that progress is possible – some of the most powerful of them would not have happened but for George.
We always find out too late how we wrongly think someone of importance to us will always be there. I deeply regret not making more time to be with this rare person whom I loved, but that’s just a story about how much he meant to me. I feel a duty to tell a much larger story – about what he meant to everyone, whether they know it or not. The world will be a better place when we learn that governance of ourselves is best done by means of a relationship – a positive, constructive relationship – between agencies and the people they regulate. It isn’t going to work if we go back to when agencies only played gotcha and the business communities were hiding out from them. In life, only some people are reluctant to do what’s right, to follow rules. We must not treat everyone as if they are criminals waiting to be caught, that creates a certain kind of society.
We should want to live in the world that George was creating. We should understand what his example can mean.
[1] https://files01.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/226759853.pdf
He kept me from being complacent. For many years I had a piece of paper prominently displayed over my desk – it was a note from George – replying to my suggestion that we didn’t have to do something right away – it said LATER IS NOW.
Whenever George gave me (OTA Assistant Director) and the Director Barbara Kelley something he wanted to publish, we always laughed because there would inevitably be something colorful in it. George was a government official but he had to be folksy. We would explain that as a new program seeking to build a reputation for objective, authoritative guidance we had to be neutral and not quirky. In person was one thing, but on paper was different. This always irritated George and he would always try to get in something to soften that distant, administrative speak that Barbara and I were trying to hard to project. He may have been right, who knows?
The term “relational governance” is not one that is bandied about. People don’t usually talk about how important it is to support the transformation of our government from one that seems interested in finding out what we did wrong to one that helps you do what’s right. After taking off in the nineties it was damaged as some places adopted the irresponsible road of cutting investment in environmental matters – as if what we’d already done was enough. That makes it more difficult to expand operations to include new efforts.
Under Bush 2 it seemed assistance replaced enforcement in importance, and was equivalent to going easier on industry. But in the nineties - under Clinton and Gore - that was not the dominant trend, it was more about improving, not weakening the rules. Unfortunately this never was clear to the public or many of the environmental organizations. If it had been, George would be famous now.
When I met George I had had a few years doing outreach to industry for the Massachusetts Office of Technical Assistance for Toxics Use Reduction, trying to convince businesses to let me and the engineers and scientists in our new government agency come to their factory or shop and help them reduce their use of chemicals, help them reduce waste and dangers to their safety and the neighborhood. It took a long time to overcome resistance, but we were having big successes. I would say to myself then that I had found my life’s challenge and I was meeting it. But with some industry sectors, I was getting nowhere. One of them was the printers.
We knew they had lots of problems, and that as DEP wrapped up inspecting the biggies, they could be next. They had air-polluting fountain solution, inks, solvents to clean the inks, rags that got all full of the inks and the solvents, and there were workers who were exposed and costly messes. We could help with all of that! But no one would talk to me. I couldn’t get in the door with the printers. So I reached out to the trade association, and as luck has it, George was there. The next thing I knew he was introducing me as “good people” to all of the printers. This wasn’t the usual business speak. This was personal.
This is a very short story. It was that simple. George’s blessing broke the ice. Companies trusted him and we started getting invitations. Before you knew it we were publishing case studies, because the companies were thrilled with what happened and wanted to share the news with others. We had lots of successes. The Americraft[1] company became a speaker at our conferences after cleaning up their processes, and the story was widely circulated. The case study in the footnote is on a UK webpage that takes from a national program, the Printers National Environmental Assistance Center (PNEAC), that George helped create and which still exists, which used the Massachusetts OTA case study that helped start the whole thing. Another visit produced the Fit To Print story, where they switched to UV printing which doesn’t rely on an evaporating toxic solvent to cure, with amazing benefits, clean air in the shop and faster process - https://www.turi.org/uses/printing/. OTA then spent years helping companies eliminate coatings that cured by evaporation of a toxic solvent carrier, to some form of radiation – electron beam, ultraviolet, that quickly caused the hardening of a solution without any of the air emissions.
You have to picture how I had gone to law school and had had a series of jobs, not too many of them what you would think a lawyer would be doing, and I had finally found something that I loved and was good at. I was launching all these initiatives and they were working and EPA was giving me money to keep trying out new things, and we had this new way of working and it was proving itself, and every now and then I would say to myself that I thought I knew what I was doing, allright.
Not long after meeting George we hired him and for a while I was leading in the work we were doing.
For example, I had the idea for creating a new thing, a Business Environmental Network, and with George to help me (and Cynthia Barakatt) we were able to start something that worked and spread and sparked international interest. It brought MA and NH programs and companies together and before we lost dominance in electronics, and lost other manufacturers, the BENs were growing and widely celebrated. I was thinking I really know what I’m doing and started writing about Good Faith – how you can make a lot happen by tapping reservoirs of good will. I wrote a paper that got published in a prominent legal journal called Good Faith as a Fundamental Principle of Relational Environmental Governance. I was really thrilled with myself, feeling like I had a real grasp of something important.
But what I remember most about that time was coming into work after our hugely successful kickoff meeting of the Merrimack Business Environmental Network, at which kids' paint company president Gabe Paci said he never thought government would do such a thing, and thanked us, and my plan was to just feel good and have an easy morning, and George is working away at his desk. What are you doing? Writing thank you notes! It hadn’t occurred to me. As an expert in relationships, I was a piker.
Then George had the idea for doing the same thing we did with the printers, with the dry cleaners. The dry cleaners were another group susceptible to DEP fines for violations, to many environmental expenses, and harms, including cancer from perchloroethylene, or a costly cleanup. They needed help. It was George who said how about I call the trade associations? The next thing we knew he had gained their trust and we had training set up with the co-hosting of the Northeast Fabricare Association and the Korean Dry Cleaners Association. Instead of the usual way of getting an industry sector to do better, to fine them, this kicked off a long period of cooperation. If you go to the website of the Toxics Use Reduction Institute of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, you will see a great deal of extremely valuable information, including detailed analyses of the cleaner alternatives for dry cleaning. Think of all the cancers that have been avoided. Think of George.
In 1996 I was asked to join the Common Sense Initiative, a national program to innovate in policy, to improve regulation, and I said you have to get George!
There he was able to expand the printers project so that it was national in scope. He also worked on something called Project XL, which was widely misunderstood as just giving companies breaks, and maybe that happened, but the intent was not that, but to work around stupid things in the regulatory system. They are there, and George was on it. What you need for those issues is someone who gets both sides. George listened to everyone.
EPA hired him, because at that time it knew what it was doing.
The great products of that “reinvention” era are not recognized. The next administration either let them wilt or corrupted them, I regret to say. George’s achievements in that realm were very substantial, if you take a “consequentialist” point of view – looking at what they led to.
He also worked in the tribal program, and when I did briefly as well, it was his introduction that got me off on a good foot there, as it had with the printers. He had clearly once again gained that kind of trust that enables you to effectively endorse.
I have a story that really illustrates this. DEP was mightily impressed with our printer case studies, and they said can you help us do a big project with them? DEP did appreciate that the rules were dense and hard to know or follow for medium and small companies. We said my yes that’s a wonderful response (keeping to ourselves that it took years) and George called up his successor at the printing trade association and got them and many printing company heads to come hear what DEP had in mind.
We are in a big room with lots of people and things are going really well and then a high DEP official says you know in order to show EPA we are actually increasing compliance with this project (they will need to see that), we have to have a baseline to measure from, so first we’re going to do 88 inspections.
There was an outcry – I remember it as a kind of shriek – “WHAT!!??”
Immediately every single printer stood up and walked out. The government people were all sitting there stunned, but George, me, and environmental consultant Roy Crystal ran after them to talk them into coming back. I remember thinking this is never going to work, but George made it happen. They listened to him. All the printers came back into the room and the DEP gave up the 88 inspections idea.
The rest is history. The Printers’ Project was the pilot for what became the Environmental Results Project, which then involved several small industry sectors and became the model for how small and medium-sized business sectors can be governed with tailored requirements they can actually understand and follow. ERP is famous. But the sine qua non – the “without which not” – was that without the trust the printers had in George, it wouldn’t have happened. At a few events I witnessed celebrating the birth of the ERP, this story about how it really started was not told, as it was not known to those who developed the program after it had been made possible.
In law we have a concept about causation. It’s called “but for”. Would something have happened but for something? The reduction in poisoning of workers in print and dry cleaning shops, the demonstration of a new, sensible model of governing, the creating of viable and fruitful partnerships instead of enmity, between the population – the people who make up businesses – and their government – the demonstrations that I have seen in my life that have convinced me that progress is possible – some of the most powerful of them would not have happened but for George.
We always find out too late how we wrongly think someone of importance to us will always be there. I deeply regret not making more time to be with this rare person whom I loved, but that’s just a story about how much he meant to me. I feel a duty to tell a much larger story – about what he meant to everyone, whether they know it or not. The world will be a better place when we learn that governance of ourselves is best done by means of a relationship – a positive, constructive relationship – between agencies and the people they regulate. It isn’t going to work if we go back to when agencies only played gotcha and the business communities were hiding out from them. In life, only some people are reluctant to do what’s right, to follow rules. We must not treat everyone as if they are criminals waiting to be caught, that creates a certain kind of society.
We should want to live in the world that George was creating. We should understand what his example can mean.
[1] https://files01.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/226759853.pdf
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