EPA employee fights for right to moonlight as environmentalist

Jeff van Ee moonlights as an environmentalist after he finishes his days as a pollution specialist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Las Vegas. The EPA considers his personal interests a conflict.

For his after-hours efforts at protecting endangered species in Southern Nevada, the U.S. Justice Department has threatened to fire him, jail him, fine him and heaped humiliation on van Ee.

"Point blank, van Ee was told he could not be a federal employee and be active in conservation organizations," writes Todd Wilkinson in his new book, "Science Under Siege."

The book focuses on the political wars against nature and the people trying to protect it despite threats to their careers and their lives. One of eight profiles, van Ee appears in the chapter, "Fear and Loathing, the EPA in Las Vegas."

Attorney John Flyger of Washington, D.C., who represents van Ee, is battling the federal government to protect van Ee's First Amendment rights. The EPA contends van Ee or any other employee does not have the right to participate in environmental issues off the job. The case could go to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, Flyger said.

The American Civil Liberties Union also has joined the legal fight.

The EPA refused to talk to Wilkinson for his book, saying the matter was internal.

The 10-year-old case started after van Ee joined the Sierra Club and moved to Las Vegas. Writing letters and attending meetings at night and on vacation, van Ee divorced himself from his work at the EPA. The quiet scientist didn't go looking for trouble.

Interested in protecting the desert tortoise, a threatened species, van Ee tracked a land exchange with the Bureau of Land Management for relocating Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp., maker of the rocket fuel booster ammonium perchlorate, outside Las Vegas in 1989. On his own time, van Ee attended a crucial meeting and asked questions about the land swap.

A couple months later, the EPA's inspector general called van Ee, telling him he was in big trouble. As van Ee and his attorney researched records, they found other federal employees were enraged that he dared interfere in a land exchange. The EPA, Wilkinson noted, decided to make van Ee an example to all other employees.

Almost a decade after his persecution started, van Ee could lose his job if he represents the Sierra Club on any public land issue, even one unrelated to the EPA. A hearing was held on June 26 where van Ee requested a preliminary injunction to prevent the government from enforcing its interpretation of the U.S. Administrative Code.

As van Ee continues to walk the fine line between government employee and involved citizen, he says, "The government can own my dedication, but it can't take my soul."

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