In this episode, host Stephen Goldsmith interviews Michael Ogletree, discussing his innovative strategies for improving Denver's air quality through collaborative efforts, low-cost sensors, and community engagement, providing actionable insights for city leaders.
In this episode, host Stephen Goldsmith interviews Michael Ogletree, division director of Air Pollution Control for the state of Colorado. Ogletree shares his insights from leading one of the most significant urban air quality programs in the US, the Denver Love My Air program, which aimed to reduce asthma rates in public school children through the use of low-cost air quality sensors. He provides valuable insights for city leaders on using innovative technology and community engagement to tackle air pollution and enhance public health.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
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Data-Smart City Solutions, housed at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, is working to catalyze the adoption of data projects on the local government level by serving as a central resource for cities interested in this emerging field. We highlight best practices, top innovators, and promising case studies while also connecting leading industry, academic, and government officials. Our research focus is the intersection of government and data, ranging from open data and predictive analytics to civic engagement technology. We seek to promote the combination of integrated, cross-agency data with community data to better discover and preemptively address civic problems. To learn more visit us online and follow us on Twitter.
Betsy Gardner:
This is Betsy Gardner, editor at Data Smart City Solutions at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. And you're listening to the Data-Smart City Pod where we bring on top innovators and experts to discuss the future of cities and how to become data smart.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Welcome back. This is Stephen Goldsmith. I'm a professor of Urban Policy at the Bloomberg Center at Harvard University with another one of our podcasts. A particularly interesting one today for folks who follow the issues of air quality around the country, in particularly is cities with Michael Ogletree, who now is division director of Air Pollution Control for the state of Colorado, the public health department. Before that, he was the air quality program manager in the city and county of Denver, where he led maybe the most significant effort in the US to date. And he has a bunch of other titles, which will take most of our podcast if I read them. So let's leave it at that. Michael, welcome.
Michael Ogletree:
Thank you, Stephen. Really excited to be here.
Stephen Goldsmith:
We want to focus mostly on the city and county of Denver, a little bit what you're doing at the state, but why don't you tell us just a bit, how did you get into this area? How did you end up in the city and the state? What was your career path, if you will? It might motivate a few others.
Michael Ogletree:
Yeah, absolutely. First out of college I worked in R&D for fuel additives to reduce no emissions. So first job out of college, still very interested in air quality. Growing up in Southern California in the Los Angeles area in the nineties, air pollution was just really, really poor. So for me, kind of gravitated to that space. Also, a lot of social unrest at that time. So also spurred additional interest in working with environmental justice communities and communities of color.
After that, I was an analytical chemist looking at stack testing, so ended up running an analytical chemistry lab, and there I kind of saw how regulation was done and that spurred my interest in trying to find ways to improve that and moved to the city and county of Denver in about 2015, and that allowed me to work with environmental justice communities in around 2018, applied for a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, which was an innovation grant, and that was what kind of brought me into the space with low cost sensors. So there had the opportunity to develop some technology with the private sector through that grant, both on the monitoring side as well as the analytical data side with low cost sensors. As many know there are challenges with comparison to higher quality instrumentation. So worked through that grant to co-develop a platform with private industry that would allow for more dynamic data correction.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Well, I'm going to get back to those things in a second. So let's start with you going to the city and county of Denver and the Denver Love My Air program, which at the Harvard Bloomberg Center, we've been spending a lot of time trying to figure out what you did and how other cities had emulated. Our goal has been to focus on hyper-local air quality, and its relation to public health. So how can we reduce chronic asthma for children in long, neglected communities and the like. So what you did is motivating us. So let's start with what were the original goals? You mentioned Bloomberg Philanthropies, but what were your goals in the Love My Air program and where was that housed in the city?
Michael Ogletree:
So, the goal was to reduce asthma in public school kids. That was the goal in and of itself. The city and county of Denver has one public school district. It's the biggest one in the state, and the asthma rates at that school district are higher than the national average. So really focusing on that as the why behind the project. In terms of how it was developed, it was co-developed with community. Bloomberg provided resources to kind of refine the way we did the outreach and development, and made sure that we very closely engaged with community. So we started with a pilot with three schools and learned a lot through that six month pilot. It can be challenging to put these monitors at schools because people are like, oh, well, what if it shows something that we're not necessarily wanting to show? And the response there for me was like, well, your school is right next to a highway, so people think pollution is bad anyway, if you do put these monitors up, what it shows is that you're being proactive and understanding that your school might be impacted by local sources of pollution and that you're working with the local public health agency to address some of those concerns.
And that answers your second question, which is where the air division was housed within the city and county of Denver. It was in the local public health department, which was beneficial in getting that initial buy-in from schools.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So, with that, let's just focus for a second on childhood asthma, go back to where you were taking us a few minutes ago. One of the things we've wrestled with is how to get city transportation departments to understand the implications of their decisions on such issues. So, let's start with the role of sensors and then go to how you wrestled with traffic guys.
Michael Ogletree:
There was some technology that had been piloted at the city with regard to transportation, and so there was an interest in the Department of Transportation to address some of that through traffic. The City fortunately had a pretty robust and continues to have a pretty robust smart cities program. So that was led by key members in the cabinet. And so this was part of one of the smart cities projects, and that allowed me to interact and engage with the Department of Transportation. So what we tried to do was then use some of the sensors that we developed and place them on traffic signals.
That is a whole bunch of things to overcome to be able to do that in particular around integrating into a transportation network just because of the sensitivities of putting something in that data stream. So if there is a hack or something, the entire transportation network goes down, that's a huge problem. So those were some of the security issues we had to overcome with placing those sensors. But the idea was to use sensors along key corridors, take quality measurements, and then dynamically influence traffic patterns to reduce local sources of pollution.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So you've got the sensors up, you've evaluated communities, some spatial equity index, I'm sure, so that you can see where folks are particularly challenged. How did you get the transportation department to run the models? I mean, it's one thing to advocate for changes in patterns, but those vehicles have to go somewhere. And so how did you manage to take the air sensor information and your project and actually change the routing of trucks or cars or diesel or whatever you were focusing on?
Michael Ogletree:
For us, it was a pilot. There wasn't the full data infrastructure to be able to really kind of take it to that next level. We did more of a proof of concept, putting these up there, that was a challenge in and of itself. And then kind of having the dataset to identify traffic patterns was another one. So at the time in 2018, 2018 to 2019 when we were piloting these, the smart cities infrastructure hadn't been built out enough. And since leaving, I'm not sure if the data collection infrastructure was there with connected vehicles and everything else to be able to fully prove that out. But we did create a proof of concept that we could integrate all of these different data sets to be able to do that.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So, in addition to transportation patterns themselves, how did your work influence city or state regulation?
Michael Ogletree:
At the time, there was hesitation less at the city level. We were in a regulatory agency, certainly at the state level because these use of what's termed low cost sensors wasn't something that had been proven out anywhere and also at the federal level. So when I started at the city in about 2018 down this path, what I wanted to do to build in buy-in at the state level and the federal level was to engage them in the process. So kind of made a big outreach effort to the state of Colorado and EPA to tell them about what we were doing. And everyone's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You got to be careful. As regulatory agencies, we don't know about this low cost stuff, but it allowed them to follow some of what we were doing. And over time we started doing some additional testing. EPA had been doing some testing, and by the end of it, by the time I left late 2021, the state had adopted some of our technology. It had been used more widely across the state. The federal government was now convening groups around low cost sensors, and at the end of 2019, there was a regulation passed at the state that actually included the use of low cost sensors in regulation.
So I think it was a powerful way for cities to kind of lead the way for wider scale technology adoption, not only at the state level, but also additional use at the federal level.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So, let's think a little bit about additional stakeholders here and how you brought them in or manage them. So one question is there are multiple cities and state agencies that could be involved in resolving some of these challenges. How would you recommend a city or a state go about creating that network? Where does the leadership reside so that you can look at collaboration across city, state and multiple agencies?
Michael Ogletree:
For me, getting leaders on board is key because as decision makers, those are the people who have the ability to spend money on some of these projects. What we see a lot in the air quality space is that shorter term projects have trouble overcoming financial hurdles to become programs. So in the past couple of years, there's been a lot of funding to stand up, but this funding is short term through grants. So maybe three years. And then after that, what happens? So one of the things that I've been sharing with folks to do that is to create that buy-in at the senior level and then make the programs very public facing with the Love My Ear program, working with school kids in disproportionately impacted communities, really kind of working with the most vulnerable population and then creating those narratives and telling those stories publicly in news articles, in media interviews makes the whole program very public.
And it's challenging to back out of a program when you're working with kids in schools and disproportionately impacted communities to then back out after that funding ends. So that's one of the ways that I think has really made Love My Air what it is. And now there's several local agencies and soon at the state level adopting that program. So it's more of a regional approach, which is also how air quality works, right? It's not just in one location. And we have to work collectively as a larger region and state to be able to address some of those issues in the most affected communities.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Where you in Denver were working, what were their community engagement or school-based tools? Did you show them maps? What did you do to help them understand the implications?
Michael Ogletree:
Yeah, so there was a lot of in-person. So we had iterative focus groups with parents, teachers, and nurses to co-develop what the Love My Air program was going to be. So really kind of boots on the ground and making sure we heard and listened to communities and provided them the resources necessary to address those issues at a local level.
Stephen Goldsmith:
And do they become advocates over time with City Hall or the state?
Michael Ogletree:
They did. And in my opinion, it's really key to create those champions at those individual schools. Yes, first, as mentioned, getting buy-in from each individual principal because those principles are typically the decision makers of what goes on at the school. But once we have that, then working with the math teacher, the science teacher, and the nurse to ensure that we have those individual champions to continue to move forward with the different programs in a more broad base.
Stephen Goldsmith:
And if you were making recommendations to peers in other cities, we'll leave out the state for a second, and your goal was to improve the health of children, would you start with NOX, VOX, PM 2.5, social determinants of health once you've done the spatial analytics of the communities, and where would you start with respect to air quality and health?
Michael Ogletree:
I would start with PM 2.5. It's what we started with in Denver, but I think it's the right place for a handful of reasons. One of them, the technology is there at very low cost. The second is it's relatively easy to understand it's particulate, and it also provides an interesting dataset that's more understandable by elementary, middle, and high school students where people understand if you light a match, you'll create particulate matter, whereas the formation of other compounds, such as ozone, for example, is much more complex.
So starting with PM 2.5 is a way to kind of get your foot in the door with low cost instrumentation that's easy to understand and can be tied to regional events. Things like if there's a wildfire, you'll very clearly see those spikes. Or 4th of July is another interesting day to look at particulate matter. So there are local events you can tie to it and very directly be able to show that in the data and spur that interest, which would then lead to additional educational opportunities to help explain the impact of what you're seeing on your monitors.
Stephen Goldsmith:
We're interested in starting a national movement. Have other cities do what you started to energize efforts that would improve the public health of children who are adversely affected by air and water, but we're talking about air today. What haven't you told us that you would nominate as a way to create more activism around the sorts of initiatives you started and led?
Michael Ogletree:
I think one thing that I've been working on here for the past year and a half that I think is valuable in terms of engagement between community groups, local governments and regulatory agencies is standardizing the data format that data is being collected for us. If you take a look at what a low cost sensor puts out, it's missing some things, and it's not in the same format as others as regulatory agencies. We have standardized formats, which we upload data to EPA, but that doesn't exist for some of these low cost next generation monitoring that's being done much more broadly.
So that's one of the things that we've been working on with other prominent regional entities in California as well as the EPA, because then if we're all talking in the same language, it allows us to better compare data sets, which provides additional value both from community groups and local governments doing the data collection as well as the state regulatory agencies. So once we mix that data together, it now allows us a better tool to compare those for.
Stephen Goldsmith:
If we were looking at these schools and benchmarking improvements with an eye towards 2.5, but understanding that there are other conditions which affect children in those schools, what would be the right set of dashboard measurements to watch month over month or year over year to see improvement?
Michael Ogletree:
I think as we try and figure out how to improve particulate matter, specifically find particulate matter at the local level, I think the first thing you'll want to measure is education and the uptake of what that education looks like. So starting with, okay, how many courses can we get in a school? And then at the end of that, how much are kids learning about that? And one of the reasons to start with that as a metric versus a reduction in particulate matter is because air kind of moves all around, it'll be hard to see immediate impacts to localized air pollution. But that education piece I think is going to create that next generation of leaders who will not only in the short term, do things like encourage their parents to reduce their vehicle miles traveled and not idle, which has impacts to local air quality, but then also as they progress through their careers, be able to continue to work in that space and be cognizant about their own activities and how they can reduce local sources of pollution. And then as they move into more senior roles in this space, be able to influence policy and hopefully at some point develop policy to continue to improve air quality.
Stephen Goldsmith:
This is Steven Goldsmith. I'm a professor of Urban Policy at the Bloomberg Center at Harvard University. We've been working on issues of air quality and children's health, and we are delighted today to have had the chance to talk with Michael Ogletree, the director of Air Pollution Control for the state of Colorado, and previously the leader in Denver for its important initiatives in these areas. Thank you so much, Michael, for your time today.
Michael Ogletree:
Steven, thank you for having me. I think this is a really important topic and excited to have been part of it.
Betsy Gardner:
If you liked this podcast, please visit us at datasmartcities.org, find us on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was hosted by Stephen Goldsmith and produced by me, Betsy Gardner. Thanks for listening.