Top official for Louisiana’s environmental agency resigns, adding to list of high-level departures

Another top official for Louisiana’s environmental agency has resigned, adding to a list of high-level departures over the initial eight months of department secretary Aurelia Giacometto’s controversial tenure.

Christian T. Griffiths, budget chief for the state Department of Environmental Quality, left late last week for a job with the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness that he is expected to start this week, officials with both agencies confirmed. The officials described his departure after five months on the job as an opportunity that he wanted to pursue.

Griffiths, who spent more than 20 years in the U.S. Army and Louisiana Army National Guard in logistics, human resources and planning, served overseas during that military career with Jacques Thibodeaux, GOHSEP’s director, a spokesman said.

As undersecretary of DEQ’s Office of Management and Finance, Griffiths didn’t last six months at the agency after replacing Giacometto’s former budget chief, Chandra Pidgeon, who left on March 1 after two weeks on the job.

Griffiths had been appointed DEQ undersecretary on March 28 and received his Senate confirmation on May 23, the same day Giacometto and three assistant DEQ secretaries also received their legislative blessings, legislative minutes say. An April 1 statement announcing Griffiths’ appointment was still on the DEQ website Wednesday afternoon.

Giacometto, a lawyer and biologist who was former President Donald Trump’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director, has taken charge of DEQ promising to modernize the $160 million agency and create a setting in Louisiana that’s attractive to new business while balancing environmental protection.

But internally, she has faced heavy criticism from department employees about her allegedly harsh management style and early attempts to tightly control standard agency activities and external communications.

On her way out of the budget job, Pidgeon wrote of witnessing “atrocities,” accusing the DEQ leader of harassing employees and trying to make her a “hatchet man” who would push workers out of the 720-person agency.

In early June, following other top departures, the Legislative Auditor’s Office announced a workplace survey of DEQ employees. The audit was expected to include asking them if they are concerned about unethical behavior, have experienced workplace retaliation and what their perceptions of agency morale are.

Since Friday, Griffiths, a Madisonville resident and New Orleans native, has not responded to requests for comment. No one answered the door at his home or responded to a note left there as well.

In an interview Tuesday, Giacometto said Griffiths had a chance to work in another state agency and that she wasn’t going to stand in the way of someone who had an opportunity.

“He had an offer letter. I know that he has worked with people there before, so I’m excited if someone has another opportunity to go ahead and move forward with that, so I wish him the best,” she said.

She added that she appreciated his time with DEQ.

Mike Steele, spokesman for GOHSEP, said Griffiths had initially applied for an opening at the office when the Landry administration began. He was hired at DEQ instead, but recently Thibodeaux, remembering Griffiths’ earlier application, reached back out about an opening managing a backlog of post-disaster recovery projects sought through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Steele said that based on their past experience together in the military, Thibodeaux knew Griffiths would be an asset in handling the FEMA projects, which finance a variety of repairs or upgrades to public infrastructure in Louisiana. He added that he also spoke with Griffiths, who told him the job at GOHSEP was a better opportunity because he was working with someone he knew and because of the new position’s portfolio.

Gov. Jeff Landry has portrayed the criticisms of Giacometto as the words of entrenched bureaucrats resisting needed changes at a department “stuck in the Stone Age.” 

Some complaints have come anonymously from DEQ employees, who are fearful for their jobs. But the high-profile departures in DEQ’s leadership and other criticisms of Giacometto have come from new political appointees brought in by her and the Landry administration since the new year.

During her time over DEQ, Giacometto has lost two chiefs of staff, two leading communications officials and, with Griffiths, two undersecretaries of management and finance.

As Griffiths is doing, some of these other appointees who left DEQ have also moved to different spots in state government. Pidgeon, who left LSU to join DEQ, moved back to the university.

Others who have left the department were Communications Director Megan Molter, Chief of Staff Justin Crossie, and Director of External Communications Myles Brumfield.

Molter moved to the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services; Crossie to the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority; and Brumfield returned to the Department of Transportation and Development, where he previously worked. Molter had been hired away from the Louisiana Chemical Association.

Stacey Holley, who replaced Crossie as chief of staff and also served as a spokeswoman for Giacometto, also resigned earlier this year. Holley did not say why she left.

Though Giacometto and Landry have come in promising to transform DEQ into a more pro-business outlook, in more recent comments, the DEQ secretary has taken to praising the agency’s workforce.

Giacometto answered questions about Griffiths’ departure in Carencro Tuesday afternoon. She had just finished the second of six town hall meetings planned on Louisiana’s chronic problem with the illegal dumping of waste tires.

During the town hall and the later interview, she emphasized the importance of the department’s workforce, saying she wanted DEQ employees to use their brainpower and institutional knowledge to help meet hers and Landry’s long-term goals.

She pointed out that it is DEQ’s highly trained workforce that is helping lead her initiatives on problems with waste tires, red mud bauxite tailing ponds in Burnside and other longstanding environmental problems.

She also spoke about her desire to build a pipeline of employees to be DEQ’s future leaders.

“So that when people leave in retirement, there’s people that are able to carry on the mission of DEQ,” Giacometto told a collection of local officials at the Carencro Community Center.

While Landry has spoken of wanting a more pro-business DEQ, the agency has faced accusations for years from environmental and community activists of being too close to business and industry. It has, at times, sided with industry in opposing or seeking to lessen new pollution standards proposed by federal regulators.