Service Award: Stacy Hansen, Five Years

Stacy Hansen, OCC Water Quality Division’s Carbon Program director, was recognized at the October 2011 meeting of the Oklahoma Conservation Commission for five years of service to OCC and the state of Oklahoma.

Stacy originally started with OCC in 1997 as one of a team of Blue Thumb Program interns working on a project in partnership with the city of Oklahoma City. The project, funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was the first assessment of the health of streams in Oklahoma County. In that role she performed habitat assessments and macroinvertebrate and fish collections in more than 60 streams. Shanon Phillips, OCC/WQ director, said that program laid the foundation for the current Oklahoma City water quality monitoring program that now monitors 200 streams per year on a rotating basis. Stacy left in 1999 to take a job on the east coast.

In 2006 Stacy returned to OCC’s Water Quality Division as a technical writer. As director of the Oklahoma Carbon Program since 2008, she has been integral in two Conservation Innovation Grants (CIG) received from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service related to carbon sequestration in Oklahoma. Recently she performed pre-verification of applications for the CIG-Western Farmers Electric Cooperative Expansion Project to determine the eligibility of approximately 30,000 acres.

Stacy was named as Employee of the Quarter in May 2008 and following that was named Employee of the Year in May 2009.