APC receives 250+ complaints of air pollution per year from the Stark County community and investigates/responds to those complaints. Such complaints may concern activities of the private or public sector (i.e., industrial plant emissions), neighborhood open burning, and other areas that generate dust, odors, or emissions. APC categorizes complaints as fugitive dust, odors, open burning, asbestos, facility releases, and other air releases. All complaints require a thorough investigations/response with appropriate corrective actions as needed. Since the sources that cause the air pollution complaints vary, there is a wide variety of air pollutants that can be released during those incidents. For sources causing complaints that are violating Ohio EPA air pollution regulations, APC initiates enforcement action to return the source to compliance. The sooner the source of complaints is returned to compliance the less air pollution is released.

APC attempts to timely respond to complaints so that the source is able to be determined and addressed when necessary. Sometimes when APC receives the complaint it is determined to not be related to APC and it is referred to another department or agency.

APC was short staffed in recent years causing the time to respond to complaints to be longer than previous years. With full staffing achieved in June 2024, APC's goal is to improve the time to respond to complaints. 

Ohio EPA

Adequate staffing to balance workload of all tasks allows for timely completion of all tasks.

APC staff will timely respond to/investigate all APC-related complaints received with a goal of achieving a quarterly average of 1.25 days response time by December 31, 2026. - Starting January 1, 2024 - Ongoing.

[Baseline data: Set equal to 4th quarter 2022 of 2.33 days average complaint response time]

[Target value: With baseline of 2.33 and end goal of 1.25 by 4th quarter 2026, an improvement of 0.090 per quarter is the goal and was used to establish the target value. The initial target value at start (1st Quarter 2024) is 2.24 (e.g. 2.33-0.09 = 2.24)]

[Complaint response days calculated from the difference of date investigation started and date received in whole calendar days for each complaint, averaged for all complaints of all complaint types  for the time period. Data from the APC Complaints and Inspections Database (CID)]