A Conversation With ... John E. Price

Tell us about your firm.

I joined Carnahan Evans in 1999. We're ... locally owned (and) unaffiliated with any major-city firm. The firm specializes in three areas. One is tax and business transactional work, (representing) a larger number of small, family owned businesses in ... southwest Missouri. ... The second is estate planning. ... It goes kind of hand-in-hand with the family owned business aspect of the practice. A lot of our clients need more complicated estate planning arrangements. The third is the litigation area (involving) a number of different things. That's the group I'm primarily affiliated with. And then, securities transactions and litigation (and) our newest area is banking law. We opened a Branson office two and a half years ago.

How did you choose to focus on environmental law?

I was a chemistry minor in undergraduate school, so I had ... some interest in the field of sciences. I got to Springfield in 1979, and about a year and a half after I arrived, the firm (Woolsey Fischer) got involved in a very large Clean Air Act case involving a coal-fired power plant in New Madrid. ... I had to get deeply involved in research ... and found it very interesting. (When) that case got over with, we got a major Superfund case for the old Solid State Circuits factory in Republic. ... Superfund ... was a mechanism to clean up orphan waste sites. Between 1981 and 1985, I spent almost all my time working on those cases.

How does environmental law fit with your overall practice?

My practice encompasses four major areas. The biggest right now is real estate transactions. Nobody wants to purchase a piece of contaminated property, and no lender wants to loan money related to a piece of contaminated property. ... There's a major focus on finding out the history of a piece of property and whether it's got any environmental problems. The second is helping companies stay in compliance with environmental laws, (which have) become a major issue ... especially for manufacturing companies. ... The third is litigation between parties who have been damaged by some kind of environmental problem.. ... The last area is citizen suits or actions trying to protect their neighborhood from a particular project. It's not necessarily wanting to stop the project, but wanting to make sure the project completely complies with the law.

What are some recent local examples of environmental law cases?

(Without giving) names of specific parties, in the last year to a year-and-a-half, I've had a case involving a large hog operation. I represented a neighborhood association trying to ensure that the hog operation was properly permitted and had sufficient buffers. ... I've had a case involving government investigation of old lead mines that are all over southwest Missouri, and trying to protect a particular property owner from the government listing their property as a hazardous waste site simply because there had been a lead mine on it many years ago.

What kinds of environmental challenges do you see on the legal horizon?

I think the whole issue of land use and open spaces is going to be a major issue (while) as Springfield, Ozark and Nixa continue to grow together. We're going to see some tension between rural land uses and urban land uses. ... We keep trying to come up with a new way to dispose of waste. ... In large part, the green movement and trying to reduce the amount of chemicals we use in our daily lives is a major focus of the future, but what do we do with chemicals that are essential and can't be dealt with in any other way? You've got to either dispose of them in the ground, put them in the water or put them in the air. How do we balance that to minimize the impact on the resources?

Tell us about your family and community involvement.

My wife, Nancy, is also an attorney. She practices criminal law and has her own firm. My son, Jeremy, is 34, lives in Tulsa and is an (information technology) guy for Flintco. My daughter, Juliene, is 26, and she is in graduate school in Portland, Ore. Her degree is going to be in sustainability. I'm the vice president of Springfield Sister Cities Association.