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Sunday, July 15, 2007

Environment - "Huge task faces Puget Sound's anointed savior"

So reads the headline to a column by Warren Cornwall in the May 20, 2007 Seattle Times. Here is how the long and intriguing article begins:

It's been a long, storied career in government and business for William Ruckelshaus. He has defied President Nixon and he has battled the New York Mafia. He helped start the Environmental Protection Agency and he has sued Fortune 500 companies for pollution.

Now at age 74, from a corner office on the 37th floor of a downtown Seattle high-rise, Ruckelshaus can peer down at what may be his most sprawling and elusive problem yet.

Far below, cars whiz along the Alaskan Way Viaduct, spilling oil and other chemicals that will wash into the bay. Massive freighters chug toward the Duwamish River, a huge Superfund site. In the distance, West Seattle homes cover what used to be forest, allowing contaminated rainwater to rush into the Sound.

Now it's up to Ruckelshaus to convince the public that, despite the way Elliott Bay glitters in the afternoon sun, beneath the surface it is gravely ill.

Gov. Christine Gregoire has chosen Ruckelshaus to become the kingpin in a brand-new state agency, the Puget Sound Partnership, formed by the state Legislature this year to do what state, federal and local agencies haven't been able to: protect and restore the Sound.

The governor and other fans say few people are in a better position to fill the role of elder environmental statesman and navigate the region's tricky political waters. No one disagrees that he has a rare combination of political acumen, environmental know-how and corporate leadership, topped off with a squeaky-clean reputation that has weathered the likes of Watergate.

Still, on the eve of this ambitious undertaking, there are some who question whether his trademark approach — heavy on citizen involvement and input from a broad range of interests — will work.

Even Ruckelshaus admits success isn't certain.

"People aren't going to spend lots of money trying to fix something they don't think is broken," he said.

Longtime ILB readers may recall this Jan. 17, 2005 ILB entry on an outstanding Bill and Jill Ruckelshaus C-SPAN Q&A interview.

As to what Mr. Ruckelshaus had done since he left Indiana in 1968 (where he served as House majority leader and ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate) to work for President Nixon, first as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, here is a recent bio from the Madrona Venture Group, where he is a director:

William (Bill) Ruckelshaus was Chairman and CEO of Browning-Ferris Industries from 1988 to 1995, and served as Chairman from 1995 to 1999. Mr. Ruckelshaus was Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, serving as the Agency's first Administrator when it was formed in 1970. He was later appointed acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then served as Deputy Attorney General of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Mr. Ruckelshaus served as Senior Vice President for Law and Corporate Affairs for the Weyerhaeuser Company, and in the mid-1980s, he again served as EPA Administrator before joining the Seattle law firm of Perkins Coie.

He is currently a director of TVW, Isilon Systems, Inc., and has recently retired from the boards of Weyerhaeuser Company, Nordstrom, Inc., Cummins Engine Company, Solutia, Pharmacia Corporation, and Monsanto. Mr. Ruckelshaus is also on the Board and former Chairman of World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., Chairman of the Salmon Recovery Funding Board for the State of Washington, Chair of the Seattle Aquarium Society, former member of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy. In 2004 he was appointed Chairman of The William D. Ruckelshaus Center, a collaborative problem solving institution of the University of Washington and Washington State University. In 2003 he was appointed to serve on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Science Advisory Board. And in 2005, he was appointed by Governor Gregoire to co-chair the Puget Sound Partnership to organize the cleanup of Puget Sound.

He is a graduate, cum laude, of Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

The ILB also found this interview fascinating. It is from a site called "Nobodies to Somebodies." Here is a brief portion:
The mistake that more people make than not is when they get one job, or one assignment, they immediately begin thinking about, "What's my next step?" And they forget that if they don't do the job they have in a superior way, there won't be any next step. That's certainly the advice I've given my children when they were quite young. I really believe it. I've had several experiences in my own life where you're given something to do which is - which you may think at the time is not fully up to the capabilities you could bring to something bigger - but if you just pay attention to the assignment you've got, and do it to the absolute best of your ability, people just pile assignments on you! They just give you more and more to do.

Let me give you an example: I had an early experience in the Indiana attorney general's office, when I first got out of law school. I came back to Indiana, and was practicing with my brother and my father, practicing law, and at the same time was working in the Indiana attorney general's office. You were able then under the rules to have an outside practice as well as the government practice, as long as you didn't have a conflict of interest. I went into the attorney general's office with maybe 15 other people. The national highway system was being created at the time, and they needed a lot of young lawyers to try these condemnation cases, where they were building highways and taking property from people. The question wasn't whether the government had the right to take the property under the eminent domain laws - The real question was, what do you pay them? And the sort of class that I went into the Indiana attorney general's office with was made up of a lot of talented lawyers, and some others - they weren't all great and talented - but they got themselves into a position. I wasn't working on highway cases, but most of them went over to this separate office where they were working on these highway cases, and they developed this level of cynicism about what they were doing, and about the attorney general - just a poisonous atmosphere!

I was lucky enough to be assigned to the state board of health and have a normal relationship with the attorney general's office, and I kept asking for more things to do, and boy, they just kept piling them on me. Three years later, I was the chief counsel in the Indiana attorney general's office, and there were about 85 lawyers reporting to me. A lot of that was luck - other guys left. People that were much more qualified than me to do that work, by virtue of their experience, weren't around, so he gave me the assignment. These other guys I came in with were still trying highway cases, just as they had when they had come in. My sense of it was, they just didn't pay enough attention to the job they had, and concentrate on doing it really well - or they would've gotten more assignments. That's just one example. I could give you twenty where the same thing happened.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 15, 2007 10:06 AM
Posted to Environment