Bob Durands Big Leap

Bob Durand saw the leap coming.

There he was, on the banks of the Charles River in August 1996, celebrating one of the sweetest moments of his life as a Democratic state legislator and ardent environmentalist: the signing into law of the Rivers Protection Act, a tough environmental bill that restricts development along the banks of Massachusetts rivers and streams.

Durand had poured seven years of his life into marshalling the ground-breaking measure through the House and Senate – and now here was Gov. William Weld, standing next to the Charles, dotting the final i’s and crossing the last t‘s.

As Durand and a crowd of supporters watched, Weld said, “I’m going to do something crazy right now.” Instinctively, the lanky Durand reached into his pocket for his wallet, handed it to his wife, who was sitting next to him, and got to his feet.

In the next moment, Weld made his now infamous leap into the Charles – and Bob Durand was right behind him. “I figured, hey, he’s going in as a celebration,” recalls Durand. “I’m going in after him.”

It was a splash seen round the world, thanks to the cagey foresight of Weld, who had his own photographer capture the moment – a nice photo op for a governor who was also then running for U.S. Senate. Weld made a lot of mileage out of the moment; when his political ambitions brought him to the national center-stage over his fight to secure President Clinton’s nomination as U.S. ambassador to Mexico, reporters affectionately referred to the leap as an example of the governor’s unorthodox ways.

However, there aren’t too many people who remember that a Democratic state senator jumped into the Charles with the Republican governor that day. (Environmental activist Paul Burns, who also spoke at the occasion and stood by on shore, said there was no way he would have gone in – “I know what’s in that water,” he told friends later.) But Durand has no regrets.

“[People say] who was that other guy?” he says, with a smile. “I was the other guy. It was a great day. We were able to protect over 9,000 miles of rivers and streams.”

Besides, Durand has recently made another leap with another Republican governor – and this one is sure to have people talking, too. Last winter, the legislator with a 15-year career in the House and Senate accepted the invitation of his childhood friend, newly elected Governor Paul Cellucci, to take on the cabinet post of secretary of environmental affairs. “In the state Senate, Senator Durand had a knack for forging consensus on important pieces of legislation like the rivers bill and the brownfields program,” Cellucci said in announcing the appointment Dec. 10. “He speaks eloquently on all environmental issues, and will lead the secretariat with great enthusiasm and vigor.”

It’s a more breathtaking plunge than his jump into the Charles. Durand enters Cellucci’s administration as one of only a few Democrats, a man who enjoys a long personal friendship with his new boss, a passionate advocate of environmental protection being called into service by a chief executive who’s not exactly known as one of Mother Nature’s biggest boosters.

“Paul’s sort of built a reputation on health care, education, and the tax issue,” admits Durand, who says he had to think about the governor’s offer “long and hard.” When he decided to accept the job, he says, he told Cellucci, “I want to make you one of the best environmental governors in the nation.”

Durand’s latest leap with a Republican comes at a crucial time: As sprawl gobbles up much of the state’s open space – land development has outpaced population growth by a rate of six times – policy-makers must find a way to preserve the state’s natural resources while still encouraging economic development. And while the state has some of the strongest environmental protection laws in the nation, environmentalists and the business community are constantly jousting over how to enforce those regulations.

The open question in all of this, of course, is how much free rein Gov. Cellucci is willing to grant his old friend. One thing is likely: By the time Bob Durand finishes his work as the state’s most powerful environmental advocate, nobody is going to say, “Hey, who was that other guy?”

Out of the woods

If an environmentalist is, as Durand says, “somebody who cares about the environment in which they live,” then Durand’s been an environmentalist pretty much all his life.

As the eldest of six children growing up in a French-Canadian Catholic family in Hudson in the 1950s and ’60s, Durand had an idyllic relationship with nature. “You could walk out the door and go in the back yard and there would be a swamp back there, and a small brook that ran into the Assabet River, and across the street there was a small, what we called a mountain. It was Field’s Hill, and we’d camp up there and we’d explore and go after turtles, and catch frogs and salamanders, the whole nine yards,” recalls Durand, 46, during an interview this spring in his new office at the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs on the 20th floor of the Saltonstall building, just down the hill from the State House.

His uncles took him hunting and fishing – sports he still pursues today whenever he can find the time (to the dismay of animal rights’ activists). Another uncle served on the state fish and wildlife board, and Durand’s parents regularly took the family camping, often going to their hunting camp in Vermont.

But even as a child, Durand knew his environment was threatened. For one thing, suburban sprawl literally paved a path through his life when the state leveled his grandparents’ colonial farmhouse to make way for Route 495 – leaving them with $10,500 and a new home in a two-story apartment.

For another, Durand could see that the rivers he loved to fish in and canoe on were in danger. “I grew up watching rivers degrade in Massachusetts,” he says. “I remember the Nashua River when it used to change colors depending on the color of the dyes in the paper mills.” At his Catholic high school, he recalls a nun discussing Rachel Carson’s landmark book, Silent Spring. For the first Earth Day in 1970, he wrote a paper on the environmental threats to his beloved Assabet River.

“I was alarmed,” he says. “I was angry.… I believe that we have a right to clean water and we have a right to clean air.”

As the environmental passions that would become the hallmark of his life began to ignite, so did an interest in the field that would become the vehicle for them – politics. In 1971, barely out of high school, Durand teamed up with a friend, Chuck Anastas, who decided to run for a seat on Hudson’s school committee. Durand masterminded his 18-year-old friend’s campaign, enlisting some 200 teenagers to canvass door-to-door. Anastas won, by 200 votes, and became one of the youngest elected officials in the nation.

It was the beginning of a love affair with politics: Durand went on to work some 22 campaigns, eventually organizing South Dakota for Mike Dukakis in the 1988 presidential race (which, as the Boston Globe‘s former State House reporter Peter Howe notes, “is like working for McCarthy in ’68” among Bay State Democrats). His own career as a politician took off in 1984, when he won a seat as a state representative, before becoming a state senator in 1991.

But the school committee election also marked the beginning of something more – a close relationship between Durand and Paul Cellucci, who was on Hudson’s board of selectmen at the time. Though Cellucci was two years older – and a Republican – the two became good friends, a natural outcome, in many ways, of the long friendship between their fathers and the families’ shared school experiences.

In fact, when Cellucci ran for state Senate in 1976, Durand ran his campaign – the only time he’s worked for a Republican. And in 1990, when Cellucci decided to leave the Senate to run for governor, he called Durand on a Sunday night to let him know the seat would be open. Although Cellucci didn’t endorse Durand, he didn’t support Durand’s Republican opponent, either.

“He stayed out of the race,” recalls Durand, who himself sat out last year’s Cellucci/Harshbarger gubernatorial battle. “It’s always been that relationship where the Durands have never worked against the Celluccis, and the Celluccis have never worked against the Durands.”

As a legislator, Durand soon distinguished himself as a “true believer” on environmental issues, working closely with groups like MassPIRG, the Audubon Society and the Environmental League of Massachusetts, and emerging as one of the State House’s most powerful environmental advocates during his tenure as Senate chairman of the natural resources committee, and as assistant majority leader. In addition to authoring the Rivers Protection Act, the first of its kind in the nation, Durand’s record includes sponsorship of the “open space bond bill,” the state’s primary funding vehicle for purchasing and protecting open space, and the “brownfields bill,” a carefully balanced measure aimed at encouraging redevelopment of polluted “brown” spaces by lifting liabilities from new owners who want to clean them up and turn them into productive use. Durand also authored the original Community Preservation Act, a version of which is now being considered by state legislators, which sets up a revenue plan for communities that want to buy and protect open spaces and historic properties threatened by development.

“It’s the first thing you should know about Bob Durand,” says Marsha Rockefeller Westropp, legislative liaison for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. “The most important thing is he really cares about the environment. It’s not a political thing for him. It’s not something he’s taken on because it’s good for his career. He really cares about the environment – everything else comes from there.”

At the same time, Durand developed a reputation for being a man who carefully considered both sides of an issue. Early on, he professed himself a believer in the idea that “a clean environment and a strong economy are not mutually exclusive,” in his words. The state’s business leaders quickly learned that when they wanted to voice their concerns about legislation, Durand would listen.

“He appreciates rational arguments on all sides of an issue,” says Robert Ruddock, vice president for energy and environment programs at Associated Industries of Massachusetts. “He doesn’t fly off the handle. He’s a good rational decision-maker. He attempts to balance things, I’ve seen him do it. But he has goals. For example, on the Rivers Act, he had a vision of that that he wouldn’t back away from.”

In fact, Durand’s relentless, seven-year push for passage of the Rivers Protection Act may be one of the most telling battles of his career. Determined to stop the degradation of the state’s rivers and streams, he first sponsored the act in 1989. At its heart was a proposal to create a 150-foot development-free zone along all rivers and streams – a restriction Durand felt was essential to stop run-off pollution from parking lots, businesses, and other developments.

Not surprisingly, real estate developers were hardly enthusiastic about a hands-off policy on what they saw as prime real estate. Over time, Durand worked out a compromise, one that he felt still accomplished his goals: a 100-foot development-free zone, with an additional 100-foot zone that could be open to limited development, carefully regulated by local permitting authorities.

But Durand had his limits: When his beloved bill finally appeared ready to pass, another legislator attached a rider, aimed at benefiting General Electric in Pittsfield, that would have loosened hazardous-waste cleanup requirements and restricted the ability of injured parties to sue polluters. Durand said no way. He vowed to kill his own bill to prevent passage of a measure that would ease the responsibilities of polluters. In the end, Durand won, and the legislation passed in the final half-hour of the 1996 session. Not long after, he and Bill Weld took their ballyhooed plunge in the Charles.

“Bob Durand is a guy who’s willing to take on those who have a vested interest in harming the environment,” says Paul Burns of MassPIRG, who worked closely with Durand throughout the Rivers Bill process. “He’s not a person who believes that the best answer is always somewhere in the middle of the pro-environment and pro-business communities. He knows that sometimes it’s simply right to protect a resource, to protect public health.”

Burns cheered Durand’s appointment as secretary of environmental affairs last December, as did many other environmentalists who count Durand as a friend. But many say they’ll miss his strong presence in the State House, and they worry openly about what he’ll be able to accomplish under the Cellucci administration.

“My hope is that Governor Cellucci will let Bob be the great secretary of environmental affairs that he can be,” says Jim Gomes, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts. “My concern,” he says, “is that he’ll be held back by an ideology of the administration that’s very skeptical about government doing anything other than cutting taxes, cutting the size of government, and throwing the book at criminals.”

Durand, Durand

Less than four months into his new job, environmentalist Durand got his first taste of what it’s like to be Paul Cellucci’s Secretary Durand.

On April 14, he went to the State House to testify in support of the Community Preservation Act. As author of the original bill, he’d been in favor of allowing local communities to decide whether to impose a “transfer tax” – a real estate fee charged on either the buyer or seller of a piece of property, a fee vigorously opposed by the business community.

But as secretary of environmental affairs, he had to represent the governor’s point of view: thumbs up on the basics of the bill; thumbs down on the transfer tax. It was a moment that didn’t go unnoticed by the environmentalists who were pushing for the tax – Durand had been forced to yield his stand to Cellucci’s.

After repeated questioning in an interview, Durand finally allows that having to switch positions was a little painful. “Whenever you give up a little of something, then obviously it hurts a little bit,” he admits. But he’s also able to take the matter in stride, as part of “the art of compromise” that he’s learned so well in politics.

“If you can’t compromise in government,” he says, “then you probably shouldn’t be in government. I’m an idealist when it comes to environmental issues, but I’m also very much a pragmatist and a realist.”

“The legislation that the governor will sign does not include a transfer fee, it only includes the surcharge,” he says, referring to an optional property tax increase which cities and towns may pass to fund property purchases under the bill. It is expected to raise $180 million statewide. “There’s no sense in drawing the line in the sand,” he says. “Half a loaf is better than no loaf at all.”

Durand is confident, he says, of the governor’s support, and he’s even been able to persuade his old friend to take a few stands that have raised some eyebrows. For example, when Durand decided to give the go-ahead to the next phase of planning for the possible expansion of runways at Logan Airport, he recommended – with Cellucci’s backing – some tough and creative restrictions aimed at improving air quality: emissions-based landing fees (the first of their kind in the U.S.) and peak-period pricing.

The airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration can fight those recommendations, but, Durand says, “We’re willing to fight on this one. I think that we need to be creative. Logan Airport is probably the fifth or sixth dirtiest polluter of air quality in the state of Massachusetts, after some of the dirtier utilities. We have an obligation to protect the air quality for the residents of Boston.”

“Those conditions were somewhat ingenious, and I think they would do a lot to limit the environmental damage if they do add an additional runway,” says Burns, of MassPIRG, which opposes the expansion. “This might be an example of where another secretary wouldn’t have fought to put in those conditions, or wouldn’t have power within the administration to insist on those environmental controls.”

He adds: “Durand’s got a lot of power. In fact, he’s the only member of the cabinet who’s known the governor since high school. It may be that even battles we don’t win outright will be tempered to some degree by Durand’s involvement. That is part of what he must see as part of the possibility he has to make change.”

Durand does see opportunities to create change in the state, and he’s well aware that his role as secretary gives him the kind of bully pulpit that he just didn’t have as a state legislator from Hudson. He can push the federal government more aggressively to act on the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which would bring $28 million to $44 million to the state, which he has done through contacts with local and federal officials. He can use his voice statewide to help communities understand the importance of the Community Preservation Act – which he has done through sponsoring (and often attending) meetings in every city and town, where residents are shown maps of what their towns will look like when they are fully “built out,” and what sort of strain that will put on natural resources such as water.

He has introduced a biodiversity program – tapping the likes of Harvard University’s E.O. Wilson – aimed at cataloguing the state’s plant and animal species, and re-targeting open-space funding so that land purchased by the state is used to protect entire ecosystems instead of bits and pieces of suburban green space which he calls “squirrel parks.” That land, he says, will be part of the 200,000 acres of open space which Cellucci has pledged to preserve by the year 2010.

And Durand has kicked off another initiative particularly close to his heart – an environmental education program in elementary and secondary schools around the Commonwealth. It’s not a big-ticket item as far as money goes, but it’s a passionate matter for Durand. He’s asked all 3,000 employees in the five environmental departments under his office to each go into classrooms and talk about their work and teach children more about the environment – from learning how to register a vernal pool to finding out what watershed basin they live in. Durand himself has visited 17 schools, handing out shoelaces made from recycled soda bottles and teaching kids, among other things, the differences between point and non-point source pollution.

“It’s probably the best thing that we can do to inspire the next generation to have an environment ethic like we’ve had,” says Durand, who is the father of three teenage boys. “It’s important because our biological and social evolution depends on it. It’s important because kids have a right to inherit an earth free of pollution…. By doing that they realize they are part of a larger ecosystem, a larger community out there.”

Durand’s heart is clearly in the side of his job that allows him to crusade for the environment he loves so dearly – “the green team,” as he jokingly calls it. But he’s more than mindful of the other half of his job, “the clean team,” which oversees pollution prevention, regulation enforcement, and technical assistance to businesses. After taking over from his predecessor, Trudy Coxe, a Weld appointee who left for a job in historic preservation in Rhode Island, Durand divided the office along “green” and “clean” lines as a way of developing clearer communications between the two groups, as well as a more unified approach to environmental protection.

“I was probably one of the first people who said a clean environment and a strong economy are not mutually exclusive; actually they go hand in hand,” says Durand, who recently helped negotiate a six-state deal that allows businesses permitted in one state to do business in another state without going through another environmental permitting process. The states that signed on are Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, California, and Maryland.

“When people are working and the economy is doing well, people have more time to think about the environment in which they live,” he says. “And when things aren’t going so well, when the economy is poor, then it’s easy to give up funding for the environment. So there’s a huge benefit for all of us who care about quality-of-life issues when things are going well.”

Durand is particularly enthusiastic about Executive Office of Environmental Affairs programs aimed at helping companies find creative ways to reduce pollution and recycle waste products. Through a program known as the Strategic Envirotechnology Partnership (STEP), the state has helped more than 150 businesses with research and technical support. One company has found a way to recycle old tires into material used to strengthen rubber; another has drastically reduced its use of nitric acid by creating a membrane that it is now marketing for sale to other companies.

“What Bob brings to this is a vision that environmental protection is really more than going out and regulating compliance,” says Gina McCarthy, who was appointed by Durand to head the “clean team” as assistant secretary overseeing pollution prevention, and environmental business and technology. “It’s really a new way of looking at things,” she says. “If we’re going to get there, we’re going to have to do things differently. That’s what he’s willing to bring to the table.”

Pro-Business, Pro-Environment

Doing things differently, of course, is easier said than done. Durand will have to bring to his work all his skills as a crusader, mediator, listener, and visionary. The world he faces today is a different one than the one he faced as a teenage nature-lover who wrote an essay on the Assabet River for Earth Day. Thirty years of environmental education, regulation, and cleanup have led to a different national consciousness, one that places a premium on environmental protection. A whole new breed of businesses has discovered that “green” sells.

But changing times also bring changing demands. The “command and control” regulations that dictated much of the cleanup are facing new pressures. Business leaders are calling for more flexible enforcement of regulations – not for rolling back standards, but for allowing companies greater flexibility in how they meet those goals. “There’s a maturity here,” says Ruddock, of Associated Industries of Massachusetts. “People don’t just get up in the morning and say, ‘Gee, I want to pollute the river today.’ The state ought to reward [businesses that] internalize pollution prevention and allow companies to decide where they can make the best impact on reduced pollution.”

Environmentalists, for their part, cast a wary eye on what one activist calls “corporate greenwashing.” Many businesses, they acknowledge, have become more environmentally responsible. But they warn that just because companies can no longer get away with saying they don’t care about the environment doesn’t necessarily mean they are willingly living up to environmental standards. They want Durand to stay tough on issues like toxic chemicals, contaminated water, and hazardous-waste-site cleanup.

“It’s a tough job,” says Burns, of MassPIRG. “He has a difficult task ahead. He must confront some of these issues head on to make the progress we have to make.”

To make things even tougher, Durand has to face the political realities confronting the most visible Democrat in a pro-business Republican administration. By many accounts, he’s already created quite a stir in some Cellucci quarters, where people feel suspicious of his politics and uneasy about his close friendship with the governor.

But Durand is unfazed. “Whenever a Democrat comes into a Republican administration, there’s always the possibility that it’s going to take time before people trust you,” he says. “I sort of joke about it. I’ve sat at cabinet meetings before, where some issue will come up that’s a Democrat versus Republican one, and I’ll weigh in as a Democrat to give them another perspective. I think that helps the administration.”

The Globe‘s Peter Howe also notes that whatever infighting may take place among Cellucci bureaucrats, the fact remains that Durand and the governor come from similar backgrounds – a central Massachusetts, small-family-business mindset. “Given that,” says Howe, “the only people who will have a real problem with him are irrational Dukakis-haters, rabid landowner-rights advocates, and extreme Republican partisans. I think he comes from a part of the Democratic Party that independents and many moderates in both parties are comfortable with.”

And veteran GOP strategist Charlie Manning maintains that anyone trying to manufacture fault lines between Durand’s approach to the environment and a more traditional Republican view favoring less government and less regulation “just doesn’t understand the issues.”

“There’s absolutely no line being drawn here,” he insists. “You can be pro-business and pro-environment at the same time. They’re not mutually exclusive. True conservatives believe in conserving things and that’s what this is all about. Everybody wants to conserve this incredible precious resource we have. Bill Weld set a new tone, and I think Paul Cellucci has shared that with him, which is we are about as green as anybody you’re going to find.”

He acknowledges that environmentalists and business leaders may differ on strategies and approaches, but argues that such differences are “only to degrees and reasonable people can always work those things out. The great thing is everybody wants to listen to each other because everybody has the same goal.”

Manning may be overstating the case, but his strong endorsement of environmental protection is a clear sign that the GOP knows where public sentiment lies. And Durand has had long experience in banking on that sentiment to bring both sides of an issue to agreement.

“I think one of the strong suits I’ve had in the past in my legislative career is working with both parties to get results for issues we care about, which in this case, is environmental protection,” he says. “Those issues are bipartisan by nature. E. O. Wilson said the health of the planet is the concern of both the Republican and Democratic parties. I believe that.”

“And,” he adds, with a touch of political savvy, “there’s only two people I need the full confidence of, Governor Paul Cellucci and Lieutenant Governor Jane Swift.”

He doesn’t add the obvious: He has it.

Sara Terry is a Boston-based free-lance writer and photographer who writes about news and culture for Fast Company magazine and the Christian Science Monitor.