Traverse City Conservation leader still active in state

By Loraine Anderson Traverse City Record-Eagle TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) -- Michigan's environmental policies varied widely over the last half-century, particularly so since the first Earth Day in 1970. Jack Bails often held a front row seat during those years of change. Bails, a former Michigan Department of Natural Resources deputy director who now lives in Lake City, frequently played a key role in building the state's national reputation as a conservation and environmental protection leader during the 1970s and 1980s. He retired from the DNR in 1992, then went to work for Public Sector Consultants, a Lansing-based research and program management firm. He retired from that job in 2008, but continues a role as a senior fellow. Bails remains immersed in projects that "intrigue" him. One such effort is the Boardman River Sub-Watershed Prosperity Management Plan. The Boardman project is to be developed over this year and next with the help of Grand Traverse and Kalkaska county residents and officials and a Public Sector Consultants team that includes Bails. Another is a Portage Lake-Onekama "Portage Lake Forever" watershed management plan created by the community and approved by the state in 2008. Bails' 43-year career with the state and beyond often thrust him into many major environmental issues. Indeed, a glance at his career offers more than a snapshot of Michigan's environmental history -- and controversy -- that reaches to the early 1960s. Bails hailed from Missouri and first set foot in the DNR in 1961 as a Michigan State University undergrad student at the state fishery research station at the Pigeon River Country State Forest. He lived there one summer, an experience that came in handy a few years later when oil and gas industry representatives pressured the state to allow well drilling of the Niagaran Reef across northern Michigan. Environmentalist concerns erupted into a decade-long debate that resulted in the Pigeon River management plan in 1973, a model used statewide to regulate drilling on state lands. It also led to 1976's Michigan Land Trust Fund, the brainchild of wildlife ecologist Don Inman, a colleague involved with Bails in writing an environmental impact statement on the Pigeon River plan. The trust fund has been an environmental boon to the state. State royalties on the sale and lease of state-owned mineral rights went into the trust to be used to purchase lands for public outdoor recreation, as well as protection of natural resources and environmentally fragile parcels. The trust fund granted more than $435 million to more than 1,400 village, city, township and county government projects from 1976 through mid-May 2011, according to state reports. The DNR hired Bails in 1966 as a fisheries biologist after he completed his graduate work. Over the next years, he became deputy assistant to Howard Tanner, who directed the DNR from 1975 to 1983, then chief of the environmental enforcement division, and from 1984 to 1992 was deputy director. Environmentalists sometimes call the 1970s and 1980s the "glory years" of Michigan's environmental protection policy. The Michigan Environmental Protection Act of 1970 went into effect during then-Gov. William Milliken's tenure. Over a series of years the Legislature also passed a number of strong laws to protect wetlands, Great Lakes shoreline, natural rivers, inland lakes, streams and farmland as well as measures to regulate solid and hazardous waste. One of the last pieces of legislation was the polluter-pay law in 1990. "It was the environmental era," Bails said. "Michigan was one of the first states to regulate PCBs and mercury. It was an environmental leader in the nation. Today, it still regulates wetlands for the federal government." Other environmental and conservation issues of that time included Coho and Chinook salmon planting in the Great Lakes and related state dismantling of the state commercial fishing industry, Indian treaty fishing rights cases and federal district Judge Noel Fox's 1979 landmark ruling affirming those fishing rights. Dave Dempsey, author of the environmental history, "Ruin & Recover: Michigan's Rise as a Conservation Leader," described Bails as ethical, thoughtful, innovative and "one of the people from the Old Guard who really has a sense of the future and not just the present." "He probably was the person best-suited to be DNR director, but for some reason it never worked out," Dempsey said. "He's had a legacy view in his roles with the fisheries trust and other projects -- dam removal, fish habitat work and environmental education." Bails retired from the DNR as deputy director in 1992, the year after Gov. John Engler took office. Published: Wed, May 2, 2012