After 4 decades, Kentucky's 'one-man army for the environment' Tom FitzGerald steps aside

For the past four decades, major battles over Kentucky legislation involving environmental and consumer protection often featured the same cast of characters.

On one side — a major coal, energy or utility company, equipped with an army of highly paid lobbyists and lots of political influence in the commonwealth.

On the opposing side — the lone attorney/lobbyist working on a shoestring budget, always wearing the same old, scuffed up, brown wingtip shoes.

Tom FitzGerald — known by colleagues, friends and foes alike as “Fitz” — hung up his shoes in October as executive director of the Kentucky Resources Council, the group he founded in 1984 and led for 37 years.

Though he often managed to get the better of his deep-pocketed opponents since he began lobbying the Kentucky General Assembly as a law student in the late 1970s, the condition of his footwear throughout those years revealed the tall odds he faced — thanks to an off-handed joke that became an oath.

“One day I'm walking down the halls, and the shoes have gotten a little scruffy,” FitzGerald recalled. “And Rep. Herbie Deskins, who was from Pikeville and the chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, says: ‘FitzGerald, when are you going to shine those shoes?’

“And I should have kept my mouth shut, but I'm constitutionally incapable of keeping my mouth shut. So, I said ‘when are you going to pass a good bill?’ So, then it became this long-standing challenge and kind of a joke.”

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Though FitzGerald punched above his weight when it came to blocking or delaying bills he argued would devastate the environment or rip off utility customers, celebratory shoeshines were hard to come by.

“They've been shined about six times since 1978,” FitzGerald said. “Which either is the grimmest, saddest story that you can ever imagine, or it's a recognition that once every so often we get it right and do something big.”

Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame inductee Tom Loftus’ years covering state government almost perfectly overlapped with FitzGerald’s tenure leading the Kentucky Resources Council, recalling him as “like a one-man army for the environment in Frankfort for the last 40-plus years.”

“He was up against obviously powerful interests, whether it's coal or utility companies, and he was in many, many cases their match,” said Loftus, The Courier Journal’s Frankfort Bureau chief until his retirement in 2019. “They'd come to the table with their technical experts, their lawyers, their extremely highly paid lobbyists. And he was all three of those things — except the extremely highly paid part.”

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Typically the lone full-time employee of the Kentucky Resources Council, FitzGerald and his board came to the realization a few years ago that the nonprofit would need fundamental change to be sustainable in the future — kicking off a three-year process of expanding the board, hiring new staff, redefining its work and finding a new director to take over when he retired at the end of 2021.

“I wasn't comfortable three years ago that if I stepped off the curb and got hit by a car that the council would continue,” FitzGerald said. “But I am so happy that it's not only going to continue, it's going to get stronger.”

Following a nationwide search, the council hired Ashley Wilmes as its new executive director, along with five new staffers, including a dedicated fundraiser.

“I think that this was the right time to go through this transition process to get a new generation of leadership,” FitzGerald said. “I'm really confident that there will be no slippage in any of the work that we do.”

While FitzGerald was to retire at the end of the year, there’s been a slight change in plans, as he will remain on as an attorney for the council through April — assisting in one more session of the legislature.

Fitz comes to the Bluegrass

Born and raised in New York City, FitzGerald found himself inexorably drawn to the Bluegrass at age 17, after his brother gave him a copy of Harry Caudill’s "Night Comes to the Cumberlands" — the classic account of poverty in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and its plundering by the extractive industry.

FitzGerald attended law school at the University of Kentucky, then worked for his mentor John Rosenberg at the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, providing free legal services in the region.

Already a fixture in the halls of Frankfort and courtrooms representing landowners battling coal companies, FitzGerald set out on his own in 1984 with the creation of the Kentucky Resources Council — but still had not found cause to shine his shoes by the end of that decade.

While the 1970s saw the passage of landmark federal environment legislation like the Surface Mining Act, Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, President Ronald Reagan kicked off what would be decades of attempts to pull them back.

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“That was the end of the era where we governed from the middle and where environmental policy, progressive environmental policy was bipartisan,” FitzGerald said. “And then environment was turned into a wedge issue. I've spent most of the last 41 years fighting a rearguard action to prevent laws and regulations and programs from being gutted.”

In 1991, the scruffy brown shoes finally got their first shine.

By the late 1980s, much of eastern Kentucky had become a dumping ground for sewage, sludge and solid waste from New York and New Jersey, but a bill FitzGerald championed was passed to raise landfill standards, making Kentucky a less economically viable option for companies’ refuse.

During the bill signing ceremony, FitzGerald recalled former Gov. Wallace Wilkinson looked at him and said he had to shine his shoes, so he “shined them on the spot.”

The celebration was fleeting, as FitzGerald’s footwear had to wait another 10 years for its next coat, when a fee on solid waste disposal was passed to fund the closure of old and notoriously polluting city dumps and litter pickup programs.

He shined his shoes the following year with the passage of a bill to create a new Public Service Commission siting board to approve new power plant sites, then again in 2004 with the passage of a net metering bill — allowing homes and business owners with solar panels to receive a one-for-one credit energy added to the electric grid.

But there were also plenty of fights FitzGerald could not win, like one against a bill pushed by AT&T to no longer require telephone companies to offer landline services.

While he was able to delay the bill’s passage for five sessions — arguing rural landline services would be decimated — it finally passed into law in 2015.

Noting the common power imbalance in this particular battle — as AT&T employed 23 legislative lobbyists — FitzGerald recounted that he joked to legislators: “You have heard this bill being touted as a job creator, but if you pass this bill, 23 of my brethren will be immediately out of work and will have to find something else to do for a living.”

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FitzGerald was also able to defeat a bill to drastically decrease the credits received by solar panel owners over several sessions, before a bill finally passed in 2019 letting the Public Service Commission set a lower rate.

However, the PSC sided this fall with FitzGerald and the Kentucky Resources Council, rejecting an LG&E and KU proposal to reduce solar energy credits by as much as 75%. He also notes the PSC siting board he helped create has recently been deluged with 30 new proposals for utility-scale solar projects.

'Looking for good trouble to get into'

More so than any coal or utility company, FitzGerald said the biggest foe he’s faced in Frankfort “is the mindset that environmental quality and economic progress are polar opposites — this idea that we're a cheap date, that we need to tolerate the pollution, the devastation in the mountains, the contamination of water supplies, the fouling of the land, as a price of doing business.”

While the ongoing effort to tear down environmental regulations has not lifted Kentucky out of its status as one of the nation's poorest states, FitzGerald remains optimistic for the future.

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His optimism is not just rooted in the environmental values of the younger generation, but the companies that are increasingly ahead of the politicians on clean energy — citing Ford’s electric vehicle battery plant project in Glendale.

FitzGerald, who says he’s never charged a client for legal services in his career, also has one final project he hopes to launch soon before his retirement is official — a program to “engage communities and individuals more proactively in getting involved in environmental decision making at a local and state level.”

Tentatively named their “good trouble” proposal — an homage to the late congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis — FitzGerald added: “I'm always looking for good trouble to get into.”

Reach reporter Joe Sonka at jsonka@courierjournal.com and follow him on Twitter at @joesonka. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today at the top of this page.