State's Doug Foy: Guiding Four State Agencies in New Regime

By JULIA WELLS

He switched teams, changing from private to public, from advocacy to
bureaucracy, from an attorney who led the fierce charge for
environmental protection to an Uber-secretary with a lofty title and a
post in state government to match.

But on Doug Foy, the drape of the new uniform appears to be just
right.

Six months ago Mr. Foy stepped down after 25 years at the helm of
the private nonprofit Conservation Law Foundation, and accepted a post
with Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. As the new Chief of Commonwealth
Development, Mr. Foy is in charge of four state agencies:
transportation, housing, environment and energy.

"It came along unexpectedly," Mr. Foy said in an
interview this week. "My portfolio is different. I have a whole
different set of tools now and it is a more refined balancing act. When
you're working for an advocacy group it's the art of the
pure, and when you're working for the government it's the
art of the possible."

Mr. Foy was keynote speaker at the annual summer fund raiser for the
Sheriff's Meadow Foundation, held at Misty Meadows Farm in West
Tisbury on Monday evening. The event, marking the 45th anniversary for
Sheriff's Meadow, drew a crowd of more than 300 to the home of
Carol and Jerome Kenney.

Earlier in the day during a visit to the Gazette, Mr. Foy spoke
about the environment, the Vineyard, state government and beyond.
Smiling, relaxed, he had about him an air of confidence - and
possibility - that sometimes comes with a midlife career change.

In recent months there has been a good deal of jousting between the
newly elected Republican governor and the Democratic legislature about
titles and responsibility, but in the end Mr. Foy said titles are just
titles.

"Who cares? I hired the four cabinet secretaries who work for
me, and as long as the governor is committed to make things happen, what
does the title matter?" he said.

Questioned about the state environmental agenda, he stuck to the
broad themes: Open space, forests, the critical need to hang onto the
small farms and the fishermen.

"The reason West Tisbury is West Tisbury is you still have the
farm fields here," he said, noting that Massachusetts has some
500,000 acres in farmland, a number worthy of preservation. "We
need to keep the farmers in farming and the fishermen in fishing -
this is partly what the Vineyard is all about and it does still have a
working fishery," Mr. Foy said. He was less specific about how to
actually accomplish the goal. The state agricultural preservation
restriction (APR) program that buys developments rights on farmland is
still alive and well, he said, although he avoided any talk about real
funding for the program in a year when the state budget and drastic cuts
to local aid have dominated the news.

Cars - and the pollution they create - are a key issue
for Mr. Foy. A longtime summer visitor to Nantucket, he said it bugs him
that the Steamship Authority lets cars off the ferry first, before the
bikes and the passengers. "It sends a message that you'd
rather have the cars here, when in fact what you want to do is encourage
people to come a different way," he said.

When Mr. Foy worked for the Conservation Law Foundation and lived in
Sherborn, it was not unusual for him to ride his bike 23 miles to work.
But he does not pretend to be a purist and he said he owns three cars.

He praised the Vineyard transit system. Talk turned to traffic
congestion, and Mr. Foy's stellar education, which includes a
degree from Princeton University in physics and engineering and a
Harvard Law degree, began to show.

"Congestion is essentially turbulence and it's the last
five per cent of vehicles that cause turbulence. And the argument for
public transit is this: take that last five per cent, pull them out of
their cars and put them in buses and your roads will be fine for all but
the peak days," he said.

Global warming is his favorite subject. "I think it is the
single most critical environmental issue that we have. Nothing is even a
close second," he said. "If it turns out to be as bad as is
predicted it's devastating." Taking climate change
seriously, he said, is like buying home insurance. "And what
people are talking about is that we buy the insurance now," he
said.

In what proved to be a sneak preview of his speech for the
Sheriff's Meadow crowd that night, he posed a question.

"How many SUVs do we have to take off the roads on the Cape
and Islands to offset the carbon dioxide that will be saved by building
the Cape Wind project? I haven't done the calculation yet, but
I'll bet it's every SUV. You can't be opposed to Cape
Wind and drive an SUV," he declared.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that Doug Foy favors
Cape Wind, the controversial plan to build a huge, privately financed
for-profit wind farm on 24 square miles of Nantucket Sound. He said he
has no position on the project - at least not yet.

"We don't have all the facts yet," he said simply.
He said he does favor the need to do something on an industrial scale.
"You can't do token renewables anymore. If you're
going to deal with it you've got to deal with it in a big
way," he said. But when it comes to the Cape Wind project, Mr. Foy
said there needs to be more discussion about the idea of using public
land for private industry. "We don't just give away public
land for free - all the European wind farms are municipal,"
he said, adding:

"We need large scale renewable energy and we can't just
sit around waiting for it to happen. But there are still questions about
whether this is the right site. And if Nantucket Sound is not the right
site, then we have to decide where is the right site."

Mr. Foy praised the work of the state task force on Chapter 40B,
which is expected to result in some change and tailoring in the state
law that was designed 30 years ago to promote affordable housing.
"What 40B misses is the village and community concept," he
said. "You couldn't build a New England village today
because it would violate zoning - but villages are one of our best
assets. Wyoming has the incredible beauty of its mountains but here in
New England we've got communities that knock their socks
off."

But he stopped short of calling Chapter 40B a complete solution.
"It's really only one part and I don't claim to have
all the answers," he said.

More than once Doug Foy has been called an unlikely choice for a
cabinet post in state government, but in truth he said his background at
the Conservation Law Foundation offered the perfect training ground.

"In some ways I think working for an advocacy group is the
best preparation for government service, because you have a clear view
of the inside. Dealing with the fiscal problems is a hair-raising
experience. But it forces us all to be smarter," Mr. Foy said.
"And I think the measure of how well you did in an organization is
how well it does when you are gone. CLF is doing very well," he
added.

He concluded with a broad smile:

"I am awaiting the first CLF lawsuit again me."