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Today, Tim Hayes enjoys a distinguished career as a partner in a respected law firm. He has been listed in the “Best Lawyers in America” for environmental law for each of the past 15 years, and represents businesses and government in this practice area. But the history of his career is one that goes hand-in-hand with the history of modern environmentalism in Virginia

 

“I started in 1976 in the attorney general’s office, as an assistant attorney general representing the State Water Control Board,” recalls Hayes. “I came in just as the Kepone litigation was going on, and actually I was brought in to work on that litigation. That was settled in 1977. Just about that time, the board had been given the authority to run the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System program, and there was a lot of work to be done developing regulations, and getting that program in place.

 

“In addition to Kepone, there was a major oil spill in the Chesapeake Bay in February of ’76, and I helped to prosecute that case in federal court in Norfolk. We collected a fairly large amount of money for that time. One of the things we did, in that case, which scarcely had been done before, was to establish a cash value for the thousands of waterfowl that were killed in the oil spill. I believe it was also one of the first cases where a state established, as a matter of law, that it had the right to recover damage money for lost natural resources on behalf of the citizens.”

 

“The environmental problems back then were obvious. It wasn’t trying to get a few more milligrams per liter of something out of an effluent pipe. A lot of municipalities didn’t even have secondary wastewater treatment. One thing Virginia did early on in the ’70s and early ’80s was that it was pretty aggressive towards trying to help localities get funding to put in the proper amount of sewage treatment.

 

“Still, even though the sewage treatment plants were being gradually cleaned up, and the industries were being cleaned up, there was a tremendous amount of impact from development too close to the water, and there really wasn’t much that localities could do about that because they didn’t have the right kind of zoning authority. Then in 1987 a number of us from different segments started working on what turned into the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act, which gave the state standards for development
in the Tidewater counties that had to be met by all of those counties and had to be incorporated in their zoning ordinances and subdivision planning ordinances.”

 

According to Hayes, Governor Gerald L. Baliles’ administration also took action to control landfill issues. “In the mid-to late ’80s, there were hundreds of local landfills, most of which were substandard, and they were running out of landfill space. And in 1986 they set up what was then called the Department of Waste Management. The state enacted a comprehensive solid waste law, and began working on some very advanced and detailed technical regulations for landfill construction, which were adopted in 1988. It really brought Virginia up into the modern age, probably with some of the best technical landfill standards of any state in the country.

 

“Today, environmental regulations and controls are just something that you pretty much take for granted. But 30, 35 years ago, they were viewed as something kind of novel. It’s just more of a part of our cultural fabric now, and the state is much more matter of fact about environmental programs than it was originally. I think there needs to be much more of a micro-level approach than we’ve been taking so far to future development.”