03-23-08: Milton Heath: Tarheel of the Week

(C) Raleigh News & Observer

By Jesse James Deconto, Staff Writer

CHAPEL HILL - Are you glad Carolina Beach doesn't look like Myrtle Beach? Thank Milton Heath.

A professor in the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Government for more than 50 years, Heath drafted most of North Carolina's environmental laws, including the 1974 Coastal Area Management Act, which limited development along the state's shoreline.

"He was involved in environmental law before anyone knew there was such a thing," says Willis Whichard, a former state Supreme Court judge who worked with Heath on the coast management act as a state representative. "I doubt that the state of North Carolina has ever gotten more for its money for an employee than they have with Milton."

Now semi-retired, the 80-year-old Heath says he was simply at the right place at the right time. He was the School of Government's environmental law expert when the school was providing most of the legislature's legal counsel and when the environmental movement found a foothold at the statehouse.

"I wound up being the only lawyer [serving the legislature's environmental committees]," he says, "and it turned out that this was the time when almost all of North Carolina's major environmental legislation got enacted. ... Can you imagine, in career terms, falling into a better piece of luck?"

When the act passed in 1974, North Carolina helped to set the bar for coastal protection in the United States.

"It opted for a different kind of development than the more intensive, right-up-to-the-water kind of development that you see in other places," says Bill Ross, secretary of the State Department of Environment and Natural Resources. "You notice a big difference between North Carolina's coastline and the way the coastline is managed or dealt with in places like Virginia Beach or Myrtle Beach."

The son of a UNC-CH economics professor, Heath has spent most of his life in Chapel Hill, except for a year at Phillips Exeter Academy, four years at Harvard, three years at Columbia and five more years between the governor's office in Albany, N.Y., and the Tennessee Valley Authority's legal division. Notably, Heath's favorite parts of Chapel Hill are downtown and the historic district where he lives, not the rolling green landscape.

For years, he enjoyed walks through town with his Labrador retriever Andy.

"He put the umbrella over the dog to keep the dog from getting wet," says his wife, Betty Sanders.

An avid tennis player since high school, he was ranked as high as seventh in the Southeast in his age bracket when he was in his 50s. He is also a sacred choral singer, a passion his son Frank, the owner of the Carrboro rock club Cat's Cradle, doesn't share.

"Frank likes music. He's not a singer. He's not a dancer," the proud father says. "I can occasionally get him to come to a major service at the Chapel of the Cross, but mostly he gets me to come to the Cat."

Cutting-edge coastline

Of all the bills Heath has authored, including a water-rights protection law in 1967 that is still in effect, Heath is most proud of the coastal management act because, in his view, the coast is North Carolina's greatest treasure. He and his wife continue to enjoy summer trips to the pet-friendly Atlantis Lodge in Pine Knoll Shores, a motel designed by a Chapel Hill architect with wildlife habitat throughout the grounds and ocean views from every room.

And they're not the only ones enjoying the fruits of his labor.

The Surfrider Foundation, which annually assesses beaches from coast to coast, scores North Carolina tops among its Southeast and Mid-Atlantic neighbors for public beach access and behind only Virginia for water quality.

Robin Smith, Ross' assistant secretary for environmental protection, says the coastal act's mandate of land-use planning in 20 coastal counties made North Carolina an innovator in the 1970s.

A later addition to the act banned seawalls and preserved North Carolina's beaches. Seawalls protect beachfront homes but foster erosion as waves crash into them and stir up sand, she says.

"Milton has made an enormous contribution on issues of water law," Smith says. "You can look at other coastlines in the United States and see development that is closer to the shoreline and at greater risk, and you can see seawalls and other types of erosion-control measures that have caused the public beach to disappear at high tide."

Jeff Miller, executive director of the nonprofit North Carolina Coastal Federation, agreed that the seawall ban may be Heath's most important legacy, even though it came more than a decade after Heath drafted the original coastal act bill.

Miller says the act made oceanfront development a matter for public debate, not just private interests, giving beachgoers as much say as property owners who want seawalls to protect their homes.

"What CAMA [the Coastal Area Management Act] provides is a pretty open and democratic process by which people can have their say, and that's not generally available to people in a lot of states," Miller says.

Although he's a self-professed liberal Democrat, Heath credits former Republican Gov. James Holshouser for supporting the coastal protection act. Holshouser defeated Democrat Skipper Bowles in 1972, and Heath thought the new Republican leader wouldn't support controls on coastal development. But Holshouser used his clout to help the bill get though without being watered down by amendments.

In the mountains

Ross noted that Heath's influence also stretches west to the Blue Ridge Mountains. In 1971, Heath drafted one of the tougher pesticide laws in the nation.

In the early 1980s, Heath drafted the Mountain Ridge Protection Act, and legislators passed it in 1983 in response to the construction of a condominium complex on Little Sugar Mountain that mars the view from Grandfather Mountain. The law bans buildings taller than 40 feet from mountaintops.

"There was a problem, and that law addressed it," Ross says. "He's contributed to the state's environmental law and environmental programs at a very high level and over a very long period. We've been lucky to have him."

Heath's work takes him all over the state. He shares his expertise with county health officials, and soil and water conservation officials. He has also been teaching a graduate course on environmental law at the UNC-CH School of Public Health for most of his career.

Heath is the longest-serving faculty member on campus, but the School of Government almost lost him in the early 1970s, when former UNC-system President Bill Friday asked him to become a university vice president and lobbyist at the legislature.

He believed in the work he was doing at the School of Government and turned Friday down. He now realizes he would have missed out on writing most of North Carolina's environmental laws.

"That offers about as good a professional experience as I can imagine," he says. "It's better than being vice president of the university."