He leads battle to keep state's coastal waters clear

Todd Miller spent his boyhood wading in Bogue Sound with a net, looking through the clear water for blue crabs skittering along the bottom. At sunset on summer evenings, fishermen would come out in small boats to net shrimp as they moved from the shallows toward deeper waters.

"What was remarkable was how clear the water was in summertime," Miller recalls. "When I went off to school and visited other coastlines and looked for what we had here, that is when I realized just how special what we had here was."

Fresh out of college in 1982, Miller founded the N.C. Coastal Federation to protect the coastal waters, using a back bedroom as an office and a $20,000 foundation grant. Despite such meager resources, the federation helped derail a plan to strip-mine vast acres of wetlands in Eastern North Carolina -- land now protected as national wildlife refuge.

Today, the nonprofit environmental group has three offices on the coast, a $1.4 million annual operating budget, a staff of 18 and about 8,000 dues-paying members in Eastern North Carolina and the Triangle.

The federation will be busy this spring trying to make sure lawmakers uphold stricter standards on pollutant-laden stormwater runoff set to take effect this summer. It's a fight that has defined Miller and the federation, which have long stressed water-quality protection.

As its membership and budget have grown, the group has expanded its mission beyond advocacy. Today, the federation also conducts environmental education in schools, buys coastal land for preservation and restores wetlands.

"The work of the Coastal Federation shouldn't be about telling people what is right," Miller says, "but more about helping people accomplish what they know is right."

The federation has been especially vigilant about tougher restrictions on pollutant-laden stormwater runoff -- the No. 1 source of pollution along coastal waters. New restrictions adopted by state environmental regulators will take effect this summer in the 20 coastal counties if the legislature doesn't strike them down when it reconvenes next month.

"I think ultimately we'll prevail, and hopefully it will happen this year," Miller says. "The science is so indisputable. We know what we are doing now is a failure, and the state is violating the Clean Water Act by allowing it to occur."

State water quality regulators asked for the tougher limits on runoff, admitting that its existing restrictions were not protecting coastal water quality. Because of pollution, the acreage of coastal waters permanently closed to shellfishing has increased about 13 percent in the past two decades. But the state home builders lobby will ask the legislature to repeal the new runoff rules or delay them at least a year for further study.

"We have some significant issues with the rules," says Paul Wilms, director of government affairs for the N.C. Home Builders Association.

A formidable advocate

Wilms, who often finds himself opposing Miller on issues, said the federation's advocacy had been formidable, even when he disagreed with their views.

"I think the contribution of the Coastal Federation has been phenomenal and productive to debate on coastal issues," Wilms says. "It seemed to me prior to the advent of the Coastal Federation that there was no effective voice for coastal issues in North Carolina. Citizen voices were pretty disparate and disorganized.

"We certainly haven't always agreed with their public policy positions," Wilms says. "But they have done a superlative job in organizing the public and encouraging participation. That is positive regardless of the position."