SVCA Board of Directors

Officers for 2012:

President Honor Fox Sage: Honor brings more than 30 years of fund raising and board development experience to the SVCA including five years as development director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, and two years as capital campaign director at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. Before becoming President of the SVCA's board in 2004, Honor served as chairman of the membership committee, a member of the Executive Committee and two years as vice president. Honor is also a former board member of the Maine Audubon Society. Honor and her husband, Sandy, live on the Sheepscot River and put their property under a conservation easement with the SVCA in 2002.

Vice-President John Atwood: Born in Brooklyn, N.Y. and raised in New Jersey, John graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell Law School. He was a Maine Assistant Attorney General and chief of its Criminal Division and then elected District Attorney for Waldo, Knox, Lincoln and Sagadahoc Counties where he served from 1979 to 1987. Thereafter he was appointed to serve as Commissioner of Public Safety. While Commissioner, John was the chair of the Maine Commission on Domestic Abuse, and the Maine State Employees' Combined Charitable Appeal among other boards and committees, which he chaired. He left Public Safety in 1994 upon appointment to the Superior Court bench. He retired in April 2005. He moved to Maine in 1971, and has lived in Sheepscot since 1998. He is married to Maggie Atwood, a licensed clinical social worker, and has three grown children and five step children. He is a member of the Board of Visitors at the Maine State Prison, and an alternate to the board of the Twin Bridges Regional Jail Authority. Aside from membership in various legal organizations, John is a life member of the Nature Conservancy. John currently serves as chair of the SVCA's Stewardship Committee.

Treasurer Clifford Russell: Cliff and wife Susan moved to Head Tide in December 2002 from Nashville where Cliff was a Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies. With a doctorate from Harvard, he is an internationally known environmental economist and author of seventy journal articles and author or editor of two dozen books. He was Treasurer of the Environmental Defense Fund (now Environmental Defense) from 1976 to 1984, and has served on a number of National Academy and other national study committees on environmental issues. He continues to do research, with his current interest being the analysis of the effectiveness of eco-labeling. Cliff serves as chair of the SVCA's Finance Committee.

Secretary Joanne Steneck: Joanne graduated from University of Maine School of Law in 1987. Her entire legal career has been with the Maine Public Utilities Commission where she has served as General Counsel since 1997. In 2002, she worked on a special project at Governor King's request as project manager for the Department of Education's laptop program for all of Maine's seventh and eight graders. She has happily lived on the Sheepscot River in Whitefield since 1981 and is an SVCA water quality monitor at one of the longest-tested sites (S009-F).

Board of Directors:

Otis Carroll:Otis is a restoration carpenter, partner in shop specializing in traditional woodworking. Work has included extensive experience with local 18th and 19th century houses in restoring and repairing historic fabric, fabricating reproduction components to match existing evidence, and designing new work to blend unobtrusively with extant features. He has also worked on Yin Yu Tang, an 18th century Chinese house installed at the Peabody Essex Museum. A member of the Newcastle Planning Board, Otis has extensive land planning experience.

John DelVecchio: John coordinates special projects at the Maine State Planning Office. The State Planning Office has spent the last four years studying patterns of development in Maine, the hidden costs and incentives for sprawl, and designing effective strategies for smart growth. A key strategy is the "Hometown Maine" initiative intended to create new and restore existing Great American Neighborhoods across the state, and thus relieve some of the development pressure on rural areas and forest resources. John has a natural resources background, and is a Maine Licensed Professional Forester. He has extensive experience in both public and private sectors working in the fields of community planning, community development, and natural resources planning in Maine. John lives with his family in Whitefield. He is currently chair of the SVCA's Lands Committee.

Tom Eichler: Tom retired in 2003 after a long career with the U.S. Information Agency and the State Department in Washington and overseas. He specialized in economic reporting, and retired as editor-in-chief of the State Department's daily international information service. He thus brings to SVCA extensive writing and editing experience, and since moving to Maine in 2005 has been producing press releases, newsletter articles and other public relations materials for SVCA, in addition to assuming preserve monitoring and trail maintenance responsibilities. He and his family were regular visitors to the Midcoast for over 30 years before he and his wife Wendy relocated here permanently, and thus he has been nursing a long-term love affair with the region - a relationship he is looking forward to intensifying on the SVCA board and as co-chair of the Events and Outreach Committee. Tom and Wendy live in Jefferson.

Suki and Gerry Flanagan: Gerry and Suki became full time residents of Head Tide in June of 2009. Before moving to Maine, Gerry was Vice President and Technical Director of Materials Sciences Corporation, a small engineering company focused on the application of advanced composite materials. Suki is a professional harpist with music degrees from Wellesley College and Boston University. S he has had a long performing career and loves to teach the harp. Gerry and Suki come to Maine from the Philadelphia area.

Past President Michael Herz: Before coming to Maine, Mike spent 20 years protecting San Francisco Bay from polluters as the S.F. BayKeeper and as Executive Vice President of the Oceanic Society. He has a PhD in Biopsychology from the University of Southern California and was Associate Professor in Residence at University of California, San Francisco. He was appointed to the Alaska Oil Spill Commission to assess the impact of the Exxon Valdez spill and has served on National Research Council, Department of Interior and State of California technical advisory committees. He is a board member and past chairman of Friends of the Earth, U.S., a member of the Maine Rivers board, as well as an avid river paddler and ocean sailor who has cruised over 20,000 miles on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and single-handed from San Francisco to Kauai. Mike is chair of the SVCA's Advocacy Committee.

Paul Hoffman: Initially trained as a mechanical engineer, Paul came to conservation after 24 years of aircraft engine design, technical consulting and law practice. An SVCA member since 1997, Paul joined the board in 1998, bringing legal, technical and business expertise to the SVCA. He started SVCA's Geographical Information Systems (GIS) support center in 1999 and currently manages it. He has served as President and Treasurer and is currently chair of the Governance Committee. Paul lives in Newcastle with Maureen Hoffman, SVCA's Executive Director.

David Lieser: Dave comes to SVCA with 30 years of experience in forestry and resource management experience in the forest products industry with Champion International and International Paper. He earned degrees in forestry and resource management from Ohio State University and the University of Michigan. He currently lives in Wiscasset following a career that took him to the Carolinas, upper Michigan, Connecticut and Maine. As Vice President, Northern Forest Resources with Champion, Dave was integrally involved with Champion's industry leadership in forest sustainability and stewardship and implementation of Forest Certification in several northern states. Dave oversaw numerous sizeable land and conservation easement transactions during his career, including Champion's easement grants along several Downeast salmon rivers such as the Machias and the Narraguagus. He has served on the boards of the Wildlife Habitat Council and the Forest History Society. Dave is currently the co-chair of the SVCA's Trails Committee.

Frederick Quivey: Fred and Beth Quivey moved to Wiscasset in 2007 following his retirement. A University of Maine graduate, Fred enjoyed a long career as a higher education financial administrator. While serving as the Vice President and Treasurer of Lafayette College in Easton, PA for 16 years, Fred was deeply involved with numerous local civic and conservation organizations including the Bushkill Stream Conservancy and the United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley. Fred and Beth are committed stewards of the earth.

Libbey Seigars: Libbey brings to SVCA years of conservation-related experience, including over 14 years as Director of Experiential Programs at Unity College, Unity, Maine, where the focus is on environmental studies. Prior to taking on the Unity College job in 1993, she worked for five years as volunteer coordinator for the Maine Department of Conservation in Augusta. Libbey has lived in Whitefield 24 years and has been an SVCA member since 1998. Libbey's roots in Maine go back to the beginning. She grew up in Caribou, and spent her summers at family camps on Long and Madawaska Lakes, on the far northern border. She and her husband Steve Spencer love kayaking, and boating in their 22-foot skiff. Their paddling adventures have included numerous sea kayak excursions along the coasts of Maine, the Canadian Maritime Provinces and Belize.

Ann Springhorn: Ann moved to Maine in 2001 after spending over 20 years in the telecommunications industry focusing on corporate marketing, sales and staff management. This included four years at Verizon's European Headquarters in Brussels working in the area of business development. Over the last eight years she has been actively involved in various nonprofit organizations focusing on environmental concerns. Her work as a master gardener led her to the Morris Farm, an experiential environmental education center where she became an active Board member of the Morris Farm Trust and eventually Board President. As President of the Garden Club of Wiscasset, Ann chaired several fundraisers including an area Garden Tour, which helped raise funds for the club's scholarship fund for environmental studies. In addition, the Club partnered with the SVCA to begin redesigning their headquarters' gardens focusing on native plantings. She is a graduate of Loyola University with an MBA in Finance. Ann and her husband Bob share a passion for the natural world and environmental preservation, which they pursue from their home along the Sheepscot River on Westport Island.

John Wentzel: John is a Registered Professional Forester, Certified Logging Professional and a Maine Master Logger. Born and raised in South China, Maine, he worked on the family vegetable and beef farm before receiving his BS in Forest Management from the University of Maine College of Forest Resources, in Orono. He is now a self-employed Forestry Consultant and Master Logger. He operates a small cable skidder to harvest wood products from privately-owned woodlots.

Emeritus Board of Directors (non-voting):

Nick Barth (Past President)
Nigel Calder (Past President)
Bill Thompson

Technical Advisory Board

Nigel Calder
Bambi Jones
William Logan, Esq.
Alex Pugh