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New Jersey

The Sierra Club's Gadfly in the Age of Hardball

TRENTON - THERE he is, skewering Bradley M. Campbell, the state's environmental commissioner as a "pander bear." Or referring to pharmaceutically tainted waters as "Viagra Falls." Or dismissing Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey's State of the State address as "his 15 minutes of fame" before an inevitable decline.

Yes, it would have been difficult for even the most casual consumers of New Jersey news in recent years to avoid coming across the name Jeff Tittel.

Who is this Mr. Tittel, one may ask, and who appointed him expert on everything?

As Mr. Tittel explains it, his ubiquity is simply a function of his will to be heard.

"People expect us to take what we're given and then get out of the way," he said in a recent interview, conducted in a hearing room at the State House that he uses when the Legislature is in session. "But we don't have the ability to stop bad things, or to make good things happen, by being quiet."

Mr. Tittel -- a loping, mustachioed 48-year-old -- is usually identified as the executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club. To the immense consternation of his targets, that title may suggest to impressionable readers that Mr. Tittel is some inoffensive tree hugger -- more at home in a hammock than a brouhaha.

He is not.

Among the political insiders who regularly bump up against Mr. Tittel's formidable frame, he is known as one of Trenton's most hard-edged lobbyists.

In an insider's craft that is usually based on the cultivation of relationships with lawmakers -- a quiet chat, a couple of drinks, a steak dinner at Lorenzo's -- Mr. Tittel's persuasive technique is more often characterized by the rhetorical hand grenades he passes on to reporters, as often as not leaving it to them to pull the pin and lob.

"Most legislators would say that if you're a lobbyist, you don't want to be in the paper negatively talking about them, especially on stuff that has nothing to do with the environment," Mr. Codey said in a telephone interview. "You want to keep your relationships. You might disagree with a legislator on something today, but there might be something else tomorrow. So when he goes off half-cocked, does he hurt the cause or help it? I think it makes him less effective."

Mr. Tittel's uncharacteristically terse response: "I got his attention."

Whether Mr. Tittel is helped or hurt by his style, he has undoubtedly made his presence felt in New Jersey politics since his arrival in 1998, transforming the once-ineffectual Sierra Club into a serious lobbying counterweight to better-financed commercial interests and raising the profile of environmental issues across the board.

By the estimation of some political insiders, Mr. Tittel's efforts have had a measurable effect on debates over such issues as fast-track legislation -- a law intended to ease bureaucracy for developers that is now the subject of mounting opposition in the Legislature -- and the multibillion-dollar development of the Meadowlands.

"People used to think of the environmental community as goody-two-shoes who said nice things and were never offensive," said Alan Marcus, veteran lobbyist and public affairs consultant. "But Tittel actually talks more like a developer. He's offensive, but effective. He's raised the awareness of the Sierra Club, and the rest of the environmental community has risen with that tide."

Growing up in Hillside and Newark in a politically active family, Mr. Tittel -- the son of a steelworker and a homemaker -- had his first taste of politics while still in elementary school. He was attending political rallies, and in an odd piece of foreshadowing, he got to -- as he put it -- "play around" in the office of Gov. Robert B. Meyner while accompanying his mother to a protest she had helped organize over America's involvement in Vietnam.

As he got older, he says, his interest in environmental issues grew as he watched development and pollution swallow up large chunks of the state. By the time he was in junior high school, Mr. Tittel said, he was persuading the mayor of Hillside to help with a clean-up of the nearby Elizabeth River.

After graduating from Rutgers, he followed the time-honored routine of the professional political operative, living, as he explained it, "from cycle to cycle," working on local and national Democratic campaigns and doing consulting work in between.

He quickly put that background to good use, taking his first paid job in environmental activism in 1998 with the Sierra Club. These days, Mr. Tittel -- who lives in Lambertville with his girlfriend -- said he "thinks" he earns $55,000 a year.

Once he was running the state organization, he lost no time picking fights with Gov. Christie Whitman over the amount of land allotted to urban parks and her proposal for less-cumbersome enforcement of development restrictions in New Jersey's watershed.

With that opening salvo, he served notice that he planned to operate differently from the environmental groups that enjoyed relatively cordial relations with the administration.

"Whitman once said to me: 'Business leaders have clout. What kind of clout do you have?"' Mr. Tittel recalled, in his customary soft-spoken, deadpan delivery. "I said, 'I have the ability to beat up on you in the press.' I didn't think it was our job to go gently into the night on an issue. If we weren't going to be aggressive and engage the media -- if we'd sit around and wait for the administration to do something positive on the environment -- we'd just get swatted like mosquitoes."

Ms. Whitman has her opinion on how Mr. Tittel conducted business. "A lot of the people who worked with him from my administration who were responsible for a lot of those policies would work with him in good faith, and then turn around and find quotes that were slamming everybody," she said last week. "I don't think that always helped his cause."

Since that splashy beginning, Mr. Tittel's influence in Trenton has spread like an oil spill in wind-whipped waters. He was seen as something of an insider during the early years of James E. McGreevey's administration -- he could count senior officials of the state's Department of Environmental Protection among his closest allies -- only to become one of the former governor's sharpest critics after Mr. McGreevey signed into law the fast-track bill that would have eased requirements for building permits.

For his efforts, Mr. Tittel was recognized by the national Sierra Club last year for his influence on public policy by helping put water quality, preservation of the Highlands and restrictions on auto emissions on the McGreevey agenda. In the process, membership in the state chapter of the Sierra Club grew to 24,000 from 13,500 in 1998.

"He's been very effective," said State Senator Leonard Lance, a Republican from Hunterdon County who shares with Mr. Tittel the ability to turn a precise and cutting phrase. And Mr. Lance, who is the Senate minority leader, has been joined by Mr. Tittel in opposing the fast-track legislation.

Typically, Mr. Tittel's favored methods of opposition include letter-writing and fax campaigns aimed at specific legislators, litigation, heaps of technical testimony and direct lobbying of lawmakers and administration officials. And then there is the area in which Mr. Tittel has made the greatest reputation for himself: what is known in the political world as "message."

"He can summarize the substance of an issue regarding the environment in an understandable fashion better that anyone I've ever known," Mr. Lance said. "He gets to the heart of the matter very quickly, and I commend him for that."

Asked about that ability, Mr. Tittel told of how he once boiled down a six-page explanation of suburban sprawl produced by fellow environmentalists to two words. "They were back and forth, talking in these scientific terms that only we would understand," he recalled. "I told them, 'Here's your definition: Land Cancer."'

That ability to speak in sound bites, a legacy of Mr. Tittel's time on the campaign trail, is only part of what puts him in the paper. Judging by the amount of time he invests lurking around press row on the second floor of the State House -- often just to chat, other times to drop a crumb -- it is clear that Mr. Tittel works at it.

"I think he's one of the hardest-working lobbyists around here," said Bob Ingle, Trenton bureau chief for Gannett, which publishes several newspapers in New Jersey. "He's here all the time, throughout the building when the legislative people are here, and he's on press row a lot. He knows everyone who works here and what stories they're working on. There may be other people who have his knowledge on environmental issues -- there could be, although frankly I doubt it."

Yet Mr. Tittel's critics -- and there are many -- accuse him of grandstanding, essentially worming his way into the news media with amusing and controversial quotations in place of substance -- even on subjects seemingly unrelated to the environment.

Indeed, the very mention of Mr. Tittel's name to supporters of Xanadu -- the five-million-square-foot retail and entertainment complex being built in the Meadowlands -- provokes reactions ranging from disdain to something approaching apoplexy.

"Throughout the negotiations on Xanadu, Jeff Tittel was never to be seen until the end, and then all he did was trash it with quotable quotes," said George Zoffinger, the voluble president of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, who also knows something about snappy quotes. "If you're head of the Sierra Club, you have a lot of responsibility. You've got to do more than object with short little quips in the press."

A casual computer search shows Mr. Tittel's name in dozens of newspaper articles about Xanadu, in which he frequently refers to the ambitious project as a "mega-mall." For their part, developers prefer to call it a Disney-like entertainment complex. (And the New York Giants refer to it as a subject of litigation.)

In criticizing Mr. Tittel, Mr. Zoffinger -- who is understandably on the opposite side of many issues -- did echo a point made by some prominent environmentalists: he does not like to compromise.

To underscore his position, Mr. Zoffinger cited an agreement in which the state agreed to buy nearly 600 acres of wetlands, known as the Empire Tract, from Xanadu's developers to preserve -- an arrangement that was praised by the Hackensack Riverkeeper, an environmental organization, but condemned by Mr. Tittel, who filed suit to block the project.

"If you're the head of the Sierra Club, you can't be against everything," Mr. Zoffinger said. "You've got to have some ability to allow people to create jobs and make a living at the same time as you protect the environment."

Mr. Tittel is unruffled and undeterred. And he rejects the notion that he would be better off involving himself in environmental issues rather than wading into all manner of political battles.

"The Sierra Club is a multifaceted organization," he said. "Sometimes legislators don't like it. We're pro-choice, pro family planning, anti-war in Iraq -- bombs aren't exactly good for air quality -- anti-Nafta, Cafta. We're against the weaponization of space, and we're for campaign finance reform, because we feel the brunt of bad government when developers can make big contributions and end up with laws like fast track. The environment and politics can't be separated like some people think they can."

Asked about the need to compromise, as in the case of Xanadu, Mr. Tittel's deadpan expression was suddenly replaced, however briefly, by laughter.

"Everyone is used to environmentalists playing dead," he said. "They think that once we feel as if we've stopped one thing, we'll go along blindly with something else. That's why they're all so mad."

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section NJ, Page 14 of the National edition with the headline: At the Heart of the State's Environmental Wars; The Sierra Club's Gadfly in the Age of Hardball. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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