By Mike Rolband
Director of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, 2025 National Wetlands Awardee
A telephone call in late 2021 from newly elected Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s staff brought me unexpectedly out of retirement. At the end of 2020, I had retired from a 30-plus year career in the field of wetland permitting, mitigation, and banking and was just focusing on my nonprofit, doing some consulting, and trying to be a farmer. Before the Governor reached out to me, I had read an article that stated his goal of helping Virginia’s economy by streamlining state environmental permitting requirements. Since I firmly believe in the preamble of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act, which states that “Healthy state and local economies and a healthy Chesapeake Bay are integrally related; balanced economic development and water quality protection are not mutually exclusive,” I had written him a letter expressing my support for his vision and interest in working for him to implement this goal. I was appointed the Director of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality in January of 2022.
Serving as DEQ Director has been an amazing experience, the capstone of a career dedicated to environmental conservation. Given that I represented permit applicants and developed regulated wetland and stream mitigation banks, I was very fortunate to already know many DEQ staff prior to assuming this role. Together we have made the agency more effective in many ways—some of which are even being emulated in other states. Most importantly, we have reduced the time it takes to both obtain a permit and enforce permit conditions by two-thirds through our Permitting Enhancement and Evaluation Platform (PEEP). Every permit now has a completeness checklist and a schedule, and we track the progress of each permit process online daily. Public transparency and accountability have made it work. I can proudly say that DEQ has achieved the Governor’s goal of improved permitting efficiency.
Looking back, I recognize that I took a circuitous route to arrive at what I have done for most of my professional career: working in the wetlands permitting and restoration field. Growing up in Vermont, I liked backpacking, cross-country skiing, snowshoe hiking, and building things, especially small dams. I went to college thinking engineering school would be like drafting class and machine shop combined—it was a shock to find out otherwise. But becoming a co-op student for Turner Construction Company got me outside as a field engineer building things. My master’s degree in Geotechnical Engineering taught me how to make usable land from “waste lands” that had high water tables and low bearing capacity—lands that I learned several years later were “wetlands.” Later, working for a subsidiary, Turner Development Corporation, I was exposed to wetlands the hard way: I was assigned a project that needed a wetlands permit. All of this occurred before the “Final Rule” that defined Waters of the United States (WOTUS) in 1986. Trying to navigate the wetland permitting process sparked my interest in the variety of natural resource management, socioeconomic, and legal challenges of environmental permitting.
I started a small real estate development firm in 1988. The firm specialized in creating value by overcoming environmental challenges on small sites that big and small developers alike would avoid—the former due to site size, and the latter due to the prohibitive consulting costs needed to solve the problems. The business was successful at first, but the recession of 1991 slammed on the brakes, so I turned to consulting to stay afloat financially. This shift led me to establish Wetland Studies and Solutions, Inc. (WSSI) and my first wetlands mitigation bank: the Julie J. Metz Wetlands Bank. A financial bank had foreclosed on the 227-acre site, originally intending to finance the development of 227 single-family lots. Between wetlands, floodplain, and Virginia’s new Chesapeake Bay Protection Act (CBPA), we found that only five lots could be built. To create some economic value and societal benefit from the property, I ended up developing Virginia’s first wetlands bank, partnering with a subsidiary of Nations Bank for Phase I. I was able to apply the engineering and scientific concepts I learned in college and grad school to make land usable to instead restore wetlands. This bank’s creation was followed by development of many more wetlands and stream banks throughout the Commonwealth.
The coolest part of this whole experience was getting to spend so much time outside. (I could even bring my dogs with me to work!) Throughout the process, I took a multitude of short courses on topics like plant identification, delineation, mitigation, and soils—provided by the Wetland Training Institute, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Rutgers University, Northern Virginia Community College, USDA Graduate School, and Rosgen, to name a few—and kept learning and teaching others. I taught many short classes over the years, and from 2017-2020 had the incredible opportunity to be a Professor of Practice at my alma mater, Cornell University. My goal was simply to be the best in this field in Northern Virginia (as I did not feel the need to travel). My company grew because of that goal, and due to the luck of operating in a location with a growing economy.
I also learned there were some wetland and stream related questions which lacked answers, so I started a nonprofit called the Resource Protection Group, Inc. to direct applied research to improve the practice of how we restore streams and wetlands. Today it also offers two software tools to help practitioners develop water budgets and select tree species and stock types developed from our research, and are currently focused on invasive species controls in wetlands and stream buffers, as well as mussel introduction and propagation to improve water quality in restored streams.
During the years of permitting 8,000+ projects, studying over 300,000 acres of land, and designing, building, and monitoring 100+ wetlands and stream projects, I periodically encountered laws and regulations that, in my opinion, lacked common sense. I learned that, by knowing the issue and having a proposed solution, laws and local ordinances can be changed through coordination with affected stakeholders; when this is done, elected officials do listen. I was thus able to make a multitude of changes to laws and regulations in the world of wetlands, streams, stormwater, and Chesapeake Bay protection.
It has been surprisingly easy to shift from being regulated to being the regulator. In fact, I believe that I am a much more pragmatic, effective regulator for having spent many years obtaining agency approvals and participating in stakeholder engagement. As unexpected as it was, the last three and a half years have been deeply satisfying.