THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 24, 1994 TAG: 9409230104
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ESTHER DISKIN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 237 lines
IN THE NINE years he has been North Carolina's chief strategist against the Lake Gaston pipeline, Special Deputy Attorney General Alan S. Hirsch hasn't spent more than an hour at the lake.
Never boated on it. Never fished in it. Never waded along the shoreline. He knows the lake from reading reports and talking with scientists.
``I guess it's sort of odd,'' he says. ``But it's like health care. How many people debating it have spent time in an operating room? That's the American system.''
And what Alan Hirsch understands best is the American system. How to shepherd a project through the maze of bureaucracy or how to get it hopelessly trapped.
For nearly a decade, Hirsch has succeeded in tying the proposed 76-mile pipeline into a pretzel.
As head of North Carolina's Consumer Protec tion Division, he's used the system's roadblocks to destroy Virginia Beach's schedule for building the pipeline. And perhaps to kill the project entirely.
He plays ``The System'' like a virtuoso, say colleagues. He can be a pit bull in court. He can cajole politicians behind closed doors to approve consumer-protection bills. He can sit around a table and negotiate a solution.
And just when it seems you've cleared one of his roadblocks, he throws up another. Like this past summer. On the day that Virginia officials celebrated news of a major decision to push the pipeline ahead, there was Hirsch stepping forward, letter in hand.
It was from top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, calling for yet another lengthy study. It wasn't just that Beach officials hadn't received a copy of the letter. They hadn't heard a whisper about it.
When asked about the 44-year-old Hirsch, the nicest thing most Virginia Beach officials can say is ``no comment.''
``I'd probably need a police escort if I came up there,'' Hirsch once joked.
Lessons from Dad:
Play by the rules
Alan Hirsch was a fast-rising lawyer in the state's Consumer Protection Division when he was, as he says, ``sentenced to the Lake Gaston case.''
That was 1985. He was one of four young turks assigned to carry out Gov. James Hunt's edict: ``not one drop.'' Hirsch is the only one still left on the case.
The sentence won't end until the case does. ``If Alan is here, Alan will be on it to the end,'' says Andrew Vanore Jr., chief deputy attorney general.
For Hirsch, the long battle hasn't been just about stopping Virginia Beach from taking North Carolina's water supply. It's about the idea of protecting people.
``I see that in Alan's personality that he very much wants to help the underdog,'' says Phil Telfer, a friend and Hirsch's counterpart in the attorney general's environmental division.
When Marcy Hirsch first met her husband-to-be, ``he wanted to be a knight with a white hat out to save the world. And he's found that niche in state government.''
Hirsch keeps his credo in the top drawer of his desk. It's a poem written by his father, who died when Alan was 9. Called ``My Son,'' the short poem closes with a wish:
I ask but this . . .
That he should ease
By just a straw
The burden of his fellow man.
Five years ago, while helping his mother clean out a closet, Hirsch found a box full of postcards and a sheaf of papers in his father's handwriting. It was a collection of family stories and moral advice written to him.
Much was practical - from choosing a wife to reading the classics. There were also pithy lessons: ``Life is like a game. If you play according to the rules, you will be respected and happy. But if you break the rules or cheat, sooner or later someone will tell and you will be shunned.''
Hirsch has not read that passage in years. He doesn't have to.
``There's always the pressure between wanting to get as much as you can and wanting to do the right thing,'' he says. ``If you manage to get more than is really fair, then in the long run, everyone knows. It may be OK today, but tomorrow it's not OK.''
A young turk
in The System
In some ways, he grew up fast. By age 2, he was in preschool. One year later, he had learned to read. By 7, he was in fifth grade - an awkward, precocious kid, three years younger than his classmates.
``For whatever reason, I always had my defenders, big kids who would take care of me,'' Hirsch says. ``It gave me a feeling for those who are not part of the crowd, to pull for the underdog.''
He was increasingly independent and always willing to debate a point.
``He would say, `It's not enough to say no,' '' says his mother. `` `I think you have to have a good reason.'. . . We'd sometimes end in a draw, neither of us making a concession.''
After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he headed to New York City for law school at Columbia University, his father's alma mater.
His college years, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, were a time of explosions on college campuses. Students overflowed from a sit-in at Columbia's president's office onto the great steps; in Ohio, National Guardsmen fired from a hillside to kill four students at Kent State.
Hirsch considered himself a rebel, joined in the marches but never strayed too far from organized channels. His protests led him into student government and an unsuccessful run for student body president. ``I kept one foot in the establishment,'' he says, ``always the moderate.''
His love for Chapel Hill drew him back to North Carolina, and back to The System. This time, he was with state government.
He spent one miserable year as a lawyer for the Department of Corrections, defending the state against lawsuits from prisoners. By 1975, he'd found his niche: the Consumer Protection Division. By 1993, when he was appointed director of the division by state Attorney General Mike Easley, he had an impressive track record in consumer protection.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the division's top lawyer and lobbyist, he helped push more than 50 tough consumer-protection laws through the Legislature.
The new laws dealt with harassment by debt collection agencies, odometer tampering in car sales, phony contests, pyramid schemes and unfair evictions.
Rufus Edmisten, his boss during those years and now North Carolina's secretary of state, said Hirsch has a talent for persuading even pro-business conservatives to support these laws.
``He could take what I said and work with the legislators one-on-one,'' says Edmisten, ``translating it into language people could understand.''
Hirsch quickly figured out the key: Find the politicians and government insiders who had the power to make things happen, and make them listen.
Not an easy task for a person who describes himself as shy, not ``smooth,'' certainly no schmoozer.
``I didn't want to BS with people,'' he says. ``I didn't want to smile at people I didn't care about. I didn't want to pretend.
``It was very hard.''
He learned. He spends hours on the phone in one-on-one conversations. Small scraps of paper, notes about phone calls he must return, are arranged in neat rows on a corner of his desk.
Battling the Beach
for the underdog
Consumer protection is the topic he most likes to discuss. Lake Gaston doesn't arouse his deepest passion.
Still, he is committed to winning the case. And the way he casts the pipeline battle meshes with his vision of himself as a defender of the underdog.
In his eyes, Virginia Beach is a wealthy, urban center with plenty of alternatives for water, from desalination to digging wells. He says Beach officials chose Lake Gaston at least partly because they didn't think the rural North Carolina communities in the area had the ammunition and stamina to fight.
``It doesn't make sense for one city to grab a resource for all time when it should be a resource that is shared by all people,'' he said.
He has had an uncanny ability to drag bureaucratic roadblocks into the project's path.
There are the small, irritating bumps. Virginia Beach officials have complained for years that North Carolina never fails to ask for extensions of deadlines or file legal appeals.
Then there are the major potholes. Like the letter from the EPA that Hirsch whapped them with.
The letter had an impact: The last federal agency with oversight on the project heeded the EPA's request and is conducting an environmental study taking at least a year.
Hirsch has other traits that make him a great strategist, say colleagues.
``He's smart,'' are the first two words everyone says about him. He's also, they say, a good listener and capable of quickly grasping ``the big picture.''
He has one thing in common with Thomas Leahy, the man on the Virginia Beach side fighting for the pipeline: Both men, convinced of their positions, won't let go.
Hirsch, says Edmisten, is ``like a pit bull when he's right. He will sink his teeth into it and not let go. But he knows when to compromise.
``Of course, there's not much compromise on this one.''
On campus: letting
the world shout
If there's one place that might lure him from state government, it's the classroom.
He recalls his decision to become a part-time teacher at the University of North Carolina as a revelation. He was strolling across the campus on his day off, hearing the students' shouts as they came out of the buildings: ``It was so different from the bureaucratic world, the drudgery. It was so alive. I had to be a part of it,'' he says.
He's a passionate mentor. He joins his students for coffee. He finds them summer jobs. His classes inspire students to write him letters, which he saves in an overstuffed folder. They call him, years after graduating, to ask his advice.
In his classes on politics and leadership, he talks about having vision and the practical skills to make an impact. ``The two sides, the practical and the realistic, ought to meet,'' he said. ``Those of us in the real world can't lose sight of idealism.''
But he doesn't just talk the talk. He pushes the students to act.
Three years ago, he told students to draft a mock bill for the General Assembly. One of the students suggested a ban on spanking in schools. Laws to ban it had been repeatedly defeated by the Legislature.
Hirsch suggested that they should get the General Assembly to pass their bill into law. The students were skeptical. Several had never entered the General Assembly building.
Hirsch showed them the rules of the game. They read about bills that had failed and changed their proposal to make it easier to sell. Instead of a full-scale ban, their bill gave school boards the power to set the policy.
Hirsch taught them the art of ``buttonholing'': As legislators moved between committee rooms, his students ran up with a fact sheet, ready to explain their bill in half a minute. They targeted big hitters at the top of important committees.
When the bill passed, the students made headlines around the state. Teachers wrote them letters of thanks. They had had an impact: Hirsch says half of the students in the state are now in school systems that ban corporal punishment.
Christine Frohock, one of his students, can't shake her memory of that success. A few weeks ago, she called Hirsch about her plans to attend law school.
``He taught us we needn't be as cynical about politics and bureaucracy as some people are,'' she said. ``Alan conveys a tremendous enthusiasm about life and making a difference. It's contagious. It's addictive.''
Someday, Hirsch's passion for teaching may push him into the classroom to stay. Now, he's happy to juggle many roles: teacher, crusader and, always, strategist to stop the pipeline.
Activity on the Lake Gaston case comes in waves. When it comes, it crashes into Hirsch's family life. About four or five weekends a year, the father who plays and jokes with his 14-year-old daughter, Melanie, and 8-year-old daughter, Sara, disappears into his study.
He doesn't talk about the case much at home, because his family just wants it to be over.
``It goes on and on,'' said his wife, Marcy. ``It's like round 1,692.''
After nine years, Hirsch wants to move on, as long as he wins the case. ``There are so many problems out there in the world,'' he says. ``It's frustrating to be stuck in this intractable one.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by Ian Martin
Hirsch on Leah: "He seems to question the sincerity of our point of
view."
KEYWORDS: LAKE GASTON PIPELINE ATTORNEY LAWYER PROFILE by CNB