THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505070050
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY BETTY MITCHELL GRAY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 281 lines
In May of 1974, the then-new East Carolina University student government president, Robert V. Lucas, a handsome 22-year-old with intense blue eyes and chin-length brown hair, was part of the radical student movement flourishing on many universities and colleges.
Lucas learned his lessons of activism and impatience early. And while they gave him an education that helped earn him his job as North Carolina's highest-ranking fisheries official, they are qualities that - some suspect - may lead him into contentious territory.
When Lucas was ECU student president, most of the great confrontations of the late 1960s - Vietnam War protests, civil and women's rights demonstrations - had ended.
But activism was still strong, even in the heart of North Carolina's coastal plain, as ECU students sought more control over their courses of study, their living arrangements and the hours they kept, and more of a voice in how the university spent its money.
That spring, the student legislature voted overwhelmingly to give more financial support to the school's popular Fine Arts Department by approving the transfer of $1 of each student's fees to a designated fund for the arts.
When the legislation arrived on his desk, Lucas, who had taken office only one month before, promptly vetoed it - triggering a firestorm of student protests.
He was vilified in the campus newspaper. Students hung signs on campus and made chalk drawings on the sidewalks and streets criticizing Lucas' veto. Others circulated a petition calling for his ouster.
But Lucas, near the start of his fifth year at ECU as a teaching fellow, responded swiftly with his own publicity campaign and behind-the-scenes wrangling.
In a flurry of newspaper interviews, letters to the editor and a guest editorial, Lucas maintained that guaranteeing funds for just one department would be unfair to other departments. And he convinced the student radio station, which wasn't privy to fine arts funding, to join his cause.
By May 13, 1974, Lucas had changed enough minds to carry the day, when the student legislature met to consider his actions.
A motion to override the veto was defeated, the petition drive fizzled and Lucas held onto his job.
``I wasn't stupid. I knew it was going to make me unpopular. Big time,'' Lucas recalled 21 years later, in the conference room of his law office in Selma, N.C. ``But it was the right thing to do.''
Today, Lucas, 43, has considerably less hair than he did in 1974 and prefers designer silk and cotton sweaters and tasseled brown leather loafers to the casual dress of his students days.
But the political experience he gained taking unpopular stands as an ECU student leader is a daily part of his 14-year-old Johnston County law practice and his 2-year-old role as the state's top fisheries official.
``To have any credibility in your life, sometimes you've got to do what is unpopular,'' Lucas said. ``Because what you're really after is not popularity but respect for your abilities.
``I am convinced that in the long run - and sometimes it is in the very long run - people will come around if you're consistent and try to make decisions based on what is right,'' he said.
Through his own considerable force of will, almost brutal work-ethic and unbridled optimism, forged during his childhood in a modest Raleigh neighborhood and his student years at ECU, Lucas has played a more active role in the fisheries management debate than any other Marine Fisheries Commission chairman.
``He's an activist and he isn't going to be happy sitting on the sidelines,'' said Rep. E. David Redwine, a Brunswick County Democrat and former chairman of a legislative study commission on seafood and aquaculture issues. ``As an activist, he wants to be in the center, directing traffic.''
He began directing the fisheries management debate in 1993 as Gov. James B. Hunt Jr.'s hand-picked, unpaid chairman of the state Marine Fisheries Commission. His role was expanded in 1994 as the General Assembly's designated head of a study committee that is seeking answers to some of the key questions of coastal fisheries management - questions that are as controversial along the coast as arts funding was on the ECU campus 20 years ago.
Over the past two years, Lucas has also infused other Marine Fisheries Commission members with the same spirit of purpose and drive that he brings to his posts, according to fisheries policy makers, industry members and other observers throughout the state.
``I think it's time for somebody like Bob,'' said former Division of Marine Fisheries Director William T. Hogarth, who worked with Lucas for two years. ``I know it's been said before and said often but North Carolina is at a crossroads in fisheries management and if you want to make a difference, you can make a difference.
``Now is the time,'' Hogarth said from his office with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Silver Spring, Md. ``Two or three years from now, if something is not done, it will be too late to make a difference.''
Membership on the Marine Fisheries Commission, the 17-member panel that oversees the state's coastal fishing industry and manages the state's coastal fish stocks, is considered one of the most contentious appointed state government posts. The average member often spends dozens of hours a year at boisterous public hearings and in harsh commission debate in an effort to balance the often conflicting needs of the state's commercial and sports anglers and the coastal fish stocks.
In past years, hundreds of fishermen have routinely crowded into meeting rooms at local community colleges and other public buildings to protest proposed regulations, shouted down commission members who tried to explain the proposals and presented funeral wreaths, draped in black ribbon, to commission members.
``I definitely did not realize it would be as controversial,'' Lucas said. ``And I didn't have any idea it would be this time-consuming.''
Despite past controversies, Lucas says coastal fishing's greatest challenge lies ahead - developing a new coastal fisheries management plan for North Carolina, presenting it to the state legislature in May of 1996 and implementing the measures outlined in the plan.
On Thursday, the moratorium steering committee begins to consider who, among some 22,000 full- and part-time commercial fishermen, should qualify for commercial fishing licenses and what type of fishing gear these fishermen should be allowed to use. This will be one of the steering committee's most crucial and contentious issues.
Throughout his life, Lucas has maintained a frenetic schedule.
As a law student at Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., Lucas held three jobs while following an accelerated course of study - arriving on campus about 6:30 a.m. and returning home at 9 p.m. after a day's study and work.
Today, he arrives at the law firm of Lucas, Bryant & Denning about 6:30 a.m. and works 12-hour days.
Lucas fields an average of 65 telephone calls daily from clients and fishing interests, while sitting at a large wooden desk in an office decorated with tan and royal blue plaid wallpaper, surrounded by prints of fishing boats and coastal marshes, family photos and an embroidered poem stitched by his daughter, Kelly.
He spends about two days each week tending to marine fisheries business. He travels across the state to meet with fishermen, drives to Raleigh to lobby legislators, cajoles members of the Marine Fisheries Commission to his way of thinking, plots strategy with confidants, holds interviews with reporters - and maintains a thriving personal-injury law practice.
Whether this hands-on approach is an asset or a liability for the coastal fishing industry depends to a great extent on who's talking.
Lucas' supporters say that he has breathed new life into a previously moribund commission.
His critics, however, say he goes too far in pressing his own agenda.
Others say Lucas aligns himself too closely with the sports fishing community.
All agree that his impatience and unfettered drive can be intimidating, particularly for Division of Marine Fisheries and Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources staff members who have been accustomed to more low-key, less-involved fisheries commission chairmen.
His impatience ``simultaneously is a strength and a weakness,'' said Richen M. Brame, director of the state chapter of the Atlantic Coast Conservation Association, and a Lucas supporter.
``When he wants something done, he usually wants it done yesterday, and this may alienate some folks.''
Even Lucas' supporters wonder whether, given his impatience, Lucas will be able to stomach the frustrations and setbacks that go with fisheries management.
Former commission member Michael K. Orbach, a 10-year veteran of fisheries management battles, said Lucas ``is in a tough situation. This is a tough time to be in fisheries management.''
``If he has a personal characteristic that's going to beat him, it's impatience,'' Orbach said.
Hunt, however, believes he picked the right person for the job.
``I'm for Bob Lucas because he's for the fish; he's for protecting the resource,'' said Hunt. ``He's going to be good for commercial fishermen. They may not understand it now, but they will in a few years.''
When he can, Lucas relaxes in his pearl-white, two-door Lexus, jazz music blaring from the compact disc player as he drives down the highway or at the helm of his 31-foot Fountain boat, heading out the inlet at Cape Lookout toward his favorite fishing grounds.
But these trappings of wealth and power - the rewards of his endless energy - belie his humble beginnings in a modest Raleigh neighborhood as the son of a plumber and grocery store cashier.
``I won't say that we were poor, because we weren't,'' Lucas said. ``But we weren't well-off by a long shot. It took everything that my folks made to live.''
But Lucas' parents instilled in him self-confidence and determination to get ahead.
``My daddy says, `I believe I overdone it, son,' '' Lucas said, drawing up with laughter. ``He says, `I meant to teach you work, son, but I went and overdone it. You're going to have to lighten up just a little bit.' ''
At 14, Lucas earned money to buy his own clothes by mowing neighbors' lawns. The aggressive teenager soon had more lawns than he could handle by himself, so Lucas managed the business and recruited other youngsters to mow the lawns - keeping a percent of the receipts for himself.
When he graduated from Enloe High School in 1970, Lucas became the first member of his family to earn a high school diploma and headed for college with the help of student loans.
``My parents pushed me constantly to go to college. That was never an option,'' Lucas said. ``It was as much a part of their dream as it was mine.''
Lucas enrolled at ECU, where he joined the radical student movement sweeping university campuses all across the nation, let his hair grow and after a year studying in Bonn and a summer in London - both through scholarships - was elected student body president.
Emboldened by his early success as president, Lucas, in 1975 challenged more powerful foes: In January, the school's board of trustees and popular chancellor; in April, the state legislature.
That January, this time with the support of the campus media, Lucas led the opposition to a plan by the school's trustees and Chancellor Leo Jenkins, a former U.S. Marine, to use student fees to buy new lights for the football stadium.
After weeks of arguing with Lucas and other student leaders, Jenkins and the trustees backed down. The school would pay for new stadium lights, they said, with private donations.
In April, near the end of his term as student government president, Lucas led nearly 100,000 students at the University of North Carolina's 16 constituent colleges and universities in their fight against the state legislature, where a Senate appropriations subcommittee had proposed a $200 increase in tuition at most schools.
He organized simultaneous rallies on every state university campus - an event that received national attention. Lucas led the Union of N.C. Student Body Presidents, a group that he founded about seven months earlier, at a rally outside the legislative building in Raleigh, and met with then-university system President William C. Friday.
The Senate appropriations committee backed down and cut the proposed tuition increase by half.
In 1975, Lucas went to Cumberland School of Law, with the help of a student loan.
In December 1977, after finishing his studies six months early, Lucas, who had by then married, moved with his wife to Selma and began his law career as a clerk for a law firm in nearby Smithfield.
In 1980, a split with the firm left Lucas with $200 in the bank and a $20,000 loan that had to be paid back in a year. He started his own practice in Selma.
As his practice grew and thrived, Lucas began to acquire the means and the leisure time to indulge his lifelong fascination with the ocean.
That love affair had begun with an annual weekend trip with his parents to Atlantic Beach, where Lucas, at 10 years old, would fish off the Iron Steamer Pier with a ball of twine because the family could only afford one rod and reel.
``I can remember getting on the pier and I'd beg them to leave me on there - to let me spend the night on there - and I did as I got older,'' he said. ``I'd fish all night and talk to people on the pier.''
By 1992, Lucas had acquired the political connections that would lead him to the Marine Fisheries Commission.
That year, as Johnston County chairman of Hunt's gubernatorial campaign, Lucas headed the county's fund-raising efforts, which garnered about $80,000 and gave Lucas the chance to meet many of Hunt's top advisors.
After Hunt was elected, he said, ``Bob, I'd like to see you involved in the administration,'' Lucas recalls.
``I thought about it for a long time and I made myself one promise - that I would not get involved in anything unless my heart was really in it,'' he said.
``I wasn't interested in doing something just as a title.
``I cared so much about fishing, but I didn't know anything, really, about the Marine Fisheries Commission, so I got on the phone and found out,'' Lucas said. ``I called the division.''
During a weekend trip to his home on Harker's Island in early 1993, Lucas went to an island tackle shop and got a copy of the coastal fisheries rule book.
Published annually by the Marine Fisheries Commission, the 4-inch by 7-inch, 198-page book contains all the rules promulgated by the commission and information on the commission and its duties.
``I came back to the house and read it,'' he said. ``I skipped though all the metes and bounds descriptions, but I read the stuff and I saw how the commission was made up.''
A few weeks later, Lucas wrote a two-page letter to Hunt, outlining his qualifications and asking to be considered when a commission vacancy occurred.
``I'm probably the only person in the state that wanted to be on the commission,'' he said. ``It's just because I felt that strong about it and I felt like I had the ability to do it.''
Hunt took Lucas up on the offer, but went one step further.
In March of 1993, he called Lucas and asked him to accept chairman's seat on the Marine Fisheries Commission. Hunt, Lucas recalls, asked only two things in return - that Lucas do whatever he could to protect the resource; and, in making those decisions, always give everybody a fair say.
``My motivating factor is to look back years from now and know I've made a difference.'' he said. ``That my 13-year-old son will be able to enjoy fishing and the coast like I did.''
``The question is do we have the resolve, me and others, to make what are going to be very difficult and controversial decisions,'' Lucas said. ``It's going to be hard but I think we're going about it in the right way.''
Lucas' supporters say it would be stupid to bet against him.
``He doesn't like to fail,'' said former fisheries Director Hogarth. ``I don't think he knows what the word `failure' is.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
DREW C. WILSON/Staff
Robert V. Lucas believes that ``to have any credibility in your
life, sometimes you've got to do what is unpopular.''
Photo
Robert V. Lucas was an activist in college, and in many ways, still
is.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY FISHERIES by CNB