D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty has tapped Christophe Tulou, a former environmental consultant and policymaker, to head up the District Department of the Environment.
He takes over for former DDOE Director George Hawkins, who left last September to take the general manager reins at the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority.
Tulou will assume the directorship at a time when the agency is balancing deficit-related budget cuts with a fast-growing agenda, including instituting new stormwater regulations, a first-ever sustainable energy utility contracting position and a green building mandate that places large commercial buildings within a 2012 deadline for starting to attain certification.
For the past 12 years, he has run a environmental and natural resource policy consulting firm that bears his own name. In that capacity, he also served as director of the Resilient Coasts Initiative, a public-private collaboration that the Heinz Group and Ceres launched in 2008 to come up with policy solutions for climate change.
Tulou has also advised the Clinton Climate Initiative’s Carbon and Poverty Reduction project, helmed several nature-focused nonprofits and served as executive director of the Pew Oceans Commission, which released several reports and recommendations for changing federal policy to better protect marine life.
He spent a decade in the public sector, including serving as Cabinet Secretary for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, staff director to a House banking, finance and urban affairs subcommittee and legislative director to U.S. Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del.
Tulou is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and Georgetown University Law Center, and received a master’s degrees in zoology and marine affairs from the University of Rhode Island. He sits on the board of the Environment Research Institute of the States and on the sustainable oceans and waterways committee of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.
He steps in for interim DDOE Chief Keith Anderson, the agency’s Energy Office director who had filled in at the top spot. Before Anderson, Hawkin’s special assistant, Maureen McGowan, had also been named interim director.
