Joe Trippi Fighting for his Eastern Shore home

Joe Trippi Fighting for his Eastern Shore home

From the Baltimore Sun: Fighting for his Eastern Shore home By Rona Kobell Sun reporter May 1, 2006

Political campaigner turns grass-roots environmentalist to protect the Chesapeake Bay

WITTMAN -- Just before the sun sets over Cummings Creek, Joe Trippi ambles over to say hello to Yoda, the one-horned goat, and Mrs. Lucky, one of his favorite ducks.

He seems a world away from where he was three years ago: inhaling Diet Pepsi, stuffing his cheeks with Skoal, and trying to elect an obscure former Vermont governor as president of the United States.

These days, when Trippi's not in Italy advising Romano Prodi's campaign or in Moscow addressing the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he is here, surrounded by old-growth pines and noisy chickens, trying to safeguard the Eastern Shore's open spaces from fast- encroaching development.

For the past several months, Trippi has quietly been working with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in an effort to stop the Blackwater Resort, a 3,200-home development slated to be built near Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge and Cambridge. He has joined the board of the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, an organization dedicated to preserving the Shore's rural landscapes.

But his biggest plans are ahead of him. He wants to coordinate grass-roots gatherings and mass Internet drives in the style of the Howard Dean campaign, this time to rile the public about imminent threats to the bay. Trippi hopes to connect people who care about environmental issues, whether or not they live along the estuary and regardless of their political affiliation, and help them collaborate.

It's a different sort of cause for the inveterate campaigner, who has worked seven presidential runs. This one is not ideological, not focused around a cult of personality, and not likely to end anytime soon. It is, he says, about fighting for his home.

[…]

Trippi, 49, still advises congressional candidates, among them Democrat Kweisi Mfume, who is running for U.S. Senate in Maryland. But he seems to have settled in to life on the Eastern Shore.

In a barn on his 47-acre farm between St. Michaels and Tilghman Island, and just a few creeks away from the weekend homes of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, Trippi is restoring one of the bay's few remaining two-masted wooden bugeyes. A smaller sailboat is tied to his dock.

There are few signs of the rumpled, mile-a-minute talker who ran himself and his young staff ragged. He looks relaxed in his faded jeans, denim jacket and work shirt.

"The second I get over the Bay Bridge, this big sigh of relief happens, and I let go," Trippi said.

[…]

Trippi's ability to tap into voter anger prompted Republican media consultant Frank Luntz to call him for the job of unseating Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Prodi, the challenger, was looking to refine his message and beat the incumbent billionaire. Prodi won by a hair; Berlusconi indicated that he will resign this week.

During their trips to Italy, Luntz said, Trippi spoke often of his beloved farm.

"His comment was, 'If you saw what I see every morning, you'd live there, too,'" Luntz said. "This is something very special to him. This is part of his definition of quality of life. He lives what he preaches."

[…]

Trippi has experience wrangling with developers. In the late 1990s, he and his wife, Kathleen Lash, fell in love at first sight with a 20-acre waterfront farm near St. Michaels. They bought it that day.

Before long, Trippi said, a developer bought the two large tracts on either side and got Talbot County to upzone all three parcels so his company could build hundreds of houses. By the time Trippi learned what had happened, county officials told him he could do nothing to stop it.

So, when the Cummings Creek farm went up for sale, Trippi offered the developer his farm in exchange. Trippi says his condition was that the company move to the new farm the barn and chicken coop he'd built with his sons. The developer agreed.

Trippi and Lash have settled into their new house, which is actually three structures - a one-room schoolhouse, an old waterman's cottage and a farmhouse fused together. Trippi's longtime friend, Newsweek contributing editor Peter Goldman, said the house is like the man - elements you wouldn't think to put together, but work once they're merged.

"If they try to move me off of this, we'll be seceding from the state of Maryland," Trippi said. "This is where I intend to die. As far as I'm concerned, this is where they're going to bury me."

rona.kobell@baltsun.com

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