Long-time Hoosier Environmental Council senior attorney Kim Ferraro will be leaving HEC to become senior staff attorney at the Conservation Law Center Aug. 1.

As director of HEC’s legal program, Ferraro was behind numerous precedent-setting victories in federal and state courts that have held both violators and regulators accountable and enforced the laws and policies meant to protect the environment and human health, according to an HEC news release.

Among other successes, her legal advocacy stopped several factory farms from endangering the health of Hoosier communities, required the cleanup of millions of tons of steel-making waste dumped within feet of Lake Michigan, put an end to toxic exposures suffered by a low-income community in Elkhart from a nearby industrial waste processor, prevented a dangerous ethanol refinery from being built near the Kankakee River and required federal agencies to enforce existing protections for the state’s few remaining wetlands.

“It has been an honor and a privilege over the last decade to work side-by-side with some of the most highly skilled, dedicated and respected environmental policy experts, as well as HEC’s extremely talented, collaborative and passionate team of outreach, communications and development professionals,” Ferraro said in the release.

In her new role, Ferraro will lead the CLC’s growing docket of litigation, including continuing to represent HEC in ongoing cases. She will assist with CLC’s state and national legislative efforts to protect public lands, wild places, threatened and endangered species and freshwater ecosystems.

Ferraro will also help teach law students in the practice of environmental and conservation law as a clinical professor with CLC’s Conservation Law Clinic through Indiana University’s Mauer School of Law.

“On behalf of HEC’s staff and board, I am sorry to see Kim go. In her 11 years at HEC, she has achieved a strong track record of success – in the courts, at the Indiana General Assembly, and in communities across Indiana – in improving environmental conditions in our state,” HEC’s board president Tom Barrett said in the release. “However, her move to the Conservation Law Center is not really a 'good-bye,' since her excellent work for Indiana will continue.”