Chris Mihaly
Chris grew up appreciating and enjoying the waters and environs of the Farmington, the Connecticut, and the Allagash Rivers, among others. As a Girl Scout she worked on the cleanup and restoration of a town park along a local stream in New Jersey, and in high school participated in a “water analysis” class taking samples from local water bodies and analyzing (and publicizing) the results. She graduated from Dartmouth College, and Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was an editor of the Ecology Law Quarterly. She practiced law with the firm of Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger in San Francisco for fifteen years, representing local governments and community organizations in environmental protection and land use planning. She worked with California community groups and nonprofits including the League to Save Lake Tahoe and Save the Bay, and the intergovernmental Sacramento Area Water Forum, to assure long-term protection of water and wildlife resources, open spaces, and agricultural lands. After 20 years in the Bay Area, Chris and her family were ready to give up living on their houseboat on the Bay in Sausalito, and move Back East. In 2004, their search for a New England small town with an old-fashioned sense of community brought them to Montpelier, where Chris joined the Tobacco Enforcement Unit of the Vermont Attorney General’s Office. She is grateful for the opportunity to work with the dedicated folks at VRC to help protect and preserve some of Vermont’s irreplaceable wild and beautiful places.
