CEC welcomes new Board members
The Community Environmental Council is pleased to announce the addition of four new Board members, including Laura Burton Capps, Christopher E. Hahn, Karl L. Hutterer, and John H. Steed, to the organization’s Board of Directors.
Laura Burton Capps has spent over 15 years developing strategic communications and issue advocacy campaigns for the nation’s highest profile public officials—including President Bill Clinton, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign—as well as for academic and non-profit organizations. Her current work involves national and local issues of immigration reform, child hunger, interfaith education and climate change. The daughter of Congresswoman Lois Capps, she has recently established her own public affairs consulting firm in her hometown of Santa Barbara.
Christopher E. Hahn, J.D. has over 20 years of experience in developing a broad litigation and transactional practice in real estate, trust and probate, and business. He received his Juris Doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and joined the California Bar in 1989. Currently, he is Senior Associate at Allen & Kimbell law firm. He actively supports the Santa Barbara community, having served in the past as a board member or volunteer at local nonprofits including the Environmental Defense Center, California Rural Legal Assistance, the Braille Institute, and AYSO.
Karl L. Hutterer, Ph.D. is well known in the Santa Barbara area after serving as the Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History from 2000 to 2012. He has held positions at universities around the world including in the Philippines, at the University of Hawaii, the East-west Center in Hawaii, Bryn Mawr College, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has served or serves on several national and state boards of museum and non-profit organizations.
John H. Steed, J.D. joins the CEC Board with 31 years of experience in private practice after earning his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1977. Throughout his career, Steed has specialized in corporate law, financial services, and real estate transactions with private law firms in Orlando, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, and Tokyo. After retiring from Paul, Hastings LLP as a partner in 2008, Steed began an international business consulting practice, and he continues to investigate opportunities for collaboration between U.S. and Japanese companies in the fields of renewable energy generation and power storage.The CEC would also like to thank John Melack, Elizabeth Wagner, Brian Fahnestock, and Russ McGlothlin for their dedicated and generous service as Board members, and we wish them well in their future endeavors.