educator environmentalist lawyer
George Sherman Hawkins was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Edward Jackson Hawkins and Barbara Rollo Hawkins. Cleveland lies on the southern shore of Lake Erie in northern Ohio and developed into one of the major industrial and port cities of the American Midwest.
Hawkins graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1983 with a bachelor's degree in history. Founded in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the United States, and its undergraduate program emphasizes the liberal arts alongside scholarship in the sciences and humanities.
He then studied at Harvard Law School, graduating cum laude with a Juris Doctor in 1987. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is among the oldest law schools in the United States and has long been one of the country's most prominent centers of legal education.
Hawkins began his legal career with Ropes & Gray, a Boston firm founded in 1865, where he practiced as an environmental lawyer from 1988 to 1992. He had been admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1987, and he is also a member of the District of Columbia bar. His legal career also included a partnership in a law firm.
In 1992 he joined the United States Environmental Protection Agency, an agency created in 1970 to consolidate federal responsibilities for pollution control and environmental protection. He worked there until 1997 as senior assistant regional counsel and special assistant to the regional administrator. In 1997 he served as the EPA representative to the National Performance Review, the federal government reform initiative launched in 1993 under Vice President Al Gore, where he helped streamline environmental protection programs at the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
From 1997 to 2004 he was executive director of the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association, a New Jersey nonprofit working to protect the watersheds of the Stony Brook and Millstone rivers. In 1999 he began teaching environmental law and policy at Princeton University, where he served as a senior lecturer through the Princeton Environment Institute. From 2004 to 2007 he was executive director of New Jersey Future, a nonprofit economic development organization in New Jersey.
In 2007 he became director of the District Department of the Environment, an agency with about 300 employees and a budget of roughly $110 million. The agency was later renamed the Department of Energy and Environment, and he held the directorship until 2009.
On September 3, 2009, the board of directors of the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority, known as DC Water, unanimously named him chief executive officer and general manager. DC Water is an independent authority that provides drinking water and wastewater treatment for the District and surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia. During his tenure the authority pursued the $2.6 billion Clean Rivers Project to reduce sewage and stormwater overflows into local rivers. He led DC Water until 2017.
In August 2016 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, which advises the president on infrastructure policy. After leaving DC Water he founded Moonshot Missions, a nonprofit focused on helping communities secure safe, accessible, and affordable drinking water. In 2018 he became executive in residence at XPV Water Partners, a firm active in the water sector.
At DC Water, Hawkins secured board approval to triple the rate of the program replacing the utility's water and sewer infrastructure, much of which had been installed generations earlier.
He introduced new financing methods for long-term water infrastructure, including a 100-year bond and an environmental impact bond, and worked to set water prices more closely aligned with the cost of service.
He launched the Team Blue improvement program at DC Water, connected to the BlueStat process for evaluating business processes against benchmarks and performance statistics.
He implemented the Anacostia 2032 Plan, an effort to restore the Anacostia River, one of the most polluted rivers in the country, and support economic revitalization along its banks.
He launched and chaired the Mayor's Green Team, which coordinates the sustainability program of the District Government across more than 40 agencies.
Hawkins is a member of the bars of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, the bodies that admit and regulate lawyers practicing in those jurisdictions. He has also served on the Board of Trustees of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation since 2015. NERC works to ensure the reliability of the bulk electric system across North America, including the electric grid that serves the continent.
Quotes from others about the person
The chairman of the DC Water board, William M. Walker, said that the board needed a general manager who could think strategically and understood the significant environmental issues facing the utility, and that Hawkins's background made him well suited to the role.
