By Victor Greto
WILMINGTON — Kathy Klein eyes the crowded Black-eyed Susans in her suburban home’s front-yard garden filled with mostly native plants.
“They just take off,” she says. “You want some? I can’t kill them because they’re alive.”
Spoken like the unpretentious environmentalist she is.
Klein’s getting her hands dirty before she goes to work for one of the last times as executive director of the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary. A non-profit created a decade ago, the Partnership fosters conservative management of the Delaware River’s tidal basin, which rolls south from Trenton to the Delaware Bay. It coordinates federal, state and local governments to “protect, sustain and enhance” the estuary — the lower course of the Delaware River as it mingles with the tides of the Atlantic Ocean.
A hands-on fund-raiser and environmental educator, Klein consolidated the Partnership’s power and role as an indispensable bridge between the often-at-odds and always self-interested state governments, federal agencies, corporate and environmental groups.
Getting New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers together on a time to meet, let alone to play nice, takes a lot of skill, says Dave Carter, head of Delaware Coastal Programs at DNREC.
But, he notes, “The fish don’t give a damn on which side of the state lines they’re in.”
Others aren’t so kind to the Partnership and to Klein.
“That organization is a classic example of an industrial front group done by the very people who are polluting the river and masquerading as an environmental group,” says Alan Muller of Green Delaware. It’s nothing but the regulated getting in bed with regulators, he says.
Klein won’t have to make such contrasting organizations play nice that much longer.
In an April e-mail that surprised many friends and colleagues, Klein, 44, announced her resignation, effective in July. She said she wanted to spend more time with her two teenage children.
Her decision became obvious early this spring when, trying on clothes with her daughter at a local department store, she had to deal with a contentious piece of business over the phone.
“It was my day off, and I’m in the dressing room, and this thing couldn’t wait, and I thought to myself, with the phone to my ear and my daughter right there: What am I doing?”
Klein wrote in the e-mail that the family-career balancing act didn’t work for her anymore.
That makes her part of a trend, says Saul D. Hoffman, an economics professor at the University of Delaware.
“What we saw from the 1950s through the 1990s was a very steady increase in women’s labor force activity,” he says. “But it’s plateaued and is now falling in some groups.”
“I’m older now,” Klein says, “and you take a look at your life and see your kids grow, and you can’t get it back.”
But wanting to be there for her kids as they navigate adolescence isn’t the sole reason Klein decided to leave.
“It’s really been a combination of burn-out and not loving what my job has turned into,” she says.
As the organization has grown and succeeded, her job has turned into a bureaucratic series of meetings and budgets.
Unlike in her garden on this sunny morning, she’s not getting her hands dirty at work any more.
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Klein’s love of the environment began in Pittsburgh where her mom ran a store called “The Potted Plant.”
She loved helping out and making terrariums, a rage during the 1970s.
Her family — she was the oldest of three — was part of a small, tight-knit Jewish community in the steel city. Her father was an anesthesiologist. She would grow up to marry a doctor, too, David Paul, the son of a pediatrician whose practice the family went to.
Klein expressed her creativity early through making jewelry, and she sold some pieces by the time she made it to eighth grade.
“My family has a retail gene,” she says.
But by the time she reached high school, Klein wanted to explore beyond Pittsburgh and her high school crowd.
She convinced her parents to send her to Quaker boarding school George School in Newtown, Pa., to finish high school.
Encouraged by teachers there, she studied environmental science and helped build trails in Utah’s Zion National Park during the summer of 1980. She chose the University of Colorado in Boulder — “I wanted to wake up and there be mountains outside my window” — to major in environmental science and study photography.
For a class project, she chronicled the unusual way people use fences.
She and Paul crossed paths at Boulder, where he was a year ahead of her, on his way to becoming a neo-natalogist. She had been friendly growing up with his sister, but hadn’t really known him. They started dating.
By the time she interned at the Natural Resource Defense Council in Washington DC in 1983, Klein considered becoming an environmental lawyer. But her boss told her that what the movement really needed was public educators.
After graduating in 1985, she moved to Philadelphia to be close to Paul, who was in medical school.
She worked with the city’s recycling program and became assistant director of PhilaPride’s “Keep America Beautiful” program, where she cultivated her talent for raising money and creating educational programs. These included “Clean Street Theater,” where she hired actors who performed environmentally-themed skits on the street.
Klein and Paul married in 1987. Their son, Jesse, was born in 1992, and daughter Emma in 1995.
While pregnant with Jesse, she opened an environmental consulting business to have more flexibility with her time. But three years later, in 1993, she became director of development and communications for the Pennsylvania Environmental Council.
“I learned a lot of skills managing multiple projects, grant writing and fund raising,” Klein says. “It’s exciting to have a great idea and then raise the money to make it happen.”
After Paul went to work in Delaware, the commute from Wilmington to Philadelphia grew tedious.
She went to work as assistant to the director at the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary in 1997. She became executive director two years later, after its first director, Bud Watson, moved on.
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Eight years later, she cries as she discusses leaving this job she’s built.
“The way you become successful in most businesses is by moving up the ladder and becoming an administrator,” Klein says. “All the things that got you there — hands-on work, creativity — you don’t do that anymore because you’re dealing with budgets and bureaucratic stuff, and it takes the fun out of it.”
Working on a $2.2 million budget and fine-tuning the contrasting personalities of a dozen employees encompasses most of her time.
“I am so bad at math,” she says, “that it’s kind of scary that I’ve been doing this.”
Couple being cut off from the nuts-and-bolts lobbying and education she loves, and the realization that her children have reached an age where she felt like she personally needed more guidance, and you’ve got the post-feminist dilemma that confronts many working mothers.
You can see that predicament playing out in statistics.
The trend of working married mothers with children under 18 has been eking downward for less than a decade, Hoffman says. After a huge rise — from less than 20 percent of all married mothers in 1950 to a bit more than 70 percent toward the end of the 1990s — by 2005, about 68 percent of those mothers worked.
Hoffman, however, believes one should not make too much of the decline.
“Women’s commitment to the labor market is enormously greater than it was 20 to 30 years ago,” he says. “We’re seeing an end to this steady trend but we don’t know how it’s going to play out. I have my doubts we’ll see a reversion.”
Still, in terms of sustained careers in families with children, the dice seem loaded against women.
“The skill differences between men and women are gone,” Hoffman says. “But it is still true that marriage and children affect women’s careers and women’s earnings more than men. It’s difficult for this to be resolved.”
Klein acknowledged that collision in her e-mail.
“Balancing the demands of running the Partnership and being there for my family has become increasingly difficult for me over the past year or so,” she wrote.
Because she “sets the tone” for the Partnership, Klein says she decided she could not just leave the office at 3 p.m. twice a week to catch her son’s baseball game, or spend the time she thinks she’ll need to help her daughter move to a new school this coming fall.
“In addition, as the responsibilities of being the executive director have become more management and administrative intensive I have been really missing being involved with the programmatic work that is so near and dear to my heart.”
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The Partnership for the Delaware Estuary took shape in the late 1980s after the comprehensive conservation management plan — a government study seven years in the making — recommended it be created to implement the study’s recommendations.
The estuary actually had been coming back environmentally for nearly two decade by then, thanks in part to the 1972 Clean Water Act and a general upgrade of sewage treatment plants, say Jonathan Sharp, professor of oceanography at the University of Delaware’s college of marine and earth studies in Lewes.
At first, an estuary director headquartered at the Delaware River Basin Commission in Trenton ran the program. But three years ago, Klein merged that office with her position at the Partnership.
Some DRBC members fought the merger, says Marjorie Crofts, deputy principal assistant of air and waste management for DNREC.
“Kathy made them realize that pulling the executive directorship of the estuary program into the Partnership was more efficient,” Crofts says. “She now has both titles, and ended the duplication of efforts. It was a bit contentious, but it brought a lot more unity to the program.”
Now, Sharp says, “The focus of the Partnership is not just on education and outreach, but habitat restoration. There’s now a science director, and it has reestablished a science advisory committee”
The science director, Danielle Kreeger, worked with Klein to run two successful scientific conferences focusing on the ecology of the estuary.
“The Partnership is now moving into the golden age,” Kreeger says. “Over the last two years there has been a great expansion of our programs and activities to include science outreach, conferences and workshops that bring groups together.”
DNREC’s Dave Carter points out that Klein got Delaware, New Jersey and the Army Corps of Engineers to cooperate and help restore the oyster population in the bay. She also helped make the ongoing detailed mapping of the bottom of Delaware Bay possible by negotiating the contract that and made it possible for Delaware and New Jersey to work together.
Aside from educating thousands of teachers and students and establishing the scientific conferences, the group works with dozens of companies.
And therein lies much of the problem, according to Muller of Green Delaware, who sees a problem with government “partnering” with polluters in the first place.
“We don’t want the regulators partnering with the people who are being regulated,” Muller says. “Government should be controlling these guys and refusing to allow companies like DuPont to dump millions of pounds of toxins in the river each year.”
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“I’ve cried more in the past month than ever before,” Klein says, as she contemplates leaving in a few weeks. “It’s leaving the people whom you’ve worked with, that have become your friends, and worrying about starting over at this point in your life.”
While she’s excited about the changes coming, she also can’t suppress the anxiety about what’s next.
While the family can survive on her husband’s salary, “I like making money,” she says. “It helps me do the other part of what I like to do: make jewelry.”
Children need you even more as they get older, she believes. “That’s when you need to be there to talk to them about what they’re experiencing.”
Klein has spent many hours on the phone with her best friend, Amy Neukrug, discussing the change.
“I’m also a mom and have encouraged her to do this,” says Neukrug, who grew up in Pittsburgh with Klein, and who now owns a jewelry business in Philadelphia.
“You don’t get this time back,” she says. “She is so talented and smart and will be able to do anything she wants to do professionally forever. But her kids won’t be this age forever.”
She wants to work — maybe open a dress shop that sells unorthodox clothing or spend more time making her jewelry — but isn’t sure how or where or when, given her determination to be spend more time with her children.
She doesn’t think she needs to work at the pace and commitment required by her job with the Partnership.
“I can made good things happen without doing it at such a level.”
At this critical mid-point in her life, she may actually be making a really simple choice: To cultivate her own garden.