Land Trust Board Members

Grant Smith

Grant Smith joined the board in 2001 after a long career in the US Department of State.  As president, he has helped prepare baseline documentation reports, negotiated easement documents, resolved violations, represented the Land Trust at meetings of the Coalition of West Virginia Land Trusts and of the national Land Trust Alliance (LTA), and served a term on the board of the LTA’s conservation easement legal defense insurance subsidiary.  He and his wife, Renny, have been landowners in Jefferson County since 1988 and are members of the Potomac Valley Audubon Society and the Jefferson County Historical Society.

Bonnie M. Stubblefield

Bonnie joined the Land Trust Board on retiring after 30 years of government service from the U.S. Geological Survey, where she held numerous science and leadership positions, including Regional Director, and Associate Director for Science. Her educational background includes a Ph.D. in Marine Geology and Geophysics, as well as degrees in Geology and Oceanography. Her career provided her with an in-depth knowledge of living and non-living natural resources and a holistic approach to the understanding of watersheds and ecosystems.  She is a resident of Berkeley County, having served on the County Planning Commission, and on the Opequon Creek Watershed Team and is a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and Potomac Valley Audubon Society.

Barbara Humes

Barbara is a native of Martinsburg and graduated from Shepherd College (now Shepherd University). She has a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Maryland.   She is retired from the U. S. Department of Education.  Barbara resides in Harpers Ferry and currently serves as secretary and records manager for the Land Trust, chairperson of the Harpers Ferry Woman’s Club scholarship committee,  member of the Jefferson County Youth Board, and member of the Safe Water For Harpers Ferry Partnership. She has participated in many areas of community service including chairperson of the Elks Run Watershed Study Committee, Harpers Ferry Water Commissioner, Harpers Ferry Planning Commission, as a municipal liaison to the Jefferson County Planning Commission, the Harpers Ferry Comprehensive Land Use Plan Committee, Jefferson County Envision Jefferson 2035 Steering Committee, and currently is a Harpers Ferry Town Council member.

Georgia Jeppesen

Georgia retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Conservation Training Center. Her conservation education career includes NGO’s, state agencies, and universities. Her final career focus was diverse youth employment, conservation leadership, and connecting people to nature. Georgia’s degrees in biology and science education are B.S. (University of Utah) and an M.S. (Florida State University). She has 6 acres in Berkeley County and is a long time supporter of Land Trusts.

Lucien Lewin

Lucien joined the Land Trust Board in 2018 after retiring from the practice of law at Steptoe & Johnson, where he practiced 1990-2018 and earlier with Avey & Steptoe from 1976 to 1990. His practice focused on litigation, real estate and insurance. Early on he founded the Berkeley County Public Defender Corporation and served as a President of the Berkeley County Bar Association and later as a member of the West Virginia State Bar Board of Governors.  After serving in the Navy, JACG, Lucien and his wife Demi moved to Berkeley County in 1974 and in 1980 to the Tuscarora Creek, Nollville area where they raised four children, five Springer Spaniels and hundreds of trees as well as investing in solar energy for part of their residential electric needs.

David Lillard

David lives in Jefferson County, and is serving his second stint on the Land Trust board; the first was in the early 1990s. In his day job, he is executive director of Catoctin Land Trust. Past roles include serving as West Virginia Rivers Coalition’s EP field staff, where he coordinated WV Rivers role as state lead for the Choose Clean Water Coalition; and on staff of The Downstream Project, which builds conservation capacity through communications and technology. He serves on the Robert and Dee Leggett Foundation board of trustees and the Chesapeake Bay Citizens Advisory Committee. His favorite past time is spending time in West Virginia’s mountains, hiking and paddling.

Kevin T. McLaughlin

Kevin moved to Berkeley Springs in 1998 after completing his surgical residency. He was an active surgeon at War Memorial Hospital until 2004, when he transitioned to Emergency Medicine. He has worked at Hampshire Memorial Hospital, and Potomac Valley Hospital, but has maintained War Memorial Hospital as his main workplace.

Kevin graduated with a Degree in Biology from Saint Francis College (now University) in Loretto PA. He furthered his education at The University of Health Sciences, obtaining his Osteopathic Medicine Degree (Kansas City, MO). He has volunteered with the American Red Cross- Morgan County Chapter, and Morgan County Parks and Rec. He has served as the Morgan County Health Officer for the Morgan County Health Department for the last 8 years and is now the Associate Health Officer for the combined Berkeley-Morgan County Health Department. He is married to Debra now for 25+ years and is the father of 3 children.

W. David Plummer

David joined the Land Trust Board in 2020, having retired from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) / National Weather Service (NWS) after 34 years of public service. While at the NWS he held several positions ranging from operational numerical modeling research to leading an atmospheric visualization software engineering team in support of the forecasting mission at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. His educational background includes an MS in meteorology from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and a BS in Meteorology with a minor in Mathematics from The Pennsylvania State University.
In addition to the Land Trust, David and his wife Peggy own and operate Sundogs Bed and Breakfast, a dog-friendly country inn located on 46 acres just outside of Historic Shepherdstown, WV. He can be contacted at 703-581-9805

Susan Whalton

Susan Whalton joined the Land Trust after completing 8 years serving on the Berkeley County Farmland Protection Board (BCFPB). She and her husband Michael moved from Key West, Florida to a farm in Hedgesville in 1994, and were early adopters of farmland protection. Their 174 acres are under conservation easement with both the Land Trust and BCFPB. Susan worked in the performing arts before a love of nature and seasonal changes brought her back to beautiful West Virginia and many new pursuits.

Assistance

Lavonne Paden

Lavonne was the past president of the Land Trust and left the board to assist the Canaan Valley Institute and the Natural Resources Conservation Service in instituting land protection efforts throughout the state of West Virginia. Lavonne is a CPA and financial institutions consultant with over 20 years’ experience. She began her career with an international accounting firm, auditing a variety of commercial, governmental and nonprofit institutions. From 1984 through 1990, Lavonne was the Vice President and Controller of the Acacia Group, a $1 billion diversified financial services company in Washington, D.C. In 1992, she took a two-year professional fellowship assisting the U. S. congress through the General Accounting Office in their oversight of the financial services industry.

Since 1993, Lavonne has consulted for both regional and national financial institutions in developing reporting systems and performing financial studies for management. Most recently, she assisted a Washington, D.C.-based insurance group, providing medical malpractice insurance for doctors and hospitals, to successfully complete a $10 million public stock offering.

Lavonne has researched and written about the preservation of land, including estate planning, conservation easements, and land use issues. She is interested in land planning issues, tourism and the promotion of public awareness of land protection. Lavonne was instrumental in the 2001 legislative forum which resulted in the drafting of the real estate transfer tax mechanism to fund the county Farmland Protection Boards. She was a member of the Berkeley County Planning Commission from 2001 to 2004. She then served as the Executive Director of the Berkeley County Farmland Protection Board, where she assisted 15 counties in starting Farmland Protection Boards. After that, she became Director of the WV Agricultural Land Protection Authority, which became operational in 2005.

F. Mark Schiavone

Mark prepared the first Baseline Documentation Reports for the Land Trust and returned to that role in 2014.

He started his career in high school when he took a position as seasonal naturalist for the Maryland Park Service – at the time he was the youngest park naturalist in the service. Afterwards he pursued several degrees in biology and conducted basic research into how the basic body plan of plant embryos are laid down. Research led to an interest in computers, which opened a new career path as a developer of database systems. His major clients in that phase were institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the US Department of Education, and the National Weather Service.

Databases were the cause of the next sharp turn when he accepted a position as the Impact Fee Coordinator for Jefferson County Government. He created that program and managed it for eight years, and during that time took on the responsibility for the county IT program and finally the county budget, which he managed for 4 years. He returned to consulting, doing baseline studies for Berkeley and Jefferson Counties and authoring five books on database programming and using Microsoft Word to create complex documents.

In January 2015 he accepted the position as Executive Director of the Berkeley County Farmland Protection Board. In addition to his duties in that position, he continues to provide consulting to other conservation groups. Recent project clients have included the Farmland Protection Boards of Jefferson, Berkeley, Hampshire, and Pendleton Counties of West Virginia, the West Virginia Agricultural Land Protection Authority, and the Land Trust of the Eastern Panhandle.

Rodney Bartgis

Rodney was an early board member on the Land Trust, and a native of Berkeley County. He left the board in 2001 and served for many years as West Virginia State Director of the Nature Conservancy. He is now Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the West Virginia Outdoor Heritage Conservation Fund.