Endowment Unit Approves Grants

The Virginia Environmental Endowment board of directors approved $194,000 in grants yesterday to environmental projects, including $61,000 to the College of William and Mary law school for conferences on environmental law and purchases of environmental law books. Law school dean William B. Spong, who had sought the funds from the endowment, said the school will appoint a special committee to develop formats for the conferences to be held during the next two years. The tentative schedule calls for a conference this fall dealing with Virginia environmental law and its relationship to federal law. A second conference in February 1979 will deal with a general approach to environmental law. A third conference in the late summer of 1979 will deal with the practice of environmental law and will be offered in cooperation with the Virginia Bar Association. The fourth and final conference will be held in the fall of 1979 and will deal with the effect of environmental laws on the state\u27s seafood industry. Spong said only the third conference will be aimed strictly at lawyers. The rest will be geared to industry officials, health professionals, seafood industry representatives, journalists, and others, he said. The grant to the law school also includes $21,000 for the purchase of 1,200 volumes of environmental law books, which, Spong said, will give the law school as good a library on environmental, coastal and water resource law as any library in the nation. Gerald P. McCarthy, executive director of the endowment, said the remainder of the $194,000 in grants will be announced later this month after the endowment has contacted the recipients to make sure terms are acceptable. McCarthy did say some of the grants will go to projects related to the Kepone pollution of the James River. The endowment is a non-profit, independent corporation created in 1977 with an $8 million contribution from Allied Chemical Corp., which gave the money in lieu of a fine for its part in the Kepone pollution of the James River