Award-winning outdoor reporter Roberta Scruggs will be the new Communications Director at the Maine Forest Products Council. This is a good move by the Council and a great opportunity for Roberta. The Council gets involved in all of the natural resource and forest industry issues. She’ll be busy!
Roberta earned a reputation as an outstanding reporter of outdoor news during her years at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, where she created the Telegram’s special outdoor section. She later wrote for the Lewiston Sun Journal. She created the Scruggs Report on her own website and later moved it to Down East magazine’s website where it appeared for several years. She is very well known and popular in the outdoors community.
For the past eight years, Roberta has been membership and outreach director for the Lakes Environmental Association in Bridgton, an organization focused on protecting lakes and watersheds. During her tenure, LEA's membership and funding increased substantially, as did public awareness of LEA's programs, including its efforts to prevent and control invasive aquatic plants.
The Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine hired Roberta for a couple of projects, including a very successful effort to bring all interests together to address landowner problems – focused on ATVs – and to create a plan that addressed and resolved those issues. Her report: Landowner Relations – A Practical Guide to Preserving Public Access to Private Land, is still very relevant ten years after she presented it.
Roberta also coordinated a state ATV Task force and wrote its report that had a significant and positive effect on landowners and landowner relations.
The Council reached out to carefully selected people to recruit four outstanding candidates for the position, offering “an exciting opportunity to create and implement a comprehensive communications strategy for the organization that reaches our members, political and community leaders, and the general public.”
Patrick Strauch, the Council’s Executive Director, told me, “We’re excited to have a professional communicator of Roberta’s reputation and experience. As a reporter, and most recently at LEA, Roberta was effective, widely known, and highly respected. I can’t wait for her to begin telling our story about the people of Maine’s forest economy.”
