AUGUSTA — Adam Lee’s involvement with environmental activism began like many hobbies: slowly and out of love.

Today, he is considered a leading state environmentalist — an unlikely status for most car dealers — and chairman of the newly created Efficiency Maine Trust, which will hit its stride this summer as the one-stop shop for Maine’s energy-efficiency programs.

The hope is that the trust will save money for Maine homeowners and businesspeople, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from heating and cooling buildings in Maine to at least 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Lee, of Cumberland, took on the role of environmentalist naturally, even when it came to bucking some members of his own industry. He is the third-generation owner and president of Lee Auto Malls. 

He says he gets outside as much as possible and has always been environmentally conscious.

“I never littered, you know, when I was younger,” he said. “I spent a lot of time camping and hiking in the woods and gardening. This stuff is very important to me.”

Now, he’s lucky to get outside at all. His role as head of the trust is challenging, tedious and time-consuming.

“(The trust) has a number of goals and objectives,” Lee said. “They are bold, grand goals and they will require far more money than we currently have to accomplish them or to even set ourselves on a trajectory to end up at those goals some day.”

The Maine Legislature created the nine-member Efficiency Maine Trust last year, to consolidate the state’s energy-efficiency programs, and charged it with developing a plan to meet the state’s energy conservation goals. The trust is considered a quasi-state agency, with its own budget, authority and objectives written in law. It has independent decision-making power when it comes to achieving the goals outlined by the Legislature.

Those goals include weatherizing all Maine homes and 50 percent of businesses by 2030; and by 2020, cutting electricity and natural gas use by at least 30 percent, and heating fuel use by 20 percent.

The trust is developing a three-year plan to get started, which must be presented to the Legislature this year. Led by Lee, the trust is in the process of hiring an executive director.

“We’ve got to peck away at it,” Lee said of the goals. “We are absolutely headed in the right direction. There are a handful of states that are quite a ways ahead of us, like Vermont and Oregon; they started a lot earlier than us. However, there are way more states that are way behind us.”

Lee said he got involved in environmental issues when he was approached by someone from the Natural Resources Council of Maine to help pass a more stringent auto emissions law in Maine. At the time, around 2005, he said he had already been pushing Toyota Prius sales for a couple of years on his car lots and handing out compact fluorescent lightbulbs to customers.

“I saw them and said, ‘This is it; this is the future, this kind of technology,'” he said of the hybrid cars that partially run on electric power.

As a result of his vocal support of increased emissions standards in Maine, Lee testified before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., in 2007, alongside automotive lobbyists and a representative from the National Automobile Dealers Association.

Lee said he raised some eyebrows by disagreeing with his fellow panelists on auto emissions standards.

“You don’t like to get up publicly and criticize your own industry. However, I did not have an awful lot of qualms,” he said. “(Domestic automakers) spent so much time and money making sure the very rules that would have helped them survive didn’t get changed. Everybody bought it, hook, line and sinker. You need the little kid to say, ‘The emperor’s not wearing any clothes,’ but there was no one around.”

Lee said he was frustrated because shortsightedness by Ford, GM and Chrysler was affecting sales on his lots, not to mention the environment.

“What I (wanted) to know was, how come Toyota’s got a hybrid that gets 50 miles per gallon that I have a one-year waiting list to sell at list price, and the rest of you are doing nothing?” he said. “It’s not hard to get up in public and say that. Even with them sitting next to me. It wasn’t like I was up there espousing something that there was no real evidence of.”

Lee said he learned to use his independent voice from his father, Shep Lee, who grew up in Lewiston and has been a fixture in Maine Democratic politics and a supporter of the Maine Civil Liberties Union.

“One thing I got from both my parents, but more my dad, was, you do what’s right and you say what’s right, even if it’s not popular,” Lee said, adding that he remembers attending NAACP picnics as a child. “Since I was quite young, I saw this stuff going on and it would not have occurred to me that there was some other way. Our family was involved in these sort of things and I sort of got involved, slowly.”

Brownie Carson, executive director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said Lee’s voice in the emissions debate made a real impact.

“It makes all the difference when a businessman from a well-known car business family speaks out for cleaner cars,” Carson said. “He’s very straightforward and always candid and honest.”

Gov. John Baldacci, who appointed Lee to chair the Efficiency Maine Trust, called Lee a businessman with “an eye toward his community. He is committed to public service and has been an innovator and leader, especially on environmental issues. He is a tremendous resource.”

Lee serves on the NRCM board, the boards of the Maine Audubon Society and the Maine Organic Farmers and Growers Association, and a pair of state boards that served as precursors to the Efficiency Maine Trust.

Last Wednesday, Lee joined Baldacci and other state officials to present $8.9 million in state and federal grants to 16 Maine businesses to pay for energy-saving projects. The investment — a combination of federal stimulus grants and funds from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, has multiple benefits, Lee said.

“It’s easy to forget that the end result is not just keeping Mainers employed, it’s using less oil that we import from outside of this country,” he said. “If we import less, we will keep more money in Maine available to be spent by a Mainer, whether it’s on a business or you and I paying less for oil.”

Lee knows the task before him is daunting.

“It’s easy to forget how much wrangling, politicking, compromising, back and forth, staff time, legislators’ time and lobbyist time went into resolving these issues years ago, that resulted in the ability to raise the money to give the grant to keep a guy employed in Maine,” he said of the RGGI grants.

Everyone wants to invest in Maine to keep jobs and lower energy costs, Lee said, but coming up with how to do it is still unclear.

“We need to figure out where to get more money to do this, because no one is going to raise anyone’s taxes to do it,” he said. “So where’s it going to come from? It’s a big mystery.” The programs in the trust will be paid for in part by funds collected from sales of carbon credits as a result of Maine’s participation in RGGI.

Lee doesn’t regret agreeing to serve on the board.

“In the end, and my wife reminds me that I have said this, on my death bed, no one is going to remember how many cars I sold, nor am I going to care,” he said. “I will care about this. This will matter to me.” 

[email protected]

Adam Lee: “You don’t like to get up publicly and criticize your own industry. However, I did not have an awful lot of qualms. (Domestic automakers) spent so much time and money making sure the very rules
that would have helped them survive didn’t get changed. Everybody bought it, hook, line and sinker. You need the little kid to say, ‘The emperor’s not wearing any clothes’, but there was no one around.”

Lee is
chairman of the newly created Efficiency Maine Trust and third-generation owner and president of Lee Auto Malls.