Dennis Muchmore

MUCC Executive Director

• How did you get to this point? Both personally and professionally.
• I started out teaching high school and gravitated towards politics within the Michigan Education Association, and came to work in Lansing for the Michigan Legislature 35 yrs ago and I've been here ever since. One position, as it often happens in politics, has led to another one. Till 2002, I worked directly with the Legislature and then I took a little hiatus working for a search company in Chicago called DHR International, which is the 5^th largest in the world. I thoroughly enjoyed that for five years but then I got a chance to get back in the Lansing scene and took the opportunity with the Michigan United Conservation Clubs in 2007.
• Has your specialty or your interests always been on conservation or did it develop over the course of your career?
• Well, it's kind of developed over the course of the career. In fact, one of the advantages that I have that a lot of people don't have is, that for many years, I represented up to 100 clients and those clients had all kinds of interests. My specialty was originally in tax related activities, but it's gravitated over the years into agriculture and from agriculture into conservation and from conservation into the kinds of things we do now which are mostly policy driven-that's basically my background. So it's been an evolution of sorts. I know a lot about a lot of things on the surface level but, for some issues that require a lot more depth, I just have to yield to some people that have a lot more depth than I do.
• So you say it requires a lot of policy dealings. Where would these fit in a typical day?
• Last week a typical day would have been: talking to a legislator at 9 in the morning; having a lunch meeting at 10; meeting with the director of the Department of Natural Resources at 10:30; and having a follow up meeting with the former director of the Department and the deputy director for policy [at the MUCC]; taking a short lunch; returning to work on internal matters such as bylaws, revisions, and our internal issues such as our magazine production and internet website; and then, in the late afternoon, attending a board meeting on one of the corporate boards I'm on; and finally making my way home at 8:30.
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