Ben Grumbles is Maryland’s Secretary of the Environment. He was nominated by Governor Larry Hogan and confirmed by the Senate in 2015. His duties also include serving as Chair of the Governor’s Chesapeake Bay Cabinet and the Maryland Climate Change Commission, Executive Committee Member of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and President of the Environmental Council of the States, a national organization of all of the environmental secretaries or top administrators of the 50 states. He has served previously as President of the U.S. Water Alliance, Assistant Administrator for Water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Director of Arizona’s Department of Environmental Quality and as Environmental Counsel and Senior Staff Member on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Science Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. He has a master’s degree in environmental law from George Washington University, a J.D. from Emory University School of Law and a bachelor's degree from Wake Forest University.
Horacio Tablada, who is widely known in environmental and government circles as “HT,” was appointed as MDE’s Deputy Secretary in April 2015.
Before his promotion, Deputy Secretary Tablada had headed the agency’s Land Management Administration since 2004. He has nearly three decades of experience as an environmental regulator in Maryland. He joined the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Office of Environmental Programs, a predecessor of MDE, in 1985 as a project engineer. At MDE, he managed programs overseeing industrial wastewater discharges and fuel facilities.
He was promoted in 1998 to Deputy Director of the Land Management Administration (formerly known as the Waste Management Administration). The Land Management Administration’s responsibilities include the oversight of brownfields redevelopment of former industrial sites, recycling and waste diversion, management of solid waste and hazardous waste, large animal feeding operations, fuel facilities, mining and lead paint poisoning prevention.
Deputy Secretary Tablada, a native of Nicaragua, came to the United States in 1975 and earned a degree in biological and agricultural engineering from North Carolina State University. He earned a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Maryland in 2002. Deputy Secretary Tablada is married with three grown children and four grandchildren. He lives in Elkridge.
