Jane Sarosdy
Senior Consultant and President of Sarosdy Consulting, Inc.
Jane Sarosdy is Senior Consultant and President of Sarosdy Consulting, Inc. She works with clients seeking coastal restoration funding. She has helped clients do strategic planning for funding, to plan and present projects, and to write and submit grant applications. She works with local governments, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses. She provided advice on natural resource damage assessment to a potential responsible party in a pipeline spill incident. She has knowledge and experience dealing with funding sources arising from the Deepwater Horizon incident, particularly in Texas. Through her state agency experience, she is knowledgeable about GOMESA, which will provide greatly increased revenues for coastal restoration in Texas starting in 2018.
Before she started Sarosdy Consulting, Jane worked at the Texas General Land Office, a Texas natural resource agency, where she gained eleven years of progressive and responsible public sector environmental law and policy experience. During the last three years, she served as a natural resource trustee for the State of Texas in natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) cases.
As a trustee, Jane worked collaboratively with co-trustees from Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She participated in the Deepwater Horizon NRDA Early Restoration Trustee Council, planning for early restoration and developing the damage assessment and restoration plan for the case with trustees and natural resource staff from all five Gulf States.
Jane also prepared NEPA environmental compliance documents for Texas projects selected for Deepwater Horizon Early Restoration funding. She served as a natural resource consultant for the GLO working with National Fish & Wildlife Foundation to plan coastal restoration funding pursuant to the criminal plea agreements arising from the Deepwater Horizon incident. She provided extensive staff assistance to the Texas member on the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council to put the RESTORE Act grant program in place and recommend projects for Council consideration.
Jane graduated from Newcomb College of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors in English. She obtained her Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School in 1980, where she served as Senior Articles Editor of the Stanford Law Review. Following graduation, Jane worked as a Court Law Clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington, D.C. From 1981-1984, Jane worked as an associate at Covington & Burling, LLC, a large private law firm in Washington, D.C.
In 1984, Jane went to work for the International Tax Counsel in the Office of Tax Policy at the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. In that job, Jane drafted, reviewed and negotiated income and estate & gift tax treaties with foreign countries and coordinated tax treaty matters with the State Department, the White House, and congressional committees. She also presented the defense of a U.S. tax affecting foreign trade to a committee of the GATT in Geneva, Switzerland.
In 1987, Jane worked briefly at the Washington, D.C. office of King & Spaulding doing federal taxation work. Soon thereafter, Jane took a prolonged leave of absence from work to raise her three children, during which time she did a variety of volunteer jobs for charitable and community organizations in the Washington, D.C. area.
Jane and her family moved from the Washington, D.C. area to Austin, Texas in 2001. In 2004, Jane went to work at the Texas General Land Office (GLO) in Austin, Texas. She was a staff attorney in the Coastal and Public Lands Team in the Legal Services Division. In that position, Jane advised the Land Commissioner and client agency divisions on a wide range of environmental, real property, and administrative law topics, with a focus on state law relating to beaches and dunes and ownership issues on state-owned submerged land, NRDA, state-federal coastal programs, litigation management, and government contracting.
Jane became Director of the GLO’s Coastal Law Team in 2008. She supervised several staff attorneys and continued working on coastal law matters, including NRDA, CIAP and GOMESA. In 2012, she became Director of the NRDA Trustee Program in the GLO’s Oil Spill Prevention & Response Division. In January 2015, Jane left the GLO to pursue a career in environmental consulting.
Jane lives in North Austin with her husband and two dogs. She enjoys keeping up with her mom, siblings, grown kids, friends and colleagues. She also enjoys humor, cooking, music, fitness, photography, writing, reading, and design.