Biography

Fred Tutman’s family has farmed and fished along the banks of Maryland’s Patuxent River MD since the 1700’s. Fred was named for the Frederick Douglass, the 19th century abolitionist. The Tutman family continues to operate a farm in Prince George’s County within walking distance of the river. Fred is also the founding Patuxent Riverkeeper who serves as a community watershed advocate for Maryland’s longest and deepest intrastate waterway. His organization has worked on a wide range of issues and watershed problems in its eight year history. The group was pivotal in overhauling the State’s approach to regulating stormwater runoff, at creating new rules to assist citizen’s to attain standing in State Courts, and in obtaining a landmark consent decree with a wastewater utility that happens to be the largest such settlement in Maryland’s history. As a grassroots organization, Patuxent Riverkeeper often responds compassionately to calls for help from people and communities in its service area who are not generally included in environmental outreach. Patuxent Riverkeeper strives to reconnect people and communities to the river while championing the environmental needs of underserved and disengaged communities. Fred also happens to be the only African-American Waterkeeper in the nation and a former board member of Waterkeeper Alliance which is the licensing body for all Waterkeepers internationally.
Fred comes from a family of broadcasters with two younger sisters who are reporters and television anchorwomen in other parts of the country along with various other relatives working in the media industry. In his prior career, he spent 25 years as an award winning media consultant writing, producing and managing radio, television, satellite and multi-media outreach projects all over the globe from his branch offices in Chevy Chase, MD and in Rome Italy. The Tutman/Michaels Media Corporation provided contract services to CBS News, ABC, NBC, CNN various Canadian and British broadcasting interests including extended news coverage of the Falkland War in Argentina, the installation of a new Pope in Rome, and proceedings related to the U.S. Caribbean Basin initiative in Havana Cuba among other global assignments. In the 1990’s he masterminded the creation of a new Satellite Television Network devoted to the training and informational needs of first responders, and he engineered the first live satellite transmissions from the scene of the Oklahoma City bombing site allowing FEMA officials and others to communicate interactively with members of Congress about the bombing and subsequent rescue operations. In addition to broadcast assignments overseas, the company also provided outreach services in the U.S. to BellSouth, Xerox Corporation, AT&T and numerous Federal agencies, including The White House, the US Department of Transportation, and The Consumer Product Safety Commission. Fred’s final media assignments were for the Ford Foundation running a project in West Africa teaching traditional healers how to improve their outreach techniques to the global health community.

A mid-life sojourn into law school at the Dave A. Clarke School of Law in Washington, DC lead tolegal clerkships for the General Counsel at the DC Water and Sewer Agency and also at the Office of the Prince George’sCounty State’s Attorney (Major Crimes Division). Fred left law school only four classes shy of a law degree when his father was felled by strokes leaving him to assume the reigns of his father’s information technology business. There, Fred managed a staff of 20+ employees, secured its contracts, management transition and stability before selling the company the next generation of owners. He then founded the Patuxent Riverkeeper organization in 2004. When not watchdogging his river, Fred teaches an adjunct course in Environmental Law and Policy at St. Mary’s College of MD. In his spare time he performs trail maintenance on the Appalachian Trail and explores the Patuxent River watershed on foot and by kayak.