Nicholas Targ practices environmental, land use, and natural resources law. He works with clients to address due diligence, entitlements, permitting, and environmental compliance needs. His practice focuses on complex brownfield real estate transactions and redevelopment projects, and environmental compliance. He also assists states, counties, and other government agencies in meeting their compliance, training, and public involvement requirements and policy objectives. Representative work includes strategic legal advice on time critical "go/no go" decisions, permitting, CERCLA, NEPA/CEQA and Endangered Species Act compliance counseling, and brownfields redevelopment, public lands, and environmental justice/Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 issues.
Before joining Holland & Knight, Mr. Targ served, first, as Counsel, and later as Associate Director for Environmental Justice Integration, to the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice in Washington, D.C. He was responsible for developing the tools and strategies for addressing environmental justice agency-wide. The principal legal/policy adviser to that office, he helped bring to a successful resolution highly visible Clean Air Act, RCRA/CERCLA, enforcement, and NEPA permitting, compliance, and policy matters. He also provided strategic advice on legislation, regulatory initiatives and public participation issues to congressional offices, the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, and federal, state and tribal agencies. On a regular basis he convened and addressed trade associations, government bodies, and others.
Mr. Targ also served in the Solicitor’s Office of the Department of the Interior, representing the Bureau of Reclamation and Bureau of Land Management on a wide-range of natural resources and hazardous materials issues. He successfully handled precedent setting water rights, reclamation law, and natural resources cases, and managed the transfer of federal facilities and lands. He also drafted NEPA, CERLCA/RCRA, and land use compliance documents, legislation and regulations under natural resource statutes, including the Bureau of Reclamation's "Reclamation Reform Act Rule" and BLM's "Right-of-Way Rule." He drafted and helped implement the Department's first ADR Policy, and joined the Department through the Honors Attorney Program in 1993.
Committed to service, Mr. Targ helped found the Howard University Environmental Law Program and taught environmental law and environmental justice as an adjunct professor for five semesters. Under his leadership, the ABA's Environmental Justice Committee received the Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section's Committee Excellence Award. Mr. Targ also served as a consultant to the Republic of Haiti, representing that country as a negotiator in the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (“Earth Summit”).
While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Graduate School of Urban Studies and Planning, he taught legal research and writing. Mr. Targ was an Adjunct Professor in Environmental Law, Environmental Justice, at Howard University School of Law from 2004-2006, where has also served as thesis adviser to third-year students.