Coffee With: Save The Sound President Leah Lopez
- Carl Wiser
- Mar 15
- 8 min read
By Carl Wiser
Staff Writer
On September 11, 2001, Leah Lopez took a late breakfast before heading into New York C
ity on a Metro North train that never arrived. "I happened to be on the train an hour later than I woul
d have usually been," she says over coffee at LaSalle in Collinsville. "After that I doubled down on what I really wanted to do with my life."
Two weeks later, Lopez became the staff attorney at Save The Sound, a nonprofit that works to protect and preserve areas that impact Long Island Sound, including rivers in Connecticut. In 2018 she became their head of programs, and in 2022, when their president retired after 30 years, she took over.
"I just kept going on a path," she says. "And eventually it was the right path for me."
Lopez' dad was a pilot in the Air Force; she was born on a base in Mississippi. Her family bounced around to bases in Germany and South Carolina before settling in Louisiana when Leah was six. With a passion for art and an eye for design, she studied architecture at the University of Louisiana.
"I love spaces where people congregate and how it interacts with the planet," she says. "It really suited me in theory, but my first year in, I realized the scale was out of size for where I really got joy in the design process, and I ended up transitioning into the related field of industrial design, and really focused on sustainable product design. Things like parallel processes where you design one product that uses materials and another that uses the byproduct of that to have the least amount of waste possible. It was the design world and the creativity side, and going through that effort, I started to understand more about manufacturing processes."
That's when Lopez discovered the environmental law program at Pace University in New York, where she studied from 1997 to 2000. "I really loved every minute of law school," she says. "I love community coming together for action, and that was really the core of the program I had chosen at Pace. It took the creativity that I got from the art side and united it with very practical, logical approaches to making a difference."
At Pace, Lopez was part of an environmental law clinic that worked with the Riverkeeper, which protects water systems in and around the Hudson River. "I was really lucky to work with them," she says. "At the time I had been thinking about going into government law. I wanted to work in white-collar crimes for environmental issues. But once I did the clinic and had that experience with the Riverkeeper as a client, I realized nonprofit work was really where I wanted to be long-term."
After graduating, Lopez took a job clerking with the judicial district of Bridgeport, then she joined the New York City Human Resources Administration.
"I did not enjoy that work," she says. "The cases I had were working to deny benefits for things like asthma cases for kids. That's not the bulk of what they do, but I was the new attorney in town, so those were the cases I got, and it was not the way I wanted to spend my time."
She quit that job, with her last day on September 10, 2001. That train ride the next morning was to gather her things from the office.
Accomplishments at Save The Sound
With Save The Sound, Lopez has worked to set up clean water infrastructure in Connecticut, protect open space, and battle polluters. "We do it through a number of different tools," she says. "We have our policy advocates, who are at the capitols in Hartford and Albany and D.C. We have our marine biologists who run our water quality programs. We have our engineers who work on taking down dams and ensuring that restoration projects that build up habitat and resilience are moving forward. And then when all else fails we have our safety net of litigators who are willing to take polluters to court, whether that polluter is someone who is discharging pollution into a water body or if the state or federal government is not taking action."
Here's a brief rundown of some other Save The Sound accomplishments Lopez has been a part of:
Broadwater
From about 2002-2008, Shell Oil tried to put a Liquefied Natural Gas Terminal in Long Island Sound as part of their Broadwater project.
"There was going to be mooring and dredging and trenching of pipelines to both Connecticut's shore and New York's shore, all of which had habitat destruction," Lopez says. "Through mobilization and litigation, we stopped various permits in the process, and through political pressure, we got both New York and Connecticut politicians to oppose the project. New York said they would not grant the permit, and that was the end of the project. That was probably a seven or eight year effort until it was finally done."
Clean Water Infrastructure
"We do a lot to make sure that raw sewage is not going into our waterways. We still have about 2 billion gallons of raw sewage that gets dumped into our waterways in the state. There are water systems that allow for all sewage to go to a sewage treatment plant, but in our older cities, they have what's called combined sewer overflows, where you have almost a shut-off switch that is lifted. So if there's too much rainwater, it mixes in the pipe with the raw sewage, and if it isn't shunted into the river, it will overwhelm a sewage treatment plant and there will be no treatment whatsoever at that point. So they release certain amounts of untreated sewage at that point. It goes into the Connecticut River, the Norwalk River, the New Haven Harbor area. That was one of my other big campaigns: working on clean water infrastructure funding so that upgrades could be made to sewage treatment plants. Some of these are decades-long plans."
Dam Removal
"Taking down dams is one of our specialties, along with restoring systems in general. We're trying to make sure there's a future where Rainbow Dam is removed instead of continuing to skirt the rules that dams have had to use in the past. And we're working on the Kinneytown Dam on the Naugatuck River to take that one down. And then Wallace Dam (on the Quinnipiac River in Wallingford). When those dams are removed it will open up a massive amount of the river systems in Connecticut."
The Beach Report
"Save The Sound does a lot of science-to-action education, so our Beach Report talks about how our harbors and beaches are doing. The poor grades come from a mixture of storm water and sewage pollution. We're starting to see grades get better. We're seeing The Sound get healthier over the last 10 years."
Management Style
Lopez' training in industrial design has had a big impact on her management style. It instilled in her a collaborative approach to problem solving. "I don't look at issues like a lawyer - I look for creative solutions," she says. "It's that approach to how you design a product, starting from what you have and thinking through what the vision looks like, developing a program to be able to execute on it and then determining materials and whether or not they're functioning."
"Believing seriously in teamwork is equally important," she adds. "It doesn't matter where you are in an organization or project, your perspective is something that's truly valued. And being open and not set in my way of doing it so that we can have the best solution. That's very much rooted in industrial design."
And yes, money matters. "Environmental protection is foremost, but there is an economic issue always at play," she says. "It's a lot about setting the strategic path, the vision, and finding the pathway to get to that vision."
Lopez has lived in Collinsville since 2007. She spends a lot of time traveling for meetings, and goes into the Save The Sound office in New Haven once or twice a week (they also have a laboratory in Larchmont, New York). She lives with her seven-year-old son, Avery, and their soft-coated Wheaten Terrier, John Williams, named by Avery after the famous film composer. "He looks a little bit like a Labradoodle, but he's a terrier, so he doesn't shed," Lopez says. "So for allergies, it's really good, and he's got the terrier mindset." (Lopez played a big part in getting the Canton Dog Park developed and opened).
I often need a translator to communicate with folks from Louisiana, but Lopez has no discernible accent, despite being "Cajun through and through."
"If I get angry or if I'm super tired, it comes out," she says. "And every once in a while I switch vowels around. But the little bit I had disappeared sometime around my second year of law school."
We got to know her better with these Coffee With questions.
What do you like to do when you're not working?
My seven-year-old loves being outdoors, so we do hiking and go bike riding. Water gives me peace, and being outside just makes me feel connected.
I love pottery. It was a community-building moment for me being part of Canton Clayworks with their wood-firing approach. I love everything about wood-fired pottery. That was when I started to get more engaged in everything Collinsville.
What are some of your favorite places in the area?
I like the trail on the other side of the Nepaug, and I love going to the Farmington River.
I'm at LaSalle frequently. I like Giv Coffee. I was really sad when Husk left, but I like Crown And Hammer, and Applegate for their donuts.
I don't pass up the Halloween parade. I had my family come in this year so they could see why it is such a big deal. Our costume was the ocean. I was an angler fish and Avery was a lobster. My mom was a narwhal and my brother was a shark.
What is something you'd like to learn?
Mandarin Chinese. I took one short class with Farmington Continuing Education, and I loved it. It's an inquiry into how you can build language through a visual - it's so different than ours.
What's one of your non-work-related talents?
If anyone has an envie for Cajun food, I'm the girl to see: I make a mean gumbo and crawfish etouffee! And most people wouldn't guess that I drive a manual transmission vehicle. A Volkswagen Jetta.
What would you like to be remembered for?
Being a good mom. And for bringing people together. I love the energy of what's possible when people unite.