Ray Brady

Lifetime Service Award

The Public Lands Foundation grants to Ray Brady its Lifetime Service Award for excellence in public land management.  The Foundation provides this award to deserving members who have perpetuated and enhanced the proud tradition of public service.

Ray Brady has dedicated his life to public land management.   He was born in 1948 in Decatur, Illinois.    He moved to Arizona when he was about 10 years old. And, he graduated from the University of Arizona in 1970 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Geology.  Ray served in the Army in Vietnam and he went to work for the Bureau of Land Management as a Mineral Specialist in Colorado and Arizona in the early 1970s.

He has more than 40 years of professional federal public service in the management of public lands and mineral resources—35 years with the Bureau of Land Management, and 8 years with the Conservation Division of the U.S. Geological Survey.

He has served as BLM Deputy State Director for Minerals in Arizona; BLM District Manager at Safford, Arizona; Deputy Mining Supervisor with the U.S. Geological Survey in New Mexico; Mineral Specialist with the Federal Oil Shale Program, and Chief, Division of the Lands and Realty, in the BLM’s Washington, D.C. Office.

He has been involved in major land management challenges and opportunities throughout his career.  In Arizona, he assisted in a major land exchange with the State which acquired land that Congress later designated as the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.  In the Washington Office, Ray Brady was a key BLM staff leader in the Department of the Interior’s efforts to increase the development of renewable energy projects on Federal lands by helping and leading the development of new policies and best management practices, screening priorities for environmental resource conflicts, and streamlining procedures for review and approval of renewable energy projects on federal public lands.

He has received awards and recognition as an “unsung hero” of the Administration’s efforts to increase the development of renewable energy projects on Federal land.  His supervisors and peers have described him as “a visionary who served as a keystone to opening up the public lands for renewable energy development,” and have commended him for “achieving success in such a short period of time.”

In 2012, the Wilderness Society presented him with their “Conservation of Our Public Lands Award” for his completion of the BLM Western Solar Plan and Programmatic EIS which established a blueprint for conservation and responsible development of solar energy resources in the six southwestern States.

Ray Brady has had a long and distinguished career with the BLM, and the PLF is honored to recognize Ray Brady with this Lifetime Service Award.

September 14, 2017