Board of Directors

Tom Atkins is President and Founder of J.T. Atkins & Company P.C., based in Bend, Oregon.  Tom is an award-winning landscape architect and planner whose work focuses on applying his understanding of how natural and cultural features shape the site and region in creating sustainable plans and designs. His firm’s projects include greenway and trail system plans, park designs, urban spaces, and conservation developments. Prior to moving to Bend from Seattle, Tom was on the Board of the Cascade Land Conservancy.  He enjoys the special environments in and around Bend while skiing, biking, canoeing and birding.  

Rod Bonacker is the special projects coordinator for Deschutes and Ochoco National Forest. He began his Forest Service career in 1974 as a firefighter, and continues to work in fire suppression as Operations Section Chief for the Central Oregon Incident Management Team. When he is not working on Land trust business or fighting fire, Rod fishes, skis, rides his bike, and manages his rare book business, Black Butte Books.

Michael Emmons holds a LLM in Taxation from NYU Law School. Since both Mike and his wife, Gail, grew up in Oregon Mike started his career in Oregon by joining the Tax Division of Arthur Andersen & Co in their Portland office.  Later, wanting to live overseas, Mike worked for Arthur Anderson in Hong Kong and Tokyo. In 1995 Mike joined Andersen Consulting (Accenture today) as head of its world wide tax group and retired from Accenture in 2001. Mike is currently on the board of Mentor Corporation, listed on NYSE, and recently retired (term limits) from the board of Black Butte Ranch.  He started flying after retiring and has a plane hangared at Redmond Airport.  Gail and he also enjoy traveling, golfing, fly fishing and grandchildren, not necessarily in that order.

Kim McCarrel retired as a relationship manager for a large institutional investment manager and promptly moved to Central Oregon, where she and her husband Steve had been spending their weekends and vacations for over 15 years.  Kim is an avid horseback trail rider, and has authored two trail guidebooks for equestrians.  She is on the board of Oregon Equestrian Trails and the Sisters Trails Alliance.  

Jim Nicol is the founder and Managing Principal of McKinney Butte Consulting, an advisory company assisting forestland owners and investors on a global basis.  A forester by training, Jim has worked extensively across the US, New Zealand and Brazil.  As a champion of maintaining healthy, working forests, he has facilitated a number of conservation easements in the Pacific Northwest and Southeast. 

Jim and his wife Lisa joined the Sisters community in 2000 along with their collection of dogs, horses and donkeys, and became permanent residents in 2009. Jim is an active volunteer for the Sisters Trails Alliance and the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show in addition to the Land Trust and you can often find him biking, backpacking, running, cross-country skiing and fly-fishing with his trusty Chesapeake Bay retriever.

Laurence (Larry) Weinberg retired as an Associate Technical Fellow from the Boeing Company in 2005 and moved to Bend in September of that year. Prior to his almost 18 years with Boeing, Larry was an attorney with state government in Montana; and before that he taught mathematics at the University of Wyoming.  In Bend he volunteers with the Deschutes Land Trust, Central Oregon Humane Society, Tower Theatre, and Osher Lifelong Leaning Institute (OLLI, formerly the Silver Sage Society). Larry has eliminated a great many invasive plants from the Land Trust Indian Ford Meadow and Camp Polk Meadow Preserves, and helps to lead the Land Trust’s Weed Warrior team in its seemingly never-ending battle with invasive species.

Dougal Williams