O. James "Jim" Lighthizer (born March 20, 1946) is an American lawyer, politician, and president emeritus of the American Battlefield Trust, a nonprofit battlefield preservation organization. Political career As a Democrat, Lighthizer was a member of the Maryland House of Delegates from 1979 to 1982. Lighthizer served from 1982 to 1990 as elected County Executive of Anne Arundel County, Maryland and is remembered for being instrumental in the creation of Quiet Waters Park, something he would later say was "the toughest political fight in my 16 years of politics". After his term ended, Lighthizer served as the Secretary of Transportation to Governor William Donald Schaefer from 1991 to 1995. During his tenure, he developed new programs that matched state fund with federal ISTEA (Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act) funds to preserve battlefield land. Between 1991 and 2014, the programs Lighthizer initiated and championed protected 8,700 acres on 61 properties near the Antietam National Battlefield, as well as additional acreage at other Maryland battlegrounds. Nonprofit career After leaving state service, Lighthizer resumed the private practice of law. As a board member at the Civil War Trust, he helped engineer its merger with the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites in 1999 before becoming president of the merged organization. In 2011, the Civil War Preservation Trust was renamed, again becoming simply the Civil War Trust, and in May 2018, the overall organization was renamed American Battlefield Trust, with the Civil War Trust continuing as a division of the umbrella organization along with a second division, the Revolutionary War Trust. In November 2019, at the 20th anniversary of his presidency, Lighthizer announced that he would retire in 2020. On November 12, 1999, Lighthizer was named president of the newly formed Civil War Preservation Trust, which was created from the merger of two Civil War battlefield preservation organizations, the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, founded in 1987, and the Civil War Trust, founded in 1991. Together, these two organizations had preserved more than 6,000 acres of battlefield land, but had amassed more than $7 million in debt. In 2000, Lighthizer's first full year, the Trust (now named the American Battlefield Trust) retired all of the outstanding debt while also saving 2,421 new acres. In November 2014, the Trust expanded its preservation mission to include not only Civil War battlefields, but those of the American Revolution and the War of