Summary:
In this interview, Guy Atwood—Lafayette’s 1994 Citizen of the Year honoree—looks back on his 43 years of active involvement in civic affairs. As a 5-year member (also serving two terms as chair) of the Planning Commission, Guy drafted Lafayette’s original Hillside and Open Space Ordinances. He was also closely involved with the effort to zone the entire city in conformance with its first General Plan. He later co-founded the Lafayette Homeowners Council, chaired the 1993 Advisory Committee which was created to update the city’s original General Plan, served on the Finance Committee, and worked for many years to raise funds to maintain and improve Lafayette’s roads.
Oral History:
Chuck Kearn (interviwer): I’m Chuck Kearn of the Lafayette Historical Society Oral History Project, I’m talking with Guy Atwood on May 19th, 2016. I’d like to start out by asking some basic questions, then we can get into your involvement with the city and community. What is your full name and spelling?
Guy Atwood: Guy Davis Atwood, it’s Guy, G-U-Y, Atwood, A-T-W-O-O-D.
CK: And when and where were you born?
GA: I was born in Turtle Rock, California in the Central Valley in March 1942.
CK: And do you have any brothers or sisters?
GA: I have an older brother, he’s a PhD in, he’s a clinical psychologist, and I have a younger sister who’s a PhD in international communications, and she lives in Fresno and he loves in Oklahoma.
CK: Oh really? Good.
GA: I have a younger brother who passed away from cancer.
CK: Okay. Why did you or your family choose to live in Lafayette?
GA: I think the main reason is that my wife, Diane, actually lived in Lafayette as a child after the Second World War for three or four years with her family and always had an affinity for the community, even though she was very young at the time, and we were living in an apartment in El Cerrito at the time, Diane and I had met in Berkeley, gone to school together and married, and we were looking for a larger place for our two children, and so Lafayette just seemed like a very nice community, that’s how we chose it.
CK: How long did you live in Lafayette?
GA: Let’s see, we moved into Lafayette in July of 1968, two weeks after the city incorporated, in fact, I was told by someone that my daughter was the second child that was born in Lafayette after incorporation, it was my daughter Jeanie, so we lived there up until 2015, so that’s 47 ½ years, till we just recently downsized to Pleasant Hill.
CK: Where in Lafayette did you live, if you could give a street address?
GA: We initially lived in, almost like a summer home off of Deer Hill Road, at 3384 Deer Hill, it was right next to Elizabeth Street, which used to go through, but the freeway obviously cut it off, and at that point in time, we moved in 1968, Deer Hill did not go through to the east, it did not go through all the way to Pleasant Hill Road, it actually stopped at Elizabeth, either the county or city put it through in 1968.
CK: What do you remember about Lafayette when you first came here, like your house, or your neighborhood, or your transportation, issues or schools, what you you remember about Lafayette when you first came here?
GA: Well, it was certainly a lot of, the surrounding area we lived in, quite a bit of it was open space, very nice, we had, Kay Tobias, I remember, was one of our neighbors down the hill, and we were, the Montessori School did not exist at that time, it came in later, there were maybe four single homes there, that was later developed by a Montessori school, but you basically had to drive everywhere from where we lived, and I remember the downtown, I used to get my clothes from Art and Jim Sherry and it was later bought by George with Taylor, and, you know, the haircuts locally, that sort of thing…
CK: Freddie’s Pizza.
GA: Yeah, Freddie’s Pizza. We actually ate quite a bit at Flavio’s, Flavio’s was this little Italian place near the Seafood Grotto, I believe, and I used to love some of their sandwiches and, we didn’t eat out an awful lot, a lot of out activities were around school activities, at that time our kids went to Springhill School, then later to Stanley Middle School and then on to Acalanes.
CK: What kind of activities at the school would you go to or be involved with?
GA: Mainly for me, it was Boy Scouts with my son, we did a lot of activities, we did some hikes up in the Sierras, and my wife was pretty active with the schools, there used to be an annual fundraiser and she used to help make the confetti eggs that they used to sell, and that’s how we raised money, we had a little art fair, it later became a much bigger activity, I remember at one point they held the fundraising in the Shepherd’s Auto Body dealership, it was in their maintenance facility, we had these tables set up underneath these great big lifts and so forth, and it became a big affair, they raised something, you know, like sixty thousand dollars, and this is back in the 1970s, and it was a lot of money, prior to that time we raised five thousand, we thought we were doing well, so eventually it turned into a big affair.
CK: Anything else, traffic issues or going through the tunnel, going out?
GA: Most of the time I commuted to work either in San Francisco, I started out as a CPA with a regional CPA firm, Certified Public Accounting, eventually I went to work for a high tech firm in the Peninsula, and then an I-Tell corporation in San Francisco, where I helped take a couple of their subsidiaries public, and so most of the time I was communing for, one time I was working for a company in Walnut Creek and I loved that commute, it was so quick and fast, but most of the time I was commuting.
CK: Well, that gets back to where you lived and what your neighbors were like.
GA: Well, let’s see, from 1968 to 1971, we lived on Deer Hill and then the birth of my daughter in… as she started to grow up, we wanted a larger home, and we really wanted to be a little bit further away from the freeway because, you know, that became a little bit of a noise issue for us, and so we bought a home in Springhill Valley just over the hill. As it turned out, one of my neighbors just two homes down was Don Black, the first mayor of Lafayette, and a fellow by the name of Allen Tebb invited me to join the Board of Directors for the Springhill Valley Homeowners Association, which I did in 1972, and that’s when I became fairly active in what was going on in the city. I would say that some of my mentors who helped teach me a lot about what was happening in Lafayette were people like Allen Tebb, Bill Chillcoat, who was part of the committee to study incorporation for the city of Lafayette back in the 1960’s along with Ned Robinson and Don Black, Bill and I became quite close, and Bob Wood, from the Happy Valley area, Bob was also later, he co-founded the Lafayette Arts and Science Foundation, so those three people were very helpful to me early on, learning about the city.
CK: Okay. In your work with the city and everything else, did you have time to do other things or what did you do for fun?
GA: Well, we bought some land up on the California coast at Sea Ranch, and built a home up there, and we used to go up there quite often, even before we built the home we would take trips up there because we just loved the California coast and enjoyed it, it’s about a three hour drive each way, so it was a long drive, you know we were young at the time so it didn’t seem to bother us as much, so we spent a lot of time there, and we spent a lot of time with school activities for the kids, and most of the other things I did outside of the activities for Lafayette were with people I knew from work and things of that nature, you know, outings and so forth with them.
CK: Speaking of work, you had your friends, and then you had business associates, were any of them your mentor, or… ?
GA: I wouldn’t say that they were mentors for this kind of purpose, I mean I had certainly mentors for business purposes, I enjoyed… most of my career was in accounting and finance, once I left the accounting firm, then I became a controller for a company, and then eventually worked into becoming a YP of finance for several companies and after… in the mid-nineties, actually in the early nineties, I became VP of finance for the American Alumni Association for a couple years, which I enjoyed immensely…
CK: Is that the University of California?
GA: The University of California at Berkeley, and working with Jim Berth, the director and I really enjoyed that experience, we were really successful in getting the alumni association in a much better financial position and turned around and operating profitably and growing rapidly, and then I took another company public in 1997, another high-tech company and was able to retire in 2000 from the success of that, IPO, for that company.
CK: Okay. Who was the most important person in your life? Can you tell me a little about him or her?
GA: Well, by far, the most important person in my life was my wife, Diane, whom I met at Berkeley, I actually lived in the same apartment building, and she really changed my life significantly, she settled me down, I think, and who knows what would have happened to me if I hadn’t met Diane, and she’s an amazing individual because she’s the type of person who can fix anything and just about do anything and do it well, she use to design and make quilts, she used to own a used book store called “Hooked on Books” in Walnut Creek, she built her own computer at one point, so anyone who known Diane knows what I’m talking about. She was also active in the Friends of the Lafayette Library Association and she was president one term, so she’s really been a rock.
CK: Now, what are the biggest changes that you’ve seen in Lafayette?
GA: Well, I think the biggest changes have been in the downtown, and clearly they’ve been in the larger, taller buildings and structures, whether you agree or disagree with some of them, that’s probably been the biggest change and that has resulted, I think, in part of the increased traffic and congestion that the community currently faces, although a lot of that traffic is also coming from other cities that have to drive through Lafayette like Moraga for example, and so I think that’s probably been the single thing.
CK: That’s interesting. Can you think of anything else, housing or office complexes or zoning issues?
GA: Well, the city recently passed a… well, let me back up. I was involved in the implementation of the zoning for the 1974 general plan, that came to the planning commission, I was on the planning commission from 1975 to 1981 and chair twice, and we brought all the zoning in the city into conformance with the 1974 general plan, and the city at that point had just taken all of the zoning from the county at the time of incorporation in ’68, so it took us several years to do that, and then I was involved with the general plan committee, the committee that wrote the general plan, I was chair of that committee for the current general plan which was a 2002 general plan, what the city did was it came up with a specific plan for the downtown called the “Downtown Specific Plan” and they’ve raised the height requirements from thirty-five feet to forty-five feet in certain situations, and so I’m still concerned to this day, although we’ve only had one bad example of that so far, I’m still concerned that eventually we’re going to see much taller buildings in downtown Lafayette. The one building that got approved was a five-story building near BART that’s currently under construction that is five stories on the south side and once that’s built I think people are going to be somewhat shocked about that change, but that’s… when you get taller buildings, then it’s difficult to take care of the parking and there’s more traffic, and even though it may be near BART, people aren’t going to take BART that much if they’re driving, and so we’re just going to see more traffic congestion and parking issues downtown.
CK: Well, this is where I wanted to go next, is that talk about your involvement in city planning, the homeowners council committees, et cetera, and so if you’d want to go through and expand on each and what they meant to you and to the city, and their historical impact for future residences.
GA: The way I got started in Lafayette politics was in 1969, the city had just put through Deer Hill Road all the way to Pleasant Hill Road, I grew up in the city and I wanted to change the name of Deer Hill Road, and of course all the neighbors who lived on Deer Hill Road weren’t too happy with that, so Kate Tobias who was a neighbor, and a number of neighbors got together, and we went down to the newly-appointed planning commission of Lafayette in 1969 I believe, I think it was held in Lafayette School, I think the meeting was either at Stanley or Lafayette School and we made our pitch to retain the names of Deer Hill Road and the planning commission agreed with us, and that’s why Deer Hill Road is still called Deer Hill Road to this day, otherwise it would have been called Smith or Jones or something like that. Once I joined that Springhill Valley Association Board in ’72, then that organization was very active in the city, three of the five initial city council people who were elected into the city council were from the Springhill Valley, including Don Black who like I said I said was a neighbor of mine, and we got involved in, at that time, the only referendum in the history of Lafayette, and the referendum was to oppose an approval by the city in conjunction with the developer of the Kaiser estate at the corner of Pleasant Hill Road and Olympic, and we were able to get the signature signed, this is before computers and before a lot of the ways that people can use to communicate, and we held an election and we got 72% of the vote to defeat that proposal, and as a result of that, I realized that the power in Lafayette was really at the city council and planning commission levels and so I became involved with a number of people I worked with on the referendum, you know, people like Harry Lachlan, I mentioned Allan Tebb, Bob Wood, Bob Roach, who also became on the city council, was part of that group, Art Roanat, Bill Chillcoat, who became a member of the city council, from that group, Hollaves Renton, who became CEO of one of the largest healthcare firms, Norm Lustic, and others, and we were the group that really handled that referendum, so I realized at that point that I needed to get involved in getting good people elected to the city council, and so over the forty years, I probably have served on… been the treasurer for or the campaign manager for, I would say, as many as two-thirds of all the city council people in the city of Lafayette, and as a result I was appointed to the planning commission in 1976, so I served on that for five and a half years, and that was a lot of fun because there were a lot of buildings that came in for approval and a couple of that large housing developments, at that point in time, most of the housing and development of Lafayette, particularly in the valley, not in the ridgelines but in the valley, had all been done, there wasn’t too many large spaces left that were all the way flat that you could build a large residential development, but again, as a result of those efforts, in 1974 or 5, at the encouragement of people like Bill Chillcoat and Bob Wood and Allen Tebb, wrote a draft of both the hillside ordinance and the open space ordinance for the city of Lafayette at my kitchen table and it was later approved by the planning commission, which I was actually serving on at the time and approved by the city council, and those two ordinances were in effect for twenty-five years until the current ordinances were redone, updated, but even the current ordinances were based upon the draft that I wrote in 1974, ’75, so that’s one of the things I’m most proud about.
CK: Well, what was your capacity on the planning commission?
GA: Well, I was both a member and chair, a chair of the commission twice, and again, as I mentioned earlier, we incorporated, we had to take all the zoning for the city of Lafayette and do the entire zoning for the city, every parcel, we were going to conform it to the 1974 general plan and in order to do that, we eventually had to walk almost every single parcel in the city of Lafayette and we would do that on weekends, we would go out and drive around, and of course we had carte blanche to go on anybody’s property that we wanted to, I remember Lloyd Chowly was part of that chair for that period, and at the end of the day he would open up his trunk and he would always have a case of beer in the back and we would always have a beer or two after a long, hot day of hiking over hills and valleys in Lafayette, but I certainly got to know the city during that period of time.
CK: What would be your thinking when you started working on this general plan for what you thought would be a future, meaningful deal for this city?
GA: Well, in terms of the 1974 general plan, I had already at that time drafted the hillside and open space ordinance documents, which were working their way through the city, so I certainly wanted to protect as many of the ridgelines and hillsides in Lafayette as much as I possibly could, and so that was always primary in any kind of zoning that we were looking at, In fact, with almost every application that came in for an approval, housing application, we always, if there was a ridgeline involved, a major ridgeline in Lafayette, then we would require that that ridgeline would be protected and set aside as open space and, as part of the approval process for the application, and then once it was finished, then we would turn that property over to the East Bay regional parks district to manage, so almost all the major ridgelines in Lafayette are protected, the biggest battles today, I think, are over the remaining lots that are near those ridgelines, but I think for the most part, we’ve been successful, very successful.
CK: When we had last talked, you had mentioned that there was something about your commute in San Francisco that helped you think that you didn’t necessarily want that to happen in Lafayette was the ticky-tacky houses and…
GA: Oh yes, there was a song, “Little Boxes” or something like that, and it’s of a portion of a housing in Daly City I believe, and if you’ve ever seen it, driven by it, you’ll know what I’m talking about and I remember thinking, “You know, that could happen in Lafayette, we have the same of kind of situation, we had ridgelines and hillsides and valleys and so forth”, and for a number of reasons I really didn’t feel like it was appropriate to the city of Lafayette, that was part of the driving force to try to do everything we possibly could to preserve those ridgelines and hillsides, and like I said, I think for the most part we’ve been successful with that, you know, over the years, there was a, I think it was a bond measure that Bill Chillcoat tried to get approved at the time of incorporation in 1968, he was a driving force behind that and he was narrowly defeated, in those days you only needed a 50% vote and he got like 49%, but if it had passed, then the city would have had the money to buy the open space in the city and protect it that way, but it didn’t pass and so we had to work at it in different ways and try to protect as much as we possibly could and the ordinances were one way, and then requiring the granting of some of those ridgelines upon approval for some of the residential developments was the other way that we did it.
CK: Well, any additional… I mean your involvement with the city is pretty extensive, so let’s keep talking about…
GA: Well, after I left the Planning Commission, I had felt, and a few others felt, we pretty much had accomplished everything in the city, and we thought, we had a general plan, we have all the ordinances into effect and everything should proceed fairly normally and it only took about a year and a half to see some of the things that were bring proposed to change the city in a significant way, particularly in the neighborhoods at that time, and so some of the concerned folks that I worked with, we came together and we started something called the Lafayette Homeowners’ Council and I was a co-founder of that, and that was parent or umbrella group for all the individual homeowners’ associations in Lafayette and it was a way of bringing the ability for, if there was a problem in a certain homeowner’s area, they could get help for other homeowner’s associations, either information about the best way to proceed or, in some cases, we could help them try to work with the city to get a better development or get something changed, and that group is still in existence, been in existence since 1983, 33 years, and has done a number of wonderful things over the years, there’s just been a number of wonderful people that served on that board and become my friends and so forth, people like Len Hiden, H-I-D-E-N, who has been on the circulation commission for ever, and you know, Carol Singer’s been on Parks and Rec, and if I start naming too many names, my list might, it might take about an hour, but they’re just super-dedicated people who have helped to work in the community over the years to make Lafayette a better place to live.
CK: Sure. Is there anyone or anything that helped you when you formulated this council that, say, I grew up in Burton Valley in the St. Mary’s Orchard area, was there some other group that came to you when you solved their problem or helped them out with?
GA: There were a number. I mean, I remember one of the bigger ones early on was the group that lived off of… was it Pine Lane, in that area? Was it nearer Happy Valley Road, the entrance to that? East Bay MUD had wanted to put in and enlarge their facilities there into a major facility, and in that particular area we wanted to keep in residential, we wanted to keep it fairly open-space, which it is today and so we had to take on East Bay MUD, and the city didn’t want to do it initially, but we convinced them to do it, and then we provided all of the legal expertise, and we won in court, we beat East Bay MUD. That doesn’t happen very often.
CK: No, it doesn’t.
GA: But that was really through the efforts of the members of the Lafayette Homeowners Council. Bill Rammage, Tom Hunter were real active and a few others, but that’s just one example of when we came together and helped a local area of Lafayette protect that area.
CK: Okay. You talked about the general plan, helped out with language for the Redevelopment Agency?
GA: Yeah, well first of all, the… I ‘m not sure which came first but in 1973, every city in the state of California is required to update their general plan about every 20 years by the state of California, and so the 1974 original plan was coming through, so the city formed a committee of about twelve to fifteen members of people throughout the community and I was named chair of that committee, and we began to work on a general plan in 1993, it didn’t get completed and approved until 2002, nine years later. Three of those years were because the city was not in a position to allocate the sufficient efforts and funds for an environmental impact report, so we really worked on it for about six years, maybe five years, then it was a year going though the approval process and so forth, but it’s the current approved general plan of the city of Lafayette today and it’ll be effective until 2022, so I suspect in about five years we’ll start forming another committee to update the current general plan, but again it was a very gratifying experience because we basically wrote that general plan, it was a map for the development of Lafayette, and so even though it was a very difficult effort, we used to meet every two weeks, we were meeting every week, it seems like, I’ll have to try to get it done, people served on that committee and just did a super job of coming up with a document everyone could be proud of.
CK: I don’t know if this is important, but the city limits would border on Moraga and Orinda. How did you to get them to review your plan or were they involved in any way, was Lafayette kind of by themselves?
GA: I think other agencies and communities adjacent had an opportunity to comment, I don’t recall anything of any real significance in terms of difficulty, I think there’s some similarities between Orinda and Lafayette, for example we share a common border, as you know, for a good portion of the western part of Lafayette. Our biggest problem I think has been with the development of Moraga because it has to drive through city streets to get through the freeway, otherwise they’re landlocked, and they can go through Orinda and they can go through Lafayette and so we’ve always been concerned with the development in Moraga, Moraga hasn’t been too concerned about development in Lafayette, and so I don’t recall any contentious issues throughout that process.
CK: You also served on the finance committee?
GA: Yes, that period in my life was pretty busy in 1993 because the city had been incorporated as a no or low property tax city, it got really hurt around the time of Prop. 13 and the reason for that is that the city was already running as a low or no property tax city we didn’t get that much revenue from property taxes because people were so concerned about increases in property taxes, that was one of the major issues for incorporation in 1968. If the city hadn’t done that, made the commitment to the voters, they wouldn’t have voted incorporation in, but Prop. 13 said that everybody has to pay the same amount, you know, one percent of the assessed evaluation plus any basic increases, I think they can increase it about two percent a year or something like that, so that made everybody equal in terms of what they paid but what happened was, the legislature said that however we’re going to distribute the funds based upon the way they were distributed before Prop. 13, so even though Lafayette was paying the property taxes, they weren’t getting the property taxes back, those moneys went to other agencies and to the state and so forth, into the county, so there were about twenty-five, thirty cities in the state of California that were in that position, and it took them about fifteen years of working to finally get the state legislature to give Lafayette some of its tax monies back, which was, believe me, a big deal because it’s probably the single biggest item of revenue in the city’s budget today, whereas it was almost zero fifteen, twenty years ago, so because of the problems we were having in 1993, and this was before the allocation of those moneys back, the city was looking for ways to either run the city more efficiently, cut expenses, raise revenues, so the finance committee was formed and I wasn’t an official member, but I started to go to all the meetings, and nobody else showed up other than from the public, so they finally adopted me as part of the committee, and there were four of us, and we basically, along with the city staff, drafted 43 recommendations to help improve the way in which the city could either cut expenses, raise revenues or operate more efficiently and the city council adopted 42 out of those 43, and we did some things like, we wanted to say it was run more like a business, so we allowed the city to set aside some other savings as an incentive that they could use the following year, or in some cases even for bonuses and things of that nature, so that was a real incentive for the employees to work to save money and to, you know, do things more efficiently and as a result, as a part of the result of that, because of all these additional property tax revenues that were coming in that the city didn’t have, the city today has the highest rating possible credit rating and is in very good financial shape. Out of that series of recommendations we talked about forming a redevelopment agency for the city of Lafayette and so then became active in working with the city to get that process going and worked with the attorney on the language for the redevelopment agency, and eventually it was approved and… the redevelopment agency is basically the downtown property owners, so the additional tax revenues that came out of the base year in 1985 or whatever it was, and everything over that amount could go into this fund for the redevelopment agency to help improve the downtown, and it was initially designed, most of the moneys were designed to go back into the businesses, to help them, they want to redo a storefront or structure or street improvements, whatever the case may be, Bob Adams, who was city manager, negotiated with the county the ability to use funds for public facilities as well, and those funds didn’t count against what they called “the cap” of the property taxes in the agencies and those funds didn’t help build the library and the new veteran’s hall, so in effect, the new library costs about fifteen million to build and another fifty to seventy million in interest, cost over a hundred million dollars, about eighty or ninety percent of those funds came from the redevelopment agency, so I feel pretty good about the effort that I and others were able to put in on that which led to building these buildings, but if you really want to think about it, it’s really the downtown the property owners who paid for these structures, you know their property taxes then went for that purpose.
CK: Did any of that, I’m trying to think about other stand-out things in the city that now people could look at that this originally helped out in.
GA: Well, the, one of the big amounts of funds went to build the building of… can you stop that for a second?
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CK: Okay.
GA: One of the major projects for redevelopment in the downtown in addition to the new library and the Veteran’s Memorial Building was Steve Cortesie’s mercantile building. I think either a million or two million came out of the redevelopment agency funds to help build that project, make it financially feasible, which included some public parking underneath that building, I think that’s turned out to be a really nice structure in the downtown, so that’s an example of how some of those redevelopment funds were used.
CK: Okay. I know other cities become a little bloated and have long term obligations to their employees, how did… the city of Lafayette did a lot of outsourcing through this process?
GA: Initially, again because they were no- and low-property tax city, most of the main services were outsourced. The fire department was already a separate agency, and it continues that way to this day, although the city did look into and did a major study about whether or not they should have their own fire department, but they concluded that they should stay with the county, same thing with police services, police services were outsourced to the county, and we have our own police chief, but he’s an employee of the county, he reports to the city manager, but the city can add more police if they have the sufficient budget to do that, so it’s really a matter of how much they want to allocate that, but I read once that the city of Lafayette was allocated a least one police officer, then we were able to get two or three when we got incorporated, I think we’re up to something like seventeen now, and I have to say that the current police chief has just done an outstanding job, and that Lafayette just does an outstanding job of controlling crime in a high-income city which is a prime target, if you will of some people, and so those were outsourced, we used to outsource some of the contract on some of the maintenance and things of that nature, so Ernie Mariner was our very first city manager and he really, he didn’t have a lot to work with, but Ernie just did an outstanding job of keeping the costs down, running the city on a very low basis, but as the city has become… I guess the way to put it is, as new people have moved into the city who expect more services, and as the city has had the ability to fund those services, primarily through the increase property tax monies which I think amount to three and a half million dollars on a twelve million dollar budget were almost zero twenty years ago, we’ve been able to afford police and more services to provide for the residents.
CK: Yeah well, especially with the high bond rating that in turn gets, if you want to borrow money, a lower interest rate on things, which is a benefit to everybody in this city.
GA: Right. We haven’t had to borrow much money yet, but I think that that may change, it was certainly nice to have that available. I think the other thing that… during this period of time up until 1985 or actually about 2000 I’ve always been interested in trying to find a way to fix the roads in Lafayette, and I’m certainly not the only one. I worked on a campaign in 1995 that was successful, I remember, I think it was, I want to say Bill Zion, was one of the people, and Ann Grodin I think, and there were others who were very instrumental in getting that bond measure a pass, and it’s the only one that’s passed, and since that time we’ve tried three others and they’ve all failed, and the reason is that they require a two-thirds vote, but fortunately, a few years back, with some twisting of arms, we were able to get the city council to put up three million dollars out of their savings to accelerate road replacement in Lafayette and today, the city’s in a position within five years to have all their roads fixed, and drains, and brought up to a very high standard, and most likely at that point in time it will be in the best shape in terms of roads and drains of any city in Northern California.
CK: That’s great for the residents of Lafayette.
GA: Yes.
CK: In 1994, I’ll bring up something about you, you were Citizen of the Year for Lafayette, and maybe you could tell us a little bit about that, the dinner that they gave you, and I think there was a terminology they used for you?
GA: Yes that was, really I think a reward for me for not just one thing but maybe an accumulation of some of the things we talked about, or recognition, if you will, the Citizen of the Year is put upon by the Chamber of Commerce in the city of Lafayette, and Don Tasset was the emcee for that, and I think one of the council members who was a chamber member, Jay Strauss, I think, made me a cap and named me “Mr. Semi-Rural”, so I had a cap that I used to wear that said “Mr. Semi-Rural”, a number of the people who got to know me at that point in time, you know, they always thought of me I think as “Mr. Semi-Rural for City of Lafayette” I think goes back to both being involved in writing the initial hillside and open space ordinance for Lafayette, but also in trying to retain that character throughout the city for many, many years.
CK: So where do you see Lafayette going in the future, if you can expand on that?
GA: I think it’s going be more of the same. I think there’s gonna be, I don’t think there’s going to be that much happening in the residential areas, I mean the (?) plan, and the ordinances have done a pretty good job, and when I say the ordinances I mean the hillside and open space ordinances, have done a pretty good job in protecting the residential areas in Lafayette. The downtown, on the other hand, is going to see a lot of development, potentially for more and more housing, the pressure is really coming through the state of California and other agencies to try to provide more housing and more affordable housing in the state and so the city, every seven or eight years, has to come up with a new housing element, and that element has to specify the number of homes or parcels that the city can provide through zoning to meet the requirements in this area which is the ABAG area which is in nine counties around the Bay Area and so the city of Lafayette has just allocated their share and there’s four categories, there’s market housing, there’s moderate affordable, there’s low affordable and there’s very low affordable, those are the four categories of housing and the city has to be able to, they don’t have to build it, they have to provide the ability to have it built through zoning and other incentives and so the city had worked very hard over the past number of years to try to do that and they haven’t improved housing element for the next six or seven years now.
CK: Well, this is only a partial part of your involvement in the city, I guess I could ask you what would be your proudest, what are you proudest of in your life, that would be a lot of time and effort in making the city of Lafayette great, I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
GA: Well, outside of my family which I’m very proud of, I think it’s a number of things that have happened that I’ve been able to be involved in now over forty years of city government probably the single thing I’m most proud of are the hillside and open spaces ordinances because it had the most dramatic impact on a long term basis for the city of Lafayette, again I don’t want to give the impression that I was the only one involved in that process, there was certainly a number of other people who all deserved some credit, but that’s the single thing I’m most proud of is that I wrote the original draft of those documents at my kitchen table in 1974, I believe, but some of the other things I think, working with this committee to do the general plan was very gratifying, you know, just a super group, the people, dedicated residents, that’s one of Lafayette’s strengths, I think, over the years has been the participation by individuals in the government process in some way, and I think if I had one worry or concern about the future of Lafayette it’s that that process has been diminished. It seems to me like the committees and commissions, except a lot easier the recommendations of city staff, and it’s not that they weren’t well-intended but they my not be what the community really wants, and when I served, we challenged every single thing that they did, every single recommendation and we improved better every single thing that was done, and basically the community, ultimately what the community wanted was what the city did. Now, that’s not true so much anymore. The community seems to have less and less a voice in what’s happening in the city, and that’s disturbing to me and I think that’s one of the biggest problems, but as I said, over the years, if you look back to the 1950’s-1960’s, I think the involvement in the city of Lafayette have really been the big reason why Lafayette has become a great little community to live in.
CK: Well I can attest to your efforts and other people’s efforts on the, especially the ridgeline ordinance, I moved away, lived in Seattle for 35 years, then moved back about five years ago and the thing that stands out is those beautiful ridgelines with no houses on it, cattle grazing, so thank you.
GA: You’re welcome.
CK: And that you for this interview and you’re been great help in supporting Lafayette, so this will end the interview.
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