Summary:
Bob Fisher was interviewed by Andree Duggan on May 28, 2021. He and his wife and children lived in Lafayette for 19 years, between 1966 when he became a professor of criminology at UC Berkeley and 1985, when they moved to New York for a new career opportunity. Not long afterward they returned to Orinda and have lived there ever since. During his time in Lafayette Bob provided important leadership, which was based on his strong personal values, to the effort to incorporate the City and establish local control, and to the creation of a community-driven governance model for the City. He served two terms as mayor in his 8 years on the City council, during which nearly 250 Lafayette citizens served on the new commissions which had been given responsibility for such areas as Fire, Signage, Walkways, and BART.
Oral History:
Andree Duggan: I am Andree Duggan with the Lafayette Historical Society Oral History Project and I’m talking today with Bob Fisher. Today is May 28, 2021 and I have to ask you, what is your full name and the spelling?
Robert Fisher: Robert M. Fisher, without a “C”.
AD: Do you have a nickname?
RF: Bob.
AD: All right, I got that part right. When and where were you born?
RF: I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1938.
AD: And how long have you lived in Lafayette?
RF: We moved to Lafayette in the summer of 1966, we lived in Lafayette until the summer of 1985 when we moved to Manhattan. When we returned from a career opportunity in Manhattan, we could not find a house in Lafayette, we ended up in Baja Lafayette, so we’ve lived in Orinda since 1985-86.
AD: Very good. What is it about Lafayette that prompted you to settle here in 1986?
RF: Lafayette was a, as it still is today, a gorgeous, gorgeous community. Very convenient to Berkeley where I was a professor, great climate, great schools, all of the amenities that one would look for in a starter home for a young couple making an academic career in Berkeley.
AD: That’s wonderful. What were you doing at the time and how did you become involved in your new community?
RF: I was a Professor of Criminology, we had just been recruited by the University of California in 1965 from where I was with the British Home Office at the University of London, we had lived in a rented house in Berkeley for the first year while we decided whether we wanted to stay, so as soon as it was clear that we loved the area and I was enjoying the job, we started house hunting, we had an infant, a daughter, our first child at the time, and we fell in love with Lafayette.
AD: That’s wonderful. How many children did you have? How about if we start with your wife’s name at the time and how many children you had together.
RF: My wife, Ellie, Dr. Eleanor Fisher, still my wife after 62 years, and at the time we moved to Lafayette, we had a daughter who was a toddler, she wasn’t even two years old at the time, we subsequently added a son, so our daughter’s name is Laurie, our son’s name is Jonathan.
AD: Wonderful. Do you have any grandchildren?
RF: Oh yes. I have three grandboys.
AD: And I have to ask you, any great-grandchildren?
RF: Not yet.
AD: Way too young for that. Can you discuss how you became involved in the community here for the Cityhood Campaign?
RF: Yes, or the Incorporation Campaign. I had no intention of becoming involved, but even after being here for a year or two, I was very involved in leadership. I came from a family that always was very active in community affairs, and very active in philanthropy and charitable involvement, so that it was natural for me, I co-founded our first non-profit in Berkeley just months after arriving here, the Suicide Prevention Center of Alameda County, which is now the Crisis Center, which is only the second in the United States, so I was already extremely involved in Berkeley. What happened was that a neighbor, Anne Brinkerhoff and her husband Elmer, who lived down below us on North Peardale Drive, in Upper Happy Valley, came by the house to ask me to sign a petition for incorporation. Well, she bent my ear, and because I’ve been an activist, I’d been president of my class in high school, I had been president of my 500 men residential college at Harvard, I almost always took leadership, I was the head of my high school fraternity, and so when Anne Brinkerhoff started talking to me about the pros and cons of incorporation, I just got interested, and I said, “Anne, Ellie and I would be happy to help. Do what you’re doing in the neighborhood, if there’s anything we can do, all of it seems like a great thing, we’re brand new to the community”, and that’s how it happened.
AD: When you arrived, we were an unincorporated… territory?
RF: An area, an unincorporated area of the county, and there were at the time only thirteen cities in the county, the most recent incorporation, this was looking back from 1968, ’66 actually, which was the start of the incorporation campaign, had been in 1958, about 8 years earlier in Pleasant Hill, the city of Pleasant Hill, so Contra Costa was still a much smaller population. At the time we had a five or six hundred thousand population in Contra Costa County. We had tried once or twice to incorporate but it had never happened because there’s a certain amount of inertia, and people are afraid of property taxes and the cost of adding another level of administration as a trade-off for local control, but times were changing and because of the growth of our business district during those years, a study by the Local Agency Formation Commission of the county which determines all incorporations, of which I later became the chair in the mid-seventies, the Local Agency Formation Commission studied Lafayette, and the determination was made that based upon our sales tax revenues in downtown that we could become a no-property-tax city, which is rare, but we would not need a property tax if we incorporated with a very, very frugal model of managing the city. So by 1968, conditions were changing, we believed we could sell the incorporation as a no-property-tax city, and we were being threated increasingly by pressures of growth, notably by the proposed completion of BART by 1970, and we were concerned about the impacts of BART on Lafayette growth, at the time, the general plan of the county showed Lafayette’s population as somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 to 65,000 people. If we had built out in the zoning that the county saw for the future of Lafayette, that would have made us a fairly densely populated, single-family residential community, and we were very concerned about that.
AD: Looking back now, you live in Lafayette… oh, I need to ask you where you live, because they like to know where people live…
RF: 3932 North Peardale Drive.
AD: And this is the same place you’ve lived the whole time?
RF: It was where we lived until 1985.
AD: Okay. And so, since then you are now at…
RF: 85 Southwood Drive in Orinda.
AD: Oh, you’re in Orinda?
RF: Which I call “Baja Lafayette” a phrase I coined and which people now chuckle at because of the perennial competition among local communities.
AD: Obviously you love Lafayette, you were very involved, I’m sure you come here to have breakfast or to walk the reservoir, looking back at those days and what you did with incorporation, how do you think that has helped Lafayette today?
RF: It’s a complicated question, but we’re looking back at, what, 53 years of retrospection? From the campaign for the incorporation itself, through the values that the first council brought to our new community, participation in Lafayette meant everything to us. Before incorporation and after incorporation, thanks to the mix we had in our first councils dedicated to citizen participation, we generated twenty candidates in that first election. Every one of those candidates was a yea-sayer, there wasn’t a single naysayer in the group of twenty candidates. We had one or two who were ambivalent and who were sort of grey on the issue of incorporation, but most of these incorporation campaigns attract somebody who was going to snipe at the incorporation. We really had a cheerleading bunch, and those of us like myself are very loud cheerleaders could easily outcheer the occasional person who might snipe at the idea of incorporation. When we incorporated, participation was incredible in the campaign, the vote was really wonderful, we really did get out the vote and we won by a considerable margin. Some of the first things that first council did was to involve citizens. Within two or three months we created the BART Commission, chaired by Gordon Holmes, my good colleague, the late Dr. Gordon Holmes, who had been the second-highest vote getter in the campaign and that was to respond to what the impacts would be of the opening of BART on the community of Lafayette. We created, subsequently, a study of the BART block, we looked at what our population would be and we incorporate some population limits through rezoning of our community in our first general plan which we adopted in 1970, but there was a high level of participation, I chaired the second commission we created which we created within a month or two after we incorporated called the Fire Commission, the Fire Protection Commission, and indeed a very wonderful group of participants on my commission, the Fire Commission made the significant decision within the first six months of our incorporation to liquidate the local fire commission that had been created in 1911 and was one of our most dearly loved local institutions in favor of consolidating the Lafayette Fire District with the Consolidated Fire District because we knew after a very methodologically rigorous study that the finances and quality of service from Consolidated would give us a much higher level of fire protection in Lafayette than this local institution to which we’ve been clinging for years, it was a very tough decision in the city. We created any number of commissions, and the first mega-commission we created, the 49ers, which was chaired by Norm Tuttle who succeeded me when I retired from the fourth council, and he was elected to the first council, Norm Tuttle chaired the 49ers which was comprised of 49 citizens in seven groups looking at different facets of Lafayette life quality to make recommendations to the Gordon Holland Associates consulting group that we engaged in 1968 to work with us to draft our first general plan. From this first flood of commissions came the Walkways Commission, the Ridgelines Protections Commission, the very highly impactful Sign Commission, where we worked so closely with the Chamber of Commerce, the Youth Commission inspired by Barbara Bupp on which I served, that engaged teenagers, at one point in Lafayette’s early days we had between 200 and 250 Lafayette residents working on these commissions, that defined the city, and that really, going back to your question, and I’ve spoken at length because there’s a lot to be said about this, that had shaped citizen involvement in Lafayette and has resonated through the generations.
AD: That’s wonderful, Bob. So, you were the first head of the first council?
RF: No, I… even though I was the top vote-getter, we had a somewhat controversial start, and I was the third mayor, and then I was again the seventh mayor, so I was mayor of the third council, and I was mayor of the seventh council, counting councils as two-year periods, I served with a total of eight other councilmen during my two terms.
AD: That’s wonderful, so you really have… talk about being a public servant, it sounds as though you’ve done quite a lot over the years. Let me look at some of these other questions here that we wanted to ask. When you became mayor in 1970 and the again in ’74, what were the city’s challenges at that time?
RF: We got off to a running start, actually we got off to a somewhat halting start, we had a couple of… the council really didn’t settle down initially for a little bit, there were some disruptions, this was a very tough time, you’re too young to remember this but when we incorporated in 1968, we had… the founding of the John Birch Society was the year before. We were recovering from the assassinations of 1963-1964 and the Republican Convention in 1964 when Nelson Rockefeller, a moderate, was shouted down and not allowed to speak because the audience wanted Barry Goldwater who is aft quoted in saying as he did at the convention, “Extremism at the defense of liberty is not a vice”, or something like that, I’m paraphrasing Barry Goldwater. This was a very disrupted time, of the Vietnam War and the demonstrations. The John Birch Society was founded a year before I think in 1963, we had a candidate who got elected who was active with the John Birch Society, and the first two years we had to deal with a variety of impacts in the community of which I’m very ashamed, we had racism, we had antisemitism, people don’t know, I had swastikas painted on my garage door, I had to hire a security service, private security to protect my family for six months when I was the first mayor. At a party celebrating incorporation we had a community personality, who was speaking to an elected first-time councilman, was overheard as saying, “I’ll vote to disincorporate before I see a kike mayor in this town”, so this was a different time, and where we had to deal with undercurrents that were today had to understand, very, very embarrassing. Well, going back to your question, when I became mayor, we really, I thought we needed to brand Lafayette, we were still just a suburb of the urban core, and somewhere in that area between Berkeley, Oakland and Walnut Creek, which was burgeoning, I started with the help of John Kennedy of the Chamber of Commerce, and the Great Chamber, the Chamber Executive, the Concorde D’Elegance de Lafayette, because I thought that if we could bring a Concorde D’Elegance to Lafayette, which had been named for the marquis, that we could begin branding the community as an upscale community, an epicurean community with tastes, and this was not inconsistent with the BART block idea where we thought by creating a retail area of boutique shops around our BART station, our urban core, we could attract the Tiffanys. Well, we lost on that one to Walnut Creek, and the BART block, in most respects, given our original vision, didn’t happen, but we were branding Lafayette, we were taking advantage of the new sign ordinance that was beautifying downtown, I was thrilled to see the opening up of the reservoir to recreation, because the reservoir had been closed to recreation, on the water itself until 1970. A very important thing that I was proud of, I won’t take responsibility for it, none of us deserve individual responsibility, but in the late ‘60s, we were receiving community block grants that had no strings attached, many cities were using these community block grants to pay more to their staff, to pay for new development. Our city under our first council made the intelligent decision to set aside our community block grant money and accumulate it over a number of years until we received a sufficient critical mass of those monies so that we could build senior housing so that people forced out by the cost of living in Lafayette to other communities would have a place In which to remain in Lafayette, so we accumulate monies and built Chateau Lafayette behind the theater for seniors, no other community in this area set aside their monies and husband those monies to do something like the Chateau Lafayette of which I’m extremely proud. There were numerous other things, we had… when we adopted in 1970 the general plan during my mayoralty which had been in the works for a couple of years during the fine mayoralty of Don Black and the fine succeeding mayoralty of Gordon Holmes, we looked at our zoning and we created a community whose future growth should be roughly around 25,000; at the time we were only about maybe 18 or 20,000 people, the county zoning made such huge change. In effect, we downzoned the city so that it would become always a city of plus or minus 25,000 when it grew to its maximum, that, I thought, was extremely significant for the long-term future of the community. I’ve gone on.
AD: Well then, let me ask you a question, there’s quite a lot of concern today in Lafayette with regard to the many, many condo complexes that we see popping up all over the place, and other developments in the works, you know, there’s concern about that taxing the infrastructure, the roads, the shops, and changing the feel of the town, however, I guess there is some incentive to developing within a mile of the BART, you know, because there’s a housing shortage throughout the area, so when you look at all of these things, you seem to be a very good visionary, what do you see for the future of Lafayette?
RF: Well, thank you for that compliment. I have had experience that has shaped my thinking about the importance of thinking regionally. I was chairman of the County Mayors’ Conference involving all the cities of the county, I was Lafayette’s first chairman of the Local Agency Formation Commission which at the time, was not only approving or disapproving incorporations of other communities, I was the chair of that commission when we incorporated Moraga, so some people call me one of the parents of Moraga. I think it’s critically important to think regionally, and regionally what we know is we have a terrible housing shortage, locally we also know that density of population creates possibilities for local development that really is the lifeblood of local development. Our downtown would be very different in terms of its potential if there was more pedestrian traffic. So many people walk in and out of shops, and as long as you provide adequate parking, the vitality of a downtown depends hugely on pedestrian traffic and parking, those are the two main drivers of downtown health, and the health of a small downtown like ours is extremely important to the long term vitality of the community so we balance that with the question, “Can we help our region through the provision of housing affordable to people of all means, and secondly, are there places in Lafayette where we can create that housing that doesn’t detract from what we are, principally a semi-rural community of single family residences”, and my own belief is that we can build a healthy urban core. We’re not a Walnut Creek, we never want to be a Walnut Creek or a Pleasant Hill or a Danville or anybody else, we are Lafayette, and what I would just say is there are many places in the downtown area where multiple dwellings, higher density, would be very acceptable. Now, that doesn’t come without negative affect, negative affect is principally parking and traffic. We can deal with parking in a number of ways, there are certain ways in which we can deal with and improve traffic, but there is a trade-off, and the trade-off is more traffic and more competition for parking. Is it worth it? I think we can create a vital downtown by approving more and more multiples in the downtown center. That doesn’t mean that I agree with the development at the east end of town at Acalanes Road and Pleasant Hill Road, I’ve always been against that particular zoning for multiples.
AD: Okay. One thing that crosses my mind, I’m a big biker, and Lafayette’s the ideal biking community with all the many flat roads all over the place, and I think we have that wonderful trail, multiuse trail between Lafayette and Moraga, but when you go downtown in Lafayette, it’s very difficult to find a place to put your bike, after living in Oakland for so many years where biking is a big, well, there’s a very active biking community and they’ve been involved in putting in there little parking things all over the place for bikes, that is something that crosses my mind, perhaps for the future, that we could make more room, become more friendly for people to get out on their bikes, and that would help to alleviate some of the parking pressure, but what are your thoughts on something like that?
RF: You know, what I’ll just say to that is that I’m very big on the outdoors and very big on recreation, and I’m very active still, and I agree with you, we were committed to opening up the reservoir maximally for exercise, we created, and I say this because it goes back to my time, my Walkways Commission, we encouraged neighborhoods to look at assessment districts for putting in sidewalks, we were very supportive of bikeways and bike traffic, so we have always been believers. That having been said, when you look at Lafayette, we have two major, busy roads that are highly congested and one huge intersection at Moraga and Mount Diablo Boulevard. I would not want to do anything with either of those roads that increases congestion or decreases parking. The trade-offs are not worth it. Implication is, without affecting traffic or parking, where our businesses are and our traffic is heaviest, yes, we should build walkways and provide for biking, and it can be done, people have been very creative about this.
AD: Right, and maybe skipping over some of those big intersections and sticking to roads like Brooks or that kind of thing. Let me ask you, changing the subject here, what would you consider to be your most important personal contribution to Lafayette?
RF: I don’t know if I would select a single thing, I would say, what I’m most proud of is my values and my support of those values and the people around me who had similar values because again what I’ll say is, it wasn’t about “I” or “me” for any of us, it was about “we”. Those nine council people, of whom I was one, including one who was a very limited, dogmatic, politically out-of-sync right-winger who thought by grandstanding and appealing to his “base” he could do things in Lafayette and it turns out all he did was marginalize himself and make it difficult for us as a council to do all the good things we wanted to do and encouraged a small group, fortunately a small group, of people who were his supporters to be naysayers, snipers… he was vote out after two years, he was thrown out of office, and that was very important to us. Of the remaining seven, only one had a character defect and that was because he was politically ambitious. He wanted to be a judge, and so he did things that were wrong, and we knew who he was, we knew how he was, and most if the time he was in sync with us with land use planning issues which was 90% of what we had to deal with, how to improve Lafayette as a living environment, not culturally. 90% of the time he wasn’t an issue, and so what I would say is that of the nine people in the original council, we had seven people who were honest, who had integrity, who were devoted to each other, who were diverse in our politics, I was probably the only Democrat who was elected to the city council until Barbara Langlois was elected to the city council, I’m not sure, I don’t even know what other people’s politics were, Willy Costa may have been a Democrat, but as Donn Black and I always agreed, Don was an Oregonian and a lifelong Republican, I was a Minnesotan and a lifelong Democrat, and we agreed that we were interchangeable, totally interchangeable, in our politics, so that we were dominated by a moderate, progressive group of people who really trusted each other, and what did that do? What it did was it meant that when people like George Wasson were elected and others were elected, they really were people who continued in that mode. Lafayette never had a history of dysfunction in its city council, we controlled the first two years of potential dysfunction, and we controlled the dysfunction that potentially was there, we never had it. We’ve seen other city councils come apart because of their dysfunction, so that’s what I’m most proud of.
AD: Thank you. As we end today’s wonderful discussion and, again, we are so happy and appreciative that you agreed to share your memories with us today on these important years in Lafayette. The general plan for Lafayette will be the blueprint for how the city will grow in the future, so sort of passing the baton, the general plan is in process and will center on community priorities around conservation, development, and a desired balance for Lafayette’s social, environmental, and economic values. It sounds as though every few years, we probably do this sort of thing. What recommendations would you have for citizens who would like to get involved in the future of Lafayette, perhaps people who have lived here their whole lives or maybe newcomers, what are your feelings on civic engagement and the importance of that?
RF: I really don’t have anything to add to what I’ve said before about that, Andree, I think that I’m only involved with the fringes of Lafayette now, now I only offer my opinion when I’m asked, I’ve lived in Orinda for a long time, and so I’m reluctant to comment. What I would say is that I know that the general plan of Lafayette as updated will be excellent if there is heavy citizen involvement and I would be very shocked if there were not heavy citizen involvement, given our history.
AD: Wonderful. Well, that’s a great answer. Thank you again so much for this oral history today, and we look forward to seeing it on the Lafayette Historical Society website.
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