Elect Elizabeth Echols to keep East Bay’s top park district on track

During the pandemic, the East Bay Regional Park District has proved once again to be an invaluable community asset.

With indoor activities a threat to public health, residents turned to the nation’s largest regional urban park district for escape. And the district, consisting of 73 parks with 1,250 miles of trails in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, has met the challenge.

It’s an organization that generally works cooperatively for the common good. When longtime Director Whitney Dotson stepped down shortly before his death in January, the board appointed former Obama administration official Elizabeth Echols to fill the vacancy.

It was an excellent choice. In the only contested park district race of the Nov. 3 election, voters in Ward 1, stretching from Berkeley to Richmond and El Sobrante, should elect Echols to a full four-year term.

She’s the sort of smart, collegial, environmentally sensitive leader the district needs.

Echols has a long history of public service. An attorney who graduated from Stanford Law School, she served in the Commerce Department during the Clinton administration and the Small Business Administration during the Obama administration.

In between, she was policy director at Google and then director of the U. S. Green Building Council. And today, she represents utility ratepayers as the director of the Public Advocates Office at the California Public Utilities Commission.

In approach, she and her opponent, attorney and former El Cerrito Councilman Norman La Force, couldn’t be more different. At the park district, La Force is best known as the guy who files legal challenges.

La Force claims in his campaign material that he led the Sierra Club campaign to have the district purchase more land to double the size of the Point Isabel Dog Park, perhaps the East Bay’s most popular escape for canine owners.

Actually, when the park at Point Isabel was expanded in the early 2000s, La Force sought to block dog access to the new area.

Not surprisingly, some members of the dog- owner community consider La Force an obstacle, not an ally.

More recently, in 2012, the Sierra Club and an environmental organization La Force heads filed a lawsuit against the park district trying to block off-leash dog access planned as part of the Albany Beach Restoration project.

A court ruled that the district’s analysis in its environmental impact report about the effect of dogs was inadequate.

So, the district redid the analysis and when the results again showed no significant effect from the dogs, La Force and his group filed another legal challenge. All told, the litigation lasted four years. In the end, the park district prevailed, but it spent about $325,000 on legal fees.

Now, La Force says, he wants to join the board so he can change the park district from the inside and lead it in a different direction.

But we’re quite happy with the district’s current direction. Echols is the candidate who will keep it on track.