Sears leaves with legacy of environmental success
Marin supervisor steps down after 10 years on county board
After a decade representing Southern Marin, Marin County Supervisor Kate Sears is saying goodbye to public life.
Sears, 68, announced in July that she would not seek re- election in November, clearing the way for Mill Valley Councilwoman Stephanie Mouton-Peters to assume the 3rd District seat.
On Tuesday, Sears attended her final meeting, as fellow supervisors and community leaders from throughout the county spent two hours bidding her farewell.
“What stands out is you’ve always been the right person to lead on the big issues,” said Supervisor
Damon Connolly. “That is especially true of the issues that you care about to your core, like the well being of our environment.”
Nona Dennis, a past president of the Marin Conservation League, said, “You were driven not by political ambition but by your need to serve other people, to listen to them and to express your empathy.”
Former Sausalito councilman Ray Withy noted, “With her compassion, her vision and razor sharp intellect, you do not enter a debate with Kate Sears unless you’ve got your facts straight and your reasoning sound.”
An arthritic hip has made the hours of sitting through meetings painful for Sears, and she pines for more free time. She was
appointed to the board by then-governor Jerry Brown following the 2010 death of supervisor Charles McGlashan.
Sears grew up in Mill Valley and Sausalito. Her father was a partner in the prominent San Francisco law firm of Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro, and
her mother taught mathematics at Tamalpais High School.
“I was really motivated to throw my hat into the ring by my parents and their legacy of community engagement and environmental activism,” Sears said Tuesday.
Sears came to Brown’s attention while serving as the state’s supervising deputy attorney general during his second term as governor. She negotiated an $8.6 billion nationwide settlement with Countrywide Financial for predatory lending and supervised legal teams that investigated fraudulent conduct related to the country’s 2008 financial crisis.
Before securing a law degree from Harvard, she earned a degree in Asian studies at Carleton College in Minnesota, a masters in Chinese studies at the University of Washington, and a doctorate in political science from the University of Michigan.
The environment
During her tenure on the board, Sears picked up where McGlashan left off helping to secure the success of Marin Clean Energy. Sears proceeded, however, to establish a broader legacy of environmental achievements.
She led the county’s BayWAVE sea level rise vulnerability and adaptation initiative, and spearheaded “DRAWDOWN: Marin” — a campaign to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions community wide. She also played a leading role in Marin County’s decision to file suit against 57 oil and gas companies for damages their products caused to the environment.
On Thursday, Sears said, “The thing that makes the job of county supervisor very special is you can take initiative, like I did with all the sea-level rise work and climate change. I didn’t have to do that. That to me was one of the wonderful aspects of the job.”
Sears said even though she had served on the Sausalito Planning Commission
before being appointed to the board she had never harbored any political aspirations. She said the appointment attracted her because there was only a year and a half left of McGlashan’s term. She figured she could just walk away if she didn’t like the job.
“Then I got into office, and I became fascinated by everything that could be done,” Sears said. “I found that I really enjoyed it.”
She was elected without opposition to a full term in June 2012. Then in June 2016, she secured a second term after defeating Susan Kirsch of Mill Valley. Sears received 57.86 percent of the vote to Kirsch’s 41.92 percent.
“Unlike a lot of people, I loved going door-to- door,” Sears said. “I loved the interaction with people.”
In an email, Kirsch wrote, “I ran against her in the 2016 Board of Supervisors election because residents in Strawberry, Marin City, TamAlmonte, and other parts of District 3 said she lacked responsiveness to their issues. To her credit, Kate focused on climate change, which is important and ambitious. But she often stayed removed from the immediacy of community needs.”
Intractable issues
Sears found several local issues to be intractable during her decade in office.
Early in her tenure as supervisor, she had to contend with a fierce backlash to the initial version of Plan Bay Area, a longrange transportation and land- use/ housing blueprint for the nine- county Bay Area that seeks to cut greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging housing growth along existing traffic corridors and close to mass transit, jobs, shopping and other services.
Opponents of the plan, which included Kirsch, feared the strategy would ultimately lead to the construction
of overly dense housing apartment complexes in Marin. The plan was adopted in 2013 but only after Marin’s commitment to build housing had been reduced significantly.
Part of the Plan Bay Area process involved getting as many cities and counties as possible to designate “priority development areas” in return for promised transportation grant money from the state.
Whether areas of Strawberry should be designated as a priority development area (PDA) generated enormous controversy. Sears delayed a decision in hopes of brokering a compromise, but in February 2014 after local opposition reached a fever pitch, she eventually endorsed removing Strawberry from consideration as a PDA.
Then in April 2014, the Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary sold its 126-acre Strawberry campus to North Coast Land Holdings. That sparked a fight between North Coast and community members over the property’s development that continues to this day.
Once again, Sears attempted to broker a compromise. She convinced North Coast and eight community representatives to engage in a series
of facilitated negotiations. Some 50 meetings took place between May 2018 and October 2019, but in the end North Coast pulled out and submitted a new development proposal which community members have rejected.
Sears said although the talks slowed the process down, they were a good thing.
“It improved the project in many ways,” Sears said. “There is still a long way to go, but I think the fact that the project is now in the environmental impact report phase will be helpful.”
Marin City project
Another thorny problem that Sears was unable to resolve during her tenure is how to improve living standards at Golden Gate Village, a federally owned housing development that is home to 300 low- income families, a majority of them African-American.
Due to decades of insufficient funding from the federal government, the eight high-rise and 22 lowrise buildings that make up the project are badly in need of repair. In August, a group of residents there filed a lawsuit alleging that the county is violating their rights by ignoring hazardous conditions that include: exposed electrical wires, broken windows, dusty or broken ventilation systems, rat droppings and mold.
Marin supervisors make up a majority of the board of the Marin Housing Authority, which oversees Golden Gate Village. The authority has been working over the last several years to advance a revitalization plan that currently calls for preservation of all eight high- rise buildings and 20 of the low-rise buildings.
The Golden Gate Village Resident Council, however, has staunchly opposed the plan, expressing concern that existing residents will be displaced, Recently, galvanized by the Black Lives Matter movement, residents from outside Marin City have rushed to support the council.
“It’s frustrating to me now,” Sears said, “because there are many new people who have come in who have not been as engaged over the last couple years and may not be as aware of the realities of how you actually finance and bring to fruition a project.
“We have spent a number of years evaluating the options, including the proposal that the Resident Council brought forward,” she said. “There aren’t that many financing options.”
Sears said a complicating factor is the difficulty that people have discussing issues that involve race.
“People don’t want to ask hard questions of all the players, because they may be concerned that if they ask hard questions they will be perceived as or accused of being racist,” she said. “But in fact they’re just asking hard questions, which is perfectly fair.”
In her closing remarks on Tuesday, Sears said, “The urgent need to address equity and climate change could not be more apparent.”