Bill Kortum, county’s champion of environmental causes, dies at 87

[Barry]

Coastal protection, open space advocacy made Bill Kortum dean of local movement
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/2...space-advocacy

Bill Kortum, a veterinarian who helped lead the seminal battle to protect public access to the California coast and fought to rein in sprawl and preserve open space in his native Sonoma County, died Friday night at his Petaluma home. He was 87.

Soft-spoken and gentlemanly even in the political cauldron, Kortum’s decades of relentless activism made him the dean of the local environmental movement — one he both led and helped conceive. He grew up on a chicken ranch outside of Petaluma and became an early cautionary voice against the unchecked growth that marked much of his era. In countless public meetings, he challenged the bankers and builders who openly embraced the vision of replicating San Jose-style development in Sonoma County.

By his own reckoning, Kortum lost more battles than he won over six decades of activism. But through his efforts, including his election in 1974 to Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, he became one of the most influential figures in conservation on the North Coast.

“He’s one of the grand old men of the environmental movement in California,” said Sam Schuchat, executive officer of the Coastal Conservancy, a state agency that has funded more than $1.5 billion in coastal protection projects since 1976. “It’s hard to imagine a modern California environmental movement without him.”

Kortum had battled prostate cancer for more than three years.

His activism underpinned environmental politics in the county from their very start — in a successful fight during the late 1950s and early 1960s against PG&E’s planned nuclear power plant at Bodega Bay. He led ensuing campaigns that resulted in the voter-approved formation of the California Coastal Commission in 1972 and related legislation four years later that extended to the public unprecedented rights to access the state’s 1,100 miles of shoreline and closely oversee its development.

“Anyone who’s gone out and enjoyed the coast, pulled over and sat there and looked at the waves and the rocks, owes a debt of gratitude to Bill,” said Mike Reilly, a former west county supervisor and Coastal Commission chairman.

A descendant of a Donner Party survivor and a child of the Great Depression, Kortum nevertheless saw his efforts as a sustained attempt to break away from the past — from values and policies that allowed rough treatment of land and resources — to shape a future that would preserve more than a little of the open landscape he knew from his youth.

As a young veterinarian based in Cotati, he made rounds to local dairy ranches that were falling steadily to development, part of the postwar growth spurt that quadrupled the county’s population in the second half of the 20th century.

“I saw it absolutely being cut to ribbons by developers,” Kortum said in an oral history video recorded in 2010 and archived at Sonoma State University. “I wanted to stop that.”

And he did, to a considerable degree, with help from a burgeoning corps of environmentalists who transformed local politics and helped set aside more and more of the county’s open space.

His master stroke in that effort was the establishment of Sonoma County Conservation Action in 1991, a canvassing organization that mobilized local voters in support of urban growth boundaries. The limits on sprawl now ring every city in Sonoma County — a first in the nation as of 2010, when Cloverdale, the last of the county’s nine cities, approved restraints on leap-frog outward development.

Without such limits, Sonoma County “would look a lot more like San Mateo or Alameda County,” said David Keller, a former Petaluma city councilman and chairman of Conservation Action, now the largest local environmental group.

“Bill’s vision, insistence and strategic planning were critical for UGBs to take hold for voters in all nine cities,” Keller said.

For much of Kortum’s early life, Sonoma County was a Republican stronghold governed by businessmen, bankers, developers and their allies, who were riding the postwar boom of the 1950s and 60s during an era of minimal land use regulations. His family, however, were Democrats and political activism ran deep in their ranks. His father, Max Kortum, fought off a proposal to push Highway 101 through the family ranch in the early 1940s, and the elder Kortum later ran unsuccessfully for Congress. Bill Kortum would make is own unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1970 and would have his tenure as supervisor cut short by a recall in 1976.

Karl Kortum, Bill’s older brother, who founded the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, was one of the key leaders of the campaign against the PG&E nuclear plant at Bodega Bay. That victory is generally considered the birth of the anti-nuclear power movement in California.

“For me, it was a great lesson that you could take on a giant and win,” Bill Kortum said in the 2010 oral history interview.

Thanks to Kortum, a sweetheart deal to seal off public access to 10 miles of the Sonoma coast was stymied in the 1960s, leading to unprecedented protection for the entire California coast.

“He was an inspiration to all of us,” said Peter Leveque, a retired Santa Rosa Junior College biology instructor and longtime friend. “A prince of a man,” Leveque said, praising Kortum’s gentle demeanor and ability to enlist others in important causes.

Kortum’s forte, he said, was “to have a good, idea, get people involved and move onto another project.”

It was in Leveque’s laboratory at SRJC in 1968 where Kortum and others formed a group with the unwieldy name Californians Organized to Acquire Access to State Tidelands, or COAAST. Their goal was to establish a coastal planning commission to regulate land use at a time when investors were buying large tracts of seaside land to build luxury subdivisions.

A subsidiary of Castle & Cooke, the Hawaiian development company, in 1963 bought a 5,000-acre spread south of Gualala on the Sonoma Coast and proposed building a 5,200-home project called The Sea Ranch. County supervisors, under questionable circumstances, accepted the developer’s proposal to swap land for a 120-acre park at the mouth of the Gualala River in exchange for giving up public shoreline access through the subdivision.

Kortum and COAAST objected, but lost a local ballot measure to thwart the deal in 1968, and the following June county planners approved the first maps for The Sea Ranch.

“The battle isn’t over,” Kortum declared at the time.

Taking the fight to Sacramento, Kortum found an ally in then-Assemblyman John Dunlap, a Napa Democrat. “It struck me as being for the birds,” Dunlap said, referring to the no-access deal.

Dunlap’s coastal public access bill, introduced in 1969, went nowhere in the face of opposition from utility companies, real estate interests and local government organizations: “All the big boys in Sacramento,” Kortum said.

One of the power players, confident his side would prevail, suggested they put the measure on a statewide ballot. Kortum was at Dunlap’s house in Napa when the concept for Proposition 20 — creating the state Coastal Commission and taking control of seaside development away from local government — was hatched for the 1972 ballot. With a boost from then-Secretary of State Jerry Brown, who highlighted the hefty special interest donations to defeat the measure, Proposition 20 was approved by 55 percent of state voters.

It was the first law of its kind in the nation and it brought plans for subdivisions on dozens of sprawling coastal properties “to a grinding halt,” said the late Peter Douglas, who chaired the Coastal Commission for 25 years. The commission ultimately cut the number of Sea Ranch lots by more than half and mandated multiple public access points.

Reilly, who served on the Coastal Commission for 12 years ending in 2009, said it was the “world’s largest planning commission” with jurisdiction “over the most expensive dirt on Earth.” Absent that control, the Sonoma Coast “would look like Malibu,” he said, lined with subdivisions from Jenner to Bodega Bay.

Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian emeritus, said Kortum’s success in protecting the coast was “an astonishing achievement.”

At a 1996 meeting in Mendocino, Kortum told an audience why he fought so hard for coastal access. “Every community needs a commons,” he said. “Without being able to share the coast, the only commons we have in California is the freeways.”

Born in 1927 and raised at edge of Petaluma, William M. Kortum... (continues here)

[Larry Robinson]

Bill was one of the finest people I have ever known - kind, wise, fearless and committed to protecting this corner of the earth. Sonoma County and the world are better places for his time among us. He was a mentor and inspiration to so many of us. I will miss him.