Pioneer who helped save San Francisco Bay and California coast dies at 93

In the 1950s and 60s, San Francisco Bay was a different place. It was polluted daily with millions of gallons of poorly treated sewage. Almost all the shoreline — a hodgepodge of ugly industrial sites, garbage dumps and warehouses — was off limits to the public.

Developers had already filled in one-third of the bay for projects like Foster City, and had plans to fill in much of the rest. Then the tide began to turn. Environmental groups sprang up. Conservation laws were passed.

And Joe Bodovitz, a 35-year-old former newspaper reporter, switched careers at the request of former Sunset magazine and books publisher Mel Lane to become executive director of a new state agency aimed at protecting the bay.

Bodovitz helped build that agency, the San Francisco Bay Conservation Development Commission (BCDC), and later became the first executive director of the California Coastal Commission in 1973, where he established groundbreaking rules to guarantee public access to oceanfront beaches that millions of people enjoy today. He died March 9 in San Francisco. He was 93.

“Most people don’t get excited about government agencies and regulation,” said David Lewis, executive director of Save the Bay, an Oakland non-profit group. “But because of BCDC and the coastal commission, and what Joe Bodovitz was able to do, millions of Californians have been able to enjoy the bay and coast we have today.”

Bodovitz served as a Navy navigator on the aircraft carrier USS Boxer in the 1950s during the Korean War. He fell in love with San Francisco Bay when his ships would make port calls.

In government, he was known for his thoughtful, diplomatic style. He was not flashy. He was persistent and public minded, happy to work away from the spotlight. But his work, once described as “passionate scrupulousness,” forever changed California’s environment for the better, friends, family and former colleagues remembered this week.

“He came to California and thought it was a place of amazing physical beauty,” said his daughter, Katherine Goldgeier, of Rockville, Md.  “He was inspired by it. He was all about public access. He felt like no matter who you were you should have an equal opportunity to enjoy the beauty and wonderful natural resources of California. The idea the bay was going to sort of disappear because people were going to fill it in, or on the coast if you had enough money you could build a house and put a fence around the beach to block it from the public, he felt that wasn’t right.”

In an interview in 2006, Bodovitz acknowledged that after California voters established the coastal commission by passing Proposition 20 in 1972, he and other staff members were under a tremendous amount of pressure.

“If we just floundered and looked like a bunch of people who couldn’t figure out what to do, clearly the whole notion would be discredited,” he said in the book “Legacy: Portraits of 50 Bay Area Environmental Elders.” “Somehow or other when the doors opened we had to be on top of things.”

Bodovitz was born in Oklahoma City on Oct. 29, 1930. A good student, he earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature at Northwestern University, then enlisted with the U.S. Navy. After his service in Korea, he earned a Master’s degree in journalism, funded by the G.I. bill, at Columbia University in New York in 1956.

Looking for a way back to the Bay Area, he took a job as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, which at the time, was one of four daily newspapers in San Francisco. He covered the city council, planning commission meetings, transportation and housing stories.

The post-war boom had led to sprawling development around the Bay Area. Bodovitz began to notice the rise of advocates who said it should be better planned, led by three East Bay women, Sylvia McLaughlin, Kay Kerr and Esther Gulick, who in 1961 formed the Save the Bay to curb pollution and filling of the bay’s waters.

Intrigued by the rapid changes, he joined an urban policy think tank, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR). He volunteered to serve on a state commission studying bay issues. And in 1965 when former Gov. Pat Brown signed a landmark law establishing a new agency, BCDC, to regulate development and filling of the bay, and naming the genteel Lane, of Atherton, as its chairman, Lane asked Bodovitz to be its executive director.

In 1965 there were only 4 miles of public shoreline around the bay’s roughly 400-mile shore. Today there are more than 200 miles. Back then, roughly 2,300 acres a year of the bay were being filled for development. Today almost none is, and the bay has been steadily enlarged in recent decades by wetlands restoration projects and renovation of industrial salt ponds.

After voters created the coastal commission in 1972, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan asked Lane to become chairman. He brought along Bodovitz. They established the foundation for the powerful state agency that exists today.

“He was so cool,” said Don Neuwirth, who worked at the commission as a young staff member from 1973 to 1983. “Joe was a guy who was under real fire in the Korean War. Political fire didn’t bother him. His incredible intellect was matched by an amazing temperament. He was a really good anchor for all of us younger guys who were much more emotional about it. He was an amazing leader.”

In 1979, Bodovitz was named executive director of the California Public Utilities Commission, where he served until 1986. He then became president of the California Environmental Trust, a non-profit which focused on growth management and wildlife preservation. In retirement, he advocated for better regional planning and taught classes on environmental issues.

A longtime resident of Mill Valley, Bodovitz was married for nearly 40 years to Shirley Leon, a former elementary school teacher from San Leandro who died in 1997. He is survived by his children, Goldgeier, Sandra Feder and Steven Bodovitz; and seven grandchildren.

“Whenever we drive down the coast and I see those brown signs that say “coastal access,” I point to them and say my dad did that,” Goldgeier said.