The Shapers: The long shadow of Gary Patton’s legacy in Santa Cruz County

In the early 1970s, Santa Cruz County stood on the precipice of change — fundamental and irreversible change. 

During the previous decade, California as a whole had experienced a population growth rate of more than 25%. In 1970, it officially passed New York as the country’s most populous state. Over the hill, the Santa Clara Valley was in the midst of its inexorable transformation into Silicon Valley, with orchards and farms becoming office parks and parking lots. 

And, for a brief moment, Santa Cruz was poised to join in on the frenzy for growth. An ominously named development project called Operation Wilder sought to add more than 10,000 new homes (and possibly 30,000 new Santa Cruzans) to a broad swath of open land along Highway 1 north of town. Pacific Gas & Electric announced plans for an “atomic” power plant near Davenport. UC Santa Cruz, not even 10 years old at the time, was proposing a freeway bypass from Highway 1 to campus. And, at Lighthouse Field on West Cliff Drive, the city was formalizing plans for an enormous convention center, hotel, shopping center and condominium complex.

Yet none of those things came to pass, and many old-time Santa Cruzans today speak of those long-defunct what-could-have-beens as they might speak of a near-death experience. 

The reasons why Santa Cruz stepped back from that precipice are wide-ranging and complex, and it was the efforts of many people who put the kibosh on these major projects. But at the front of that parade to hold back the development threatening Santa Cruz was a young lawyer named Gary Patton.

Patton power

Years later, at the turn of the millennium, the Santa Cruz Sentinel named Patton one of the two most important and influential figures of the 20th century in Santa Cruz County (alongside the long-dead Beach Boardwalk promoter Fred Swanton). 

Today, Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley will echo a similar assessment. “If somebody says to me today,” said Keeley, “‘Who has left the most significant impact in the last 50 years on the Monterey Bay?’ I never hesitate. It’s [former U.S. Rep.] Leon Panetta and Gary Patton. And it’s not even close after that.”

Patton served for 20 years on the county board of supervisors, representing the Third District, which includes UCSC and most of the city of Santa Cruz, from 1975 to 1995. And in that time, most profoundly in the realm of land use, he was instrumental in determining what this county looks like, and the quality of life of many who live here. Patton, in fact, authored the landmark Measure J, passed by the voters in 1978, which, among other things, encoded into law that existing agricultural land in the Pajaro Valley, the North Coast and elsewhere in the county could be used only as ag land, and not repurposed for residential and/or commercial use. That was but one of several aspects of the measure that kept development at bay.

Keeley, who served alongside Patton on the board of supervisors for six years, said that Measure J was ingeniously designed to anticipate any loophole that might undermine its purpose. “So now, he’s put duct tape on it, then he put a lock on it, then even stronger tape. What Gary was really good at was, ‘Let me think of all the ways that growth could occur, and let me try to constrain that.’”

At 80, Patton has now been out of office for almost 30 years, but his influence and legacy are still shaping Santa Cruz politics, most immediately in the ongoing debate about the March 5 ballot measure on housing, Measure M, of which he is one of the community’s most prominent supporters. When it comes to affordable housing — the primary political preoccupation in Santa Cruz County for a couple of decades now — we are all operating within the world that Patton built … or, more accurately, didn’t build.

For many relieved that Santa Cruz did not succumb to the sprawl and growth mania that swallowed so many other places in California during the population boom, Patton is a heroic figure, a stalwart preserver of something they could consider precious about life on Monterey Bay. However, for others frustrated with the maddening cost of housing — Santa Cruz regularly ranks among the least affordable places to live in the U.S. — he is a symbol for a kind of perhaps well-intentioned but nevertheless self-serving ethic that places the values of homeowners and long-established residents above the struggles of those desperately trying (and often failing) to build a sustainable life here.

The Lighthouse Field story

Yet, in the early ’70s, when the growth boom was about to descend on Santa Cruz, Gary Patton was an anonymous outsider on the local political scene, and with no ambition to be otherwise. He had grown up in Palo Alto, attended Stanford University as a history major, then went on to Stanford Law School, and later Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he developed a political interest in military draft resistance. Years earlier, when Gary was a teenager, his parents had bought property in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Scotts Valley. His father established a law practice downtown, and eventually, the young Patton came to Santa Cruz to help his father.

Meanwhile, a group of Westside homeowners was mobilizing to stop the proposed development of the hotel/convention/shopping center at Lighthouse Field, and they needed a lawyer. 

Katherine Beiers, who years later was herself elected to the Santa Cruz City Council and served as mayor, was part of that group. During a brainstorming session in her kitchen, she mentioned that she had just had a will done for $75 with a young lawyer named Patton. “We were impressed that his office was full of books and novels, not law books,” said Beiers. She pitched him on helping the group fight the project. At the time, said Patton, “I didn’t even know where [Lighthouse Field] was.”

Today, citizen participation in political decision-making on the city and county levels might be taken for granted, but 50 years ago, such an exercise in local democracy was rare. What’s more, the convention center project had deep institutional support, from the city council, to the Chamber of Commerce, to labor unions. 

Patton himself has his own Yogi Berra-ism to describe the situation: “Everybody who was anybody was in favor of that development project … except everybody.”

Patton signed on to represent the Save Lighthouse Point Association, encouraging them to mobilize their opposition in front of the city council and other government bodies. He then authored a ballot measure that prohibited any city funding for the Lighthouse Field project. The measure passed. Coincidentally, at the same time, the California Coastal Commission, the powerful state body that governs development in the coastal zone, was first established, and it came out against the project. Lighthouse Field was preserved as open space, and remains as such today.

During the Lighthouse Field fight, Patton was never too far from the lessons of his studies in American history at Stanford, particularly the popular uprisings that led to the American Revolution, and the philosophies of German political theorist Hannah Arendt, who continues to be his philosophical lodestar. It was Arendt and his own father who inspired Patton’s stance on political action.

“The idea that we can do things that have never been done, that we can change history, that we can make things better. That was my theme song, all while I was growing up. That’s what my father told me. And I did bring that idea into local politics: What do we want to do? Let’s do it. We can do it. We don’t have to just bitch about things. We can do something. Majority rules here.”

The new supe

In 1974, just as he was enlisted to save Lighthouse Field, Patton was again recruited this time to run for the county board of supervisors. Denise and Alan Holbert and other community members approached Patton to run for the open seat in the Third District. Patton had no experience as a candidate and, at first, he rebuffed the idea: “I thought about it. I really didn’t like being a lawyer. And the right thing when you’re considering running for office is that people should be asking you to run, you shouldn’t be asking them.”

Andy Schiffrin, himself a major influential figure as a county land-use analyst, was part of that small group of early Patton supporters, and when Patton was elected, he hired Schiffrin as his aide. “There was a movement for slow growth throughout the state,” said Schiffrin of the times. “I think there was a general feeling that this big push for growth had negative effects, such as air quality in L.A., for example.”

Just a few years earlier, the 10-story tower of the Dream Inn had been built above Cowell Beach. “The general plan from 1965 had hotels going from the wharf to Lighthouse Field,” said Schiffrin, “And the Dream Inn was a kind of key moment, because it sent a message to people in Santa Cruz that this could be the future, and it was not a future that they wanted.”

The election to the board of supervisors put Patton in the position of leading the growing movement to regulate development on environmental grounds, and within two years, he had authored, with Schiffrin, Measure J, designed to protect ag land from encroaching development. But Measure J also established an urban services line (USL) between urban and rural areas, beyond which construction of gas, water and/or sewer lines were inhibited, making development in the unincorporated areas of the county outside the USL all but prohibitive. The measure also included a 15% set-aside for affordable housing in all new development in the county, a key component of housing initiatives in recent years on both the city and county levels. 

Measure J was controversial at the time and, in the same election in which the measure was passed, two of Patton’s colleagues on the board were recalled for their support of Measure J. As Patton saw it, Measure J wasn’t stopping or prohibiting growth, it was merely managing growth, discouraging it in the rural areas of the county while allowing it within the urban-services line. On top of real-estate developers, who were already opposed to Patton, the measure created two other broad categories of political foes, for opposite reasons: farmers who are suddenly denied the ability to sell off their agricultural land to developers, and people living in places like Live Oak, an unincorporated, once largely undeveloped part of Santa Cruz that became quickly urbanized.

“You have to give him huge credit, because it was astounding,” said former Santa Cruz city councilmember Mike Rotkin, himself a volunteer in the Save Lighthouse Field effort. “He was on a board of supervisors with four votes [out of five] against him on development issues. And because of Measure J and how he used it, he held four other supervisors at bay with one vote. He didn’t even have anybody to second his motions, and he was still effective.”

Mr. Consistent

Eventually, subsequent elections gave Patton allies on the board, which solidified his political standing even further, making him the most powerful political figure in the county. But in the mid-1990s, a reality check arrived. Patton, a Democrat, decided to run for the California Assembly seat vacated by Sam Farr, who was running for Congress. His opponent was former Sentinel editor Bruce McPherson, then a Republican, now an independent and Fifth District county supervisor. In an Assembly district covering Santa Cruz and much of Monterey County where the Democratic Party was dominant, Patton lost. 

“What makes Gary so strong is also his limitation,” said Keeley, “which is, Gary has a set of values that are immutable. And as politics change and the electorate changes, he has stuck to those immutable values. And I respect him for that. But when he tried to export that in an Assembly race, it didn’t work.”

The loss in the Assembly race surprised Patton. At least in Santa Cruz County, his name recognition was widespread and the district was overwhelmingly Democratic. The irony is that McPherson, the scion of one of the most significant families in Santa Cruz County history, turned to Monterey County to deliver him a victory. 

“I knew I had to be there [in Monterey County] night and day,” said McPherson in his supervisorial office in Santa Cruz. “And we just never let up. And Gary didn’t either. I want to give him credit, where credit’s due, but I think he just came on a little too hardcore for a lot of people in Monterey County.”

Patton’s admirers will often use the word “consistent” in describing his political values over time. Those on the other side prefer words like “rigid.” Many of the political figures I spoke to about Patton considered themselves allies at one time, and were quick to credit him for helping to preserve ag land and open space. But, in the face of the housing affordability crisis, those same political figures have largely moderated their views on development in a way that, they say, Patton has not. 

Since leaving the board of supervisors in 1995, Patton has worked as a land-use attorney in various capacities, he’s maintained a vigorous online blog on political matters locally, regionally, nationally and internationally, and he’s served as a kind of touchstone and informal advisor for political activists simpatico with his values of democratic action and limited growth.

But, for many in the housing affordability fight who are aware of his legacy, he’s also a symbol, fairly or not, for an economically stable generation pulling up the step ladder that they once themselves used to establish a life in Santa Cruz.

“People will worry about gentrification,” said housing activist Kyle Kelley of the organization Santa Cruz YIMBY. “And for some people, gentrification means the shops are changing, or that new people are moving in, or whatever. But they don’t recognize that gentrification is actually displacement, the fact that people are leaving or having children and have to go somewhere else.”

Patton, said Kelley, represents a kind of blindness to the long-term effects of that brand of environmentalism. People who bought their homes long ago “don’t feel the pain like someone trying to pay rent. And it’s not that I want them to feel the pain, but that delta is so wide, it leads to a lack of understanding.”

Fred Keeley considers himself a Patton friend and ally. Still, he said, by restricting development, Measure J has contributed in large part to the unattainable cost of housing locally. “Gary and I have had this discussion in private and in public,” said Keeley, “and I don’t think it’s even a debatable point that Measure J has had the direct effect of significantly increasing housing prices in our community. You limit the supply, with the university continuing to grow and Silicon Valley growing and getting wealthier every day, you’re going to see rising housing prices. It’s not the only reason, but it’s a big reason.”

Patton believes that the sacrifices that chasing a phantom of affordability might entail would just be too great in terms of losing open spaces and natural areas. “People have it in their mind that there is a ‘law’ of supply and demand,” he said, ‘that if we have more housing, the price will go down. And that works fine in a closed system … but Santa Cruz is in the exact same position as it was when I was on the board — that is, the demand coming out of the greater Bay Area is infinite. To me, the housing prices have really very little to do with the quantity of housing available, because there are so many people who want to buy real estate in Santa Cruz, that you can double the size of the city and there would hardly be a dent in the housing prices.”

YIMBY’s Kelley mocks the idea that the demand for housing in Santa Cruz is infinite. “Oh my God, that’s great,” he said. “If demand is infinite, we could pay for our roads, the train. I mean, you could charge anything. We could build an infinitely tall building next to Depot Park and it could pay for everything.”

“I don’t want growth,” said Patton. “I don’t feel that our community needs to absorb everybody who wants to live here.”

It is Patton’s burden that he will forever be associated, for good and otherwise, for decisions having to do with land use while he was supervisor. But, he told me, there are other aspects of his tenure as supervisor that he would like to be remembered for, such as a budgetary innovation that allowed a lot of startups to turn into vital social service agencies, such as Grey Bears. And a fight to keep offshore oil drilling away from the Santa Cruz County coastline. 

But, absent Measure J, there would probably be a lot of houses encroaching on agricultural land in Pajaro Valley and elsewhere, and the county’s agricultural industry might not be as strong as it is now. “It would be paved over,” Patton insisted in reference to the Pajaro Valley, “as the North Coast would too.”

Measure J is one of the most consequential government actions in Santa Cruz County’s history, and some of the consequences are subtle, unexpected, and indirect. The effect it’s had on the San Lorenzo Valley, traffic commutes on Highway 1, or any number of sectors in the county are profound, if hard to calculate. Still, Patton’s greatest legacy might be this community’s insistence that people outside the formal political structures can – and often do – have real political power in determining what their community is going to be. 

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