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From the Executive Director by Holly Van Houten

Since late May when I joined the Committee as the new Executive Director, it has been a busy time, but a very rewarding time as I have gotten to know the staff, board, volunteers, and donors. I have been so impressed with the enthusiasm and commitment you all share for this important work of protecting the Peninsula’s open spaces.

How I became an environmentalist
I wanted to take the opportunity to give you a more extended introduction. Last year, I became a resident of San Mateo, although I have lived in the Bay Area for nearly 14 years. I’m originally from Eugene, Oregon and spent much of my childhood outdoors. In fact, this love of the outdoors has been passed down through many generations of my family. My great-grandfather lived in Oakland in the 1910s and went on some early High Sierra trips, meeting John Muir and writing a book about his adventures called, The Mountain Trail and Its Message.

For me, one of my seminal child-hood memories, however, was of seeing a second home housing development pave over a piece of the Oregon Dunes that I knew well and cherished. One part of the dunes was a wetlands glade that I always thought was particularly magnificent. To this day, it still upsets me when I remember that this part of the property could have been saved if only the road had been located 15 feet further away!

This experience provided the motivation for me to pursue a graduate degree in urban planning and spend much of my career working on land use issues. Most recently I headed up the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council, the nonprofit group working to create an over 500-mile hiking and riding trail circling San Francisco Bay. During my time there, some 60 miles of new trails were opened to the public, including the first trail section on a private land easement owned by the Council and the recent opening of the 300th mile.

Prior to that position, I worked on urban creek restoration and historical interpretation at the Presidio Trust and helped communities throughout California and Arizona prepare trail and greenway plans while working for the National Park Service’s Rivers and Trails Program. I also spent time in the Congress working on environmental legislation.

The trail ahead
Interestingly, one of the first issues facing me when I arrived was how to respond to Stanford’s pro-posal to expand the Alpine Road sidewalk rather than include a trail on its lands as planned by Santa Clara County in its county trails plan. As Brian Schmidt’s article explains, we decided in early June to file a lawsuit seeking to overturn this proposal.

From working in trails for so many years, I know the Santa Clara County trails plan is held up as a model. It was a hard-fought but well-crafted plan that laid out the regional trail systems and bike routes that would be created over time. It also made clear that as properties are developed and trigger conditional planning or zoning approvals — such as Stanford’s General Use Permit to build 5 million square of new housing and academic facilities — landowners need to provide trail connections.

In this case, Stanford is essentially being able to get out of that requirement by offering to cover trail (or sidewalk) costs elsewhere. This is a terrible precedent to set if you ever want to achieve continuous trail connections that were so laboriously identified in the County trails plan in the first place. For more information about the status of this case or to find out how to help, please visit our website at www.GreenFoothills.org.

And don’t forget that this fall’s election is very important for the environment with many issues at stake. We’ve included information about various ballot measures and what they mean for open space protection.

Published October 2006 in Green Footnotes.

Page last updated October 29, 2006.