Retired Waterfront Stateswoman

Pip Elles

I had the wonderful privilege of being Government Contract Liaison for the Blue & Gold Fleet. That meant being Blue & Gold’s liaison to all of the government agencies Blue & Gold works with as a marine operator, including the National Park Service for the Alcatraz Ferry, the City of Vallejo for the Baylink Ferries, the City of Alameda and the Port of Oakland for the Oakland Alameda Ferries and the California State Parks for the Angel Island Ferries. While Tiburon and Sausalito do not officially sponsor the North Bay Sausalito/Tiburon Ferry, I also acted as the main liaison between the Blue & Gold Fleet and those jurisdictions for their ferry services.

I have always loved sailing and was able to segue into a waterfront maritime position first as a deckhand, working my way up to captain. Then I was lucky enough to start with Blue & Gold from year one. I helped deliver one of the first boats down from Nichols Shipyard, which was just coming into its own. From 1979 on, I helped the company establish itself as a growing and reputable quality provider of marine services, to where now it is the preeminent provider of marine services for the West Coast. It started with one boat and now we’re up to thirteen.

I’m from a wonderful extended Italian family in New Jersey. My father was an ardent politician and community activist in New Jersey and it is from him that I got my love for community service. I went to college at American University in Washington D.C. I quickly decided I was not cut out to be a bureaucrat and after graduating, came out west to work on a political magazine. I was an idealist who eventually became a cynic.

So I traveled, and when I returned to California I started my own yacht renovation business in Sausalito called Brightworks. I wrangled an introduction to the Masters, Mates & Pilots Union through a very opportune series of events and worked on some offshore boats for a short period of time. Then, in 1979, Blue & Gold started and the union sent me to them. I worked there for 22 years.

Now, I’m totally changing tracks with a career change that keeps me close to the meaningful community work that means so much to me. I’m working with the Napa County Farm Bureau and the Napa County Grape Growers Association as their Executive Director, focusing on advocacy for sustainable agriculture, preservation of agricultural land and resources and, of course, and advocating for the best management practices and economic policies for the wine industry.

I live in the North Bay and am centered on community service and activism about land use decisions and sustainable environmental and economic policies. I came to Cotati during a time of explosive growth in the mid-80’s and became involved in the growth issues and related land use issues. My civic engagement, which included a stint as Mayor of Cotati, involved a huge learning curve on sustainability issues. All this will be put to work as I start advocating for the wine industry in Napa County.

Executive Director, Save The Bay

David Lewis

Save the Bay is a membership organization that’s been around for 40 years working to protect and restore and celebrate the San Francisco Bay Delta. We were founded in 1961 primarily to stop the bay from being filled in. By that time, a third of the bay had already been filled in or diked off and there were plans to fill in sixty percent of what was left, leaving just a narrow river for navigation. So we were really the beginning of the modern grass roots environmental movement, at least in Northern California.

Within a few years, Save the Bay had mobilized tens of thousand of people to weigh in with legislators in Sacramento, write letters, make calls and go up there by the busload, and got the legislature to pass a new statue creating a new agency, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission to regulate fill in San Francisco Bay. That singular achievement has been extremely successful. At the time we were founded, the bay was being filled in at a rate of four square miles per year. There were some huge bay fill projects planned. Since that time, over the last forty years, not only has the bay not been filled in but there has been a small net gain in the size of the bay. There have been no massive bay fill projects. In fact, several that were proposed were rejected. The Port of Oakland wanted to increase its land size by several square miles and the City of Berkeley wanted to extend the city out on the mud flats and fill those in for about another four miles into the bay. All of these entities had to learn to make better use of the land they already had. So the Save the Bay movement was really the first modern urban growth boundary on the shoreline of the bay.

There has been a strong community consensus for the last forty years to preserve a blue belt of open space and more recently, there’s been an excellent focus on restoring what used to be tidal wetland around the bay that have not been completely destroyed. They’ve been diked off for agriculture or salt evaporators but have not been paved over. That’s vital because those wetlands are really the lungs that filter our pollutants, as well as habitat for endangered species. Ninety five percent of the tidal wetlands in the bay have been destroyed. That means that some of the species that used to live here are gone. Others are on life support like the California Clapper Rail and Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse and several species of salmon.

My job and the job of my staff is first and foremost is to get more people to appreciate, celebrate, see and use the bay and its shoreline. The more people that value the bay instead of just taking it for granted, it’s really a very small step from there to why the bay is at risk and why it’s threatened and what they can do to protect and restore it.

There is a wonderful set of shoreline parks, trails and nature interpretive centers that are under utilized. There are opportunities for wind surfing and sailing and kayaking and swimming around the bay. We want people to take advantage of all these. One of the important achievements of Save The Bay is to increase the public’s access to the shoreline. There were only six miles of publicly accessible shoreline in the entire bay before. All the land, for the most part, was privately owned and fenced off.

We have a staff of twenty. We have a large student education program that works with the schools and takes middle and high school students out as part of their science courses in canoes in the bay’s wetlands to learn about them firsthand and up close. We have a staff of folks that help our membership be active on issues, participate in public hearings and weighing in with the media and policy makers. We have a staff that does research on fish and wildlife in the bay and water quality and current development around the bay.

We have about 8,000 members, most in the Bay Area, but in fact, we have members in every state in the union. Our budget is about $1.5 Million per year.

I’m 39, born and raised in Palo Alto, married with two girls. I’ve been in this job for three and a half years. A lifelong love for the bay brought me to it. I spent a good deal of my life, more than a decade, working on environmental and other policies in Washington D.C., including the US Senate and for some national environmental groups doing grass roots organizing and campaigning. I had an opportunity to come back here with my family and got this job.