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Published on December 4, 2001
Dick Day could be a good friend and a formidable critic, an affable man who could be dogged in a political fight.
Day was happy trading courthouse stories with old friends in the legal community who gathered for sandwiches at a window table at Mac's. And he was happy leading the Young Turks in the latest frontal assault on the local establishment.
When Day died unexpectedly on Saturday, at age 67, he left behind unfinished business, but that was to be expected. From the day he arrived in Sonoma County in 1968, the Santa Rosa attorney never stopped working on public policy issues that mattered to him.
Along with Petaluma veterinarian Bill Kortum, Day would become the county's best-known and most persistent opponent of projects he believed to be a threat to the natural environment. As a speaker, op-ed writer and organizer, he led the fight against coastal development, Warm Springs Dam, major subdivisions, Windsor incorporation and expansion of Highway 101, and he led the fights for coastal access, campaign reform, growth limits and urban boundaries. Through Sonoma County Conservation Action and Concerned Citizens for Santa Rosa, Day would recruit candidates who would change public policy in several cities -- though he would later lament that some of those council members disappointed him.
Along the way, he would win some and lose some, but Day never stopped serving as a smart, tireless, sometimes blunt-spoken advocate for what he believed.
``There needs to be a Dick Day or someone like him raising questions and challenging those making the decisions,'' his longtime adversary, retired Santa Rosa City Manager Ken Blackman, said after learning of Day's death. ``Our system works best when it has those checks and balances.''
Day also served on the county Board of Education and as a Municipal Court judge. He lost his judgeship to a conservative prosecutor who himself was turned out of office four years later. Day leaves a county that has changed dramatically since he arrived 33 years ago.
Environmental and political reforms reflect a citizenry devoted to fair and open government and to preserving the natural landscape. Anyone who doubts the power of citizen activism needs only study the legacy of Richard R. Day
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DICK DAY, 67, LEAVES LEGACY OF POLITICAL ACTIVISM Published on December 3, 2001 For 35 years, Santa Rosa attorney Richard ``Dick'' Day was the ultimate governmental watchdog and environmental leader.
Day, whose fingerprints are all over the political and environmental landscape that has shaped Sonoma County since his arrival, died Saturday at Kaiser Hospital. He was 67.
The cause of death is undetermined.
His son, Doug Day, said Sunday that his father was driving home Nov. 13 from a visit with family in Oregon when he stopped at a hospital in Klamath Falls complaining of abdominal pain.
It turned out to be a leak in his aorta and he was airlifted to UC Medical Center in San Francisco, where he had a stent inserted on Nov. 16. He was transported by ambulance to Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa Wednesday to recuperate further, his son said.
``Everything was looking good,'' said the younger Day, who said his father died unexpectedly at around 4:20 a.m. Saturday. Services are pending.
The Idaho-born Day arrived in Rohnert Park in 1968, a 32-year-old attorney fresh out of U.C. Berkeley's Boalt School of Law.
He had barely set foot on Sonoma County soil when he won election to the Sonoma County Board of Education in 1969, and just a year later sought election to the county Board of Supervisors. He lost and later moved to Santa Rosa, but his campaign set a tone for the three decades of political activism that followed when he urged that he and his opponents abandon their use of campaign signs, charging they were a blight on the landscape that did nothing to inform voters about the issues. It was, in a sense, Day's warning shot that it was the issues that mattered, nothing else. From that time on, if there was a major political or environmental fight in Sonoma County, it's almost certain Day was going to be involved.
``He was my hero,'' said his son, a teacher in Santa Rosa's Mark West School District. ``If he believed in something, he would put out the effort. He didn't ask others to do it. He walked the talk.'' During his more than nearly four decades of activism, Day's legal and political skills helped open the state's coastline to public access; surrounded eight of the county's cities with voter-approved boundaries to protect against urban sprawl; pushed adoption of stricter campaign finance laws by the county and Santa Rosa; and fought all attempts to pass a sales tax increase to widen Highway 101 without the benefit of other transit improvements.
His skills, said good friend Bill Kortum, a former county supervisor considered the father of Sonoma County's environmental movement, were even more amazing considering he often was fighting underdog causes against entrenched forces.
Who else would take on the chairmanship of Sen. John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in the Republican-dominated bastion of Orange County?
"Dick was quite capable of sticking his neck out,'' Kortum said. ``It was a classic case of the role he played.''
Kortum's own group, Californians Organized to Acquire Access to State Tidelands, was fighting county attempts to keep 13 miles of beachfront as the exclusive domain of the Sea Ranch community in the late '60s.
Kortum credits Day's legal acumen with convincing the state Supreme Court to order county supervisors to reverse that decision, and for COAAST's successful statewide ballot measure that formed the California Coastal Commission and guaranteed public access to beaches.
Part of Day's power came from the pulpit of two groups he helped form. Sonoma County Conservation Action, the county's largest environmental lobbying group, has worked on anti-sprawl measures, while Concerned Citizens for Santa Rosa won city support in 1992 to restrict construction to 1,000 homes a year, after years of runaway growth.
``He was in on all the big issues,'' said longtime friend Kate Sater, a member of Conservation Action's board of directors.
``He was never afraid to challenge people on the issues,'' she said.
His list of losses was just as impressive. Battles to stop construction of Warms Spring Dam and the incorporation of Windsor on growth-related grounds, and the failure to win support for district elections in Santa Rosa to lessen the political dominance of one geographic segment of the city were among them. His most painful loss, however, was more personal. A lifelong Democrat and integral part of the county's Democratic Party machinery, Day was appointed to fill a Sonoma County Municipal Court judge vacancy in 1979 by then-Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown.
A year later he lost the judgeship when a deputy district attorney challenged him for the seat in a mid-year election.
Day rarely minced words. He said what he thought and was quick to protest what he perceived as government wrongdoing or misguidedness.
But even those he often battled with, including former Santa Rosa City Manager Ken Blackman -- whom Day once accused of running an ``anti-democratic'' form of city government -- said every city needs its Day.
``At times I don't think his criticisms were completely justified, but there needs to be somebody on the other side,'' Blackman said.
``There needs to be a Dick Day or someone like him raising questions and challenging those making the decisions. Our system works best when it has those checks and balances,'' he said. Santa Rosa Councilwoman Noreen Evans credits Day for helping her successful effort to get county supervisors and her own council to adopt stricter campaign finance laws.
Besides that and other changes Day helped bring about, Evans said, he leaves one other important legacy: ``the number of public officials in all nine cities and the county he helped elect who will carry forward the vision he had,'' she said.
Day is survived by his son, five brothers and sisters and one grandson. His wife, Jean, a retired Sonoma State University librarian, died last year. |
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This Republican Misses Dick Day Published on January 24, 2002 EDITOR: This Republican misses Democrat Dick Day. My friend, Dick, has left us. I will miss him and our many lunches together -- philosophically jousting, with the utmost civility, over the great and small divides between the liberals and conservatives but never losing our sense of humor and respect for the other. Each knew that he would leave the restaurant with the same partisanship he came in with -- a Democrat and a Republican -- but, perhaps, with just a bit more understanding of the other's point of view and having enjoyed political laughs that we could hardly find with any other opposite. Before the primaries of 2000, we bet lunches on our candidates to win the presidency -- he on Gore and me on George W. Unfortunately, I never collected. Dick, hopefully, we'll still have that lunch, sometime, somewhere. JOHN E. MCDONALD |
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Four Hundred People
Attend Memorial Service Published on January 13, 2002 Day died Dec. 1 at the age of 67. The memorial was a mix of mourning and laughter-filled remembrances by family, friends and associates from a long career that included stints on the county Board of Education and the Municipal Court bench. But Day was probably best known for his citizen efforts on behalf of environmental causes, such as blocking coastal development and advocating mass transit. Among the mourners were Assemblywomen Pat Wiggins and Virginia Strom-Martin, former Assemblyman Phil Isenberg of Sacramento and fellow activist Bill Kortum, who served on the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. Wiggins, D-Santa Rosa, said Day ``helped to hone me politically,'' and remembered him as a political activist ``with a twinkle in his eye and a righteous sword in his hand.'' She presented Day's only son, Doug, a teacher in Santa Rosa's Mark West School District, with a memorial resolution from the state Assembly. The resolution said, among other things, that Day was ``a visionary who walked the talk.'' Isenberg recalled Day, with whom he attended Berkeley's Boalt School of Law in the mid-1960s, as a leader among the young political activists running Democratic campaigns around the state in those years. And Day taught the younger man a political lesson he believed for years, said Isenberg: ``If you're a Democrat, it's gin; if you're Republican, you drink bourbon.'' Over the 35 years since he moved to Sonoma County, Day involved himself in virtually every significant local political or environmental issue -- from fighting against coastal development and Highway 101 expansion, to campaigning for urban boundaries and stricter campaign finance laws. His memorial was held at Our Lady Of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Windsor, a city whose incorporation he fought as an example of excessive growth. Many present noted that Day's fierce political will was equalled by the lack of rancor he brought to his chosen battles. That, they said, accounted for the great diversity among Day's friendships. ``Some of us knew Dick in coats and ties; others of us knew him in Levis,'' said Brad Lundborg, an original board member of the California Coastal Commission that Day helped create in the early 1970s. Kortum spoke emotionally about how environmental activists ``depended on Dick to lead us into the fray.'' And he recalled that at Day's regular luncheons at Mac's deli in Santa Rosa, ``he would always have a friendly quip for both friend and foe.'' In summing up his younger brother, Walter Day said: ``We'll miss him, he had a lot of potential.'' |
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Sonoma County Has Lost a
Brilliant Leader Published on December 19, 2001 EDITOR, With the passing of Dick Day, Sonoma County has lost a brilliant leader and visionary. Dick was a forceful advocate for the environment and promoted managed growth policies long before their current cachet. More personally, he was a mentor and friend. I knew him over 20 years, and he always impressed me with his keen intellect. But what made him great, what endeared him to many, was his razor wit and big heart. He is an inspiration to us all, and I will miss him terribly. RON HAYES |
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