Marin Women's Hall of Fame

Margaret Azevedo

By Nancy Smith Harris
In conjunction with the Writer's Center of Marin

                         Margaret Azevedo, public servant, environmentalist, community activist, author, and athlete, was never one to hesitate when it came to speaking her mind. In her 1994 interview with Nancy Nakai, the sharp-witted, outspoken Azevedo told a war story from her days in Vallejo, working for the project services division of the WPA. Azevedo found herself in charge of helping the residents of ten thousand units of temporary housing—people from the Dust Bowl and the Deep South relocated by the federal government to work at Mare Island Shipyard. Azevedo administered all of the community services for the residents, including organizing community centers, childcare centers, and medical services. “It was a tough job,” she admitted. “On top of making sure they got what they needed in terms of services, we also had to help them learn to get along with one another. They did petty well, too.”

        “One morning I came in to the office,” Azevedo recalled, “and our personnel director—a meek fellow afraid of the housing authority board—said, ‘some of the kids damaged the community center and the board wants to see you’.” Azevedo then confronted a roomful of angry board members who demanded that she take harsh action against the juvenile delinquents responsible for the damage.

            “I told them the kids were in a strange community where they weren’t accepted by the Vallejo residents. They simply had too much unsupervised time on their hands and were expressing a lot of frustration and anger. Besides, I said, reports of the damage had been exaggerated: all they’d done was shoot a couple of cue sticks into the ceiling. Pretty soon, these guys were talking about the naughty things they’d done as boys and then I knew I was home free.” Azevedo, an astute judge of human nature, quickly recognized an opportunity to do some good on behalf of the kids.

            “I told them what we need here is good, trained leadership. I told them I had a candidate on tap who’d done a lot of wonderful work with kids, but he wouldn’t come on board for the salary these board members had authorized. Then and there, the board raised the salary, we got him, and he was simply great.”  Whether she knew it or not, Margaret Azevedo had just demonstrated the staunch advocacy and superior negotiating skills that would take her far in local politics. In fact, it was clear from an early age that this woman was headed for great things in public service; she first sought office at the age of twelve when she ran for class president at Emerson Grammar School. Margaret launched her campaign despite her father’s protest that running for office was inappropriate for a young woman.

            Margaret Wood was born and raised in the East Bay with her twin brother, a sister, and a younger brother. “It was a very child-oriented household,” she said, “we were taken to the mountains, encouraged to put on plays, and urged to read. I loved school and sports and always thought I’d like to write.”  With their cousins, the Wood family traveled to the high sierras during summer vacations, riding horses to the remote regional lakes. The traditional trip to the mountains was one Margaret continued to make with her husband and children in later years. “My mother decided we should all backpack in to those lakes,” recalls Azevedo’s daughter, Janet, “and she took us into the Trinity Alps as well. For several years, we alternated trips to the Sierra’s and Trinity.”

            After graduating from high school, Margaret decided against attending Stanford because of the school’s attitude toward women. Instead, she attended Scripps Women’s College in Claremont before transferring to U.C. Berkeley. In Berkeley, she got her first real taste of government through the student YWCA on campus. “The YWCA was a marvelous, vital place in those days,” she said, “we got involved in group discussions about what was going on in the world and we learned about migrant labor, civil rights, and other issues of the day.”

            While still in college, Azevedo began working with the Oakland Recreational Department as a program director on the camp staff. It was through contacts she made there that she went on to work with the WPA Recreation Department, helping workers develop their talents and abilities for eventual placement as recreation directors with various Bay Area cities. With the war, however, came new responsibilities. Azevedo was originally placed in charge of training housing managers. “I finally decided I had to do it myself,” she said, “and when the job for housing manager in Vallejo opened up, I took it.”

            After the war, Margaret’s husband returned from overseas and the couple relocated to the East Coast briefly before returning to California, where they purchased their home in Tiburon with help from the G. I. Bill. In Tiburon, while raising her young family, Margaret Azevedo soon became involved in Marin politics, eventually taking the position of chair in charge of Vera Schultz’s reelection campaign to the Marin County Board of Supervisors.

            “Vera had been in office four years and was a great achiever. She had high ideals for the county and she knew government. She worked for the League of Women Voters in Mill Valley, had been on the city council there, and really studied government. She saw a lot of things that Marin needed,” recalled Azevedo, “and at the end of her first term, she was appreciated.”

            Vera Schultz was the first woman ever elected to the Marin County Board of Supervisors. In an introduction to Schultz’s oral history for the U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Azevedo described her friend and mentor as an extremely effective elected official, explaining, “I don’t use the word ‘effective’ lightly . . . I can name at least six major innovations that would not have been accomplished had Vera not been in that place at that time: the Frank Lloyd Wright Civic Center, the creation of the county administrator post, the personnel commission, the parks and recreation department, the department of public works, and the redevelopment of Marin City . . . Some would have occurred later probably, some not at all. That is a pretty good test of leadership in my book."

            Her close association with Vera Schultz sparked the talented Azevedo’s emerging interest in local government. Through Schultz, Azevedo went to work with the Marin Council for Civic Affairs, a watchdog group of very talented and dedicated individuals who formed various committees to tackle the job of revitalizing governmental institutions, improving systems, and holding local officials accountable.

            Appointed to the county planning commission shortly after Schultz’s reelection, Azevedo’s involvement in Marin County politics came at a time of rapid growth. With the postwar economic boom came demands for housing and for land as open space. “It was my work on the commission in those early years that got me into planning, the environment, and land use; I really had not done that before. My causes had been social causes. Young college students in the thirties were directed to study and become involved in social causes.  I’ve since found it possible to combine environmental and land use issues with social issues.”
            Azevedo’s awareness of the needs of individuals combined with her ability to scan the horizon of the population as a whole to determine community needs was her special gift. When asked how she and her fellow planning commission members met all of the conflicting demands for land in Marin, she recalled that “in the earliest days, local zoning laws were pretty old-fashioned—there was nothing like the controls and powers that counties and cities have today. It was much more permissive. My recollection is that the biggest public issues we dealt with would be whether a neighborhood wanted an apartment house near them or not. Apartment houses were not popular, and there were all these myths about and biases against renters: the idea that they wouldn’t care about the community, that they wouldn’t tend to the plants and that sort of thing.” Azevedo remained faithful to the cause of providing affordable community housing, devoting much time in the last two years of her life to researching the most recent studies in the field.

            At the same time that Azevedo worked on the person-to-person level to dispel unfounded notions about renters, she and her fellow planning commission members were growing concerned about an issue of larger scope: the preservation and protection of Marin County’s open space. In 1961, Azevedo joined ranks with Congressman Clem Miller and a member of the California Chamber of Commerce to form the grassroots organization they named the Point Reyes National Seashore Foundation. Congressman Miller wanted to introduce a bill asking for appropriation of the necessary funds to acquire lands so that Point Reyes could become a national park, but he needed evidence of public support on the issue.

            “There was opposition to the bill,” Azevedo recalled, “some ranchers didn’t want national park status because they were afraid they wouldn’t be paid fairly for their land; others didn’t want it because they wanted to continue ranching.” Determined to reach an equitable agreement with the ranchers, Azevedo and her committee worked out a plan under which those who wished to preserve their ranches could lease back the lands from the government. But there was still the task of getting the rest of the community involved in the project and insuring that sufficient funds would be appropriated so that the ranchers who wished to sell could be adequately compensated.

            Azevedo went to see Marin benefactor Caroline Livermore and asked for her help. Together, Azevedo and Livermore phoned their friends and relatives and asked them to send letters to Washington to show support for the project. Nearly six years later, Point Reyes National Seashore was officially dedicated by Lady Bird Johnson.

Azevedo still had work to do to complete the park: funding had run out after only 22,000 acres of the 53,000 acre parcel had been acquired. She worked on yet another committee with Marin Supervisor Peter Behr to acquire the additional funds. On March 17, 1970, the Senate unanimously approved authorization to complete the acquisition and, within three weeks, President Nixon signed into law the appropriation of $38.3 million dollars. “It was a step-by-step process,” Azevedo said, “and I took a lot of satisfaction from the accomplishment.”

Azevedo next went to bat for Tiburon peninsula residents, when the Utah Construction Company proposed to fill 700 acres of marshland in order to build a subdivision. After attending a meeting at which company officials tried to garner public support for the project, Azevedo quickly formed the Richardson Bay Foundation and persuaded friends, including Caroline Livermore, to make contributions. Once again, she successfully spearheaded a movement that ultimately preserved the bay from development—development that would have meant razing the hills in order to fill a large portion of the bay.

But there was increasing pressure from developers as available land in Marin became scarce. “The first subdivisions were going in on level land in communities like Terra Linda and Belvedere,” recalled Azevedo. But when the level land was fully developed, builders began moving up the hillsides. “People had gotten used to seeing those wonderful hills—sometimes with cows grazing on them—and, frankly, they didn’t like the idea of houses marching up there, replacing the green areas.”

            What Azevedo did in response to the issue was nothing short of innovative. She persuaded the planning commission members to begin thinking in terms of a plan that would cover the entire county. Until then, the commission had responsibility only for the unincorporated areas of the county, leaving the planning of the cities to each city’s administrators. Under the guidance of a creative and enterprising director named Paul Zucker, the commission formed a city planning council and began working together with the representatives from each of Marin County’s cities. The commission took the lead and worked closely with the city representatives, eventually developing a concept that preserved the county’s natural beauty while defining transportation routes, or “corridors.”

            “In Marin, we have these populated valleys—Ross Valley, Mill Valley, and so on, bordered by ridges that are often wooded,” explained Azevedo. “We designed a nice green forested ridge line between each town and we called these areas ‘ridge and upland green belts.’  The east-to-west ridge and green belts preserved the natural contours of the landscape—that was the beauty of the plan.”  The rest of the County-Wide Plan involved tackling the bigger issue of designating corridors that divided Marin into three parts: coast recreation, agricultural, and an eastern, city-centered or urban center.

            Marin’s County-Wide Plan was officially adopted in June of 1976. “I don’t think there was anything like it at the time,” recalled Azevedo, “certainly not in the Bay Area, probably not in the entire state, for that matter.” Twenty-five years later, Marin’s County-Wide Plan has been a model for many other communities seeking a balance between accommodation of swelling populations and preservation of the open spaces that define a  given landscape.

            “In Marin County, ridgelines are valued not only for aesthetic reasons but are considered part of the natural fabric of the entire region,” says Frances Brigmann, general manager of the county’s open space district and parks director. “Our first priority is the ridgelines because they help define towns and separate communities. Also, they have a number of natural characteristics that make them desirable for open space, with their woodlands and oak savannahs. People like to walk on trails across ridgelines where they can see for themselves how towns are separated by these ridges.” Through the efforts of Azevedo and her associates, who worked with determination to design and implement the plan, 164,000 acres in northern and western Marin were officially placed in an agricultural preserve, while 11,500 acres of ridge and upland greenbelts were protected from development.

            Within a few years of the passage of Marin’s County-Wide Plan, Azevedo was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the newly formed Coastal Conservancy, a statewide board with broad power to preserve and upgrade coastal areas. The Coastal Conservancy was created by the California legislature to purchase, protect, restore, and enhance coastal agricultural land threatened by development. It can also restore natural resources that have been degraded and can help public agencies finance purchase of parklands. The agency is commissioned to purchase undeveloped portions of old subdivisions deemed substandard, to reassemble parcels, and to sell for development under coastal commission guidelines.

            “Before the conservancy was created,” said Azevedo, “people could be prohibited from building on a beach or filling in a marsh, but there was no provision for preserving those areas or restoring them once they’d become degraded. One of our primary missions is to restore and access marshes.” Azevedo went on to become chair of the conservancy through appointment by Secretary of State Resources Gordon K. Van Vleck, who cited her as being the most qualified member of the conservancy to achieve the major tasks facing the group. Twenty-five years after its creation, the California Coastal Conservancy has undertaken more than 700 projects along the California coastline and proved itself enormously successful in protecting coastal wetlands, restoring urban waterfronts, resolving coastal land use conflicts, and protecting coastline agricultural lands.

            Azevedo, the conservancy’s longest-serving member, remained actively involved with the organization for the rest of her life. Drawing on her past experience as a seasoned columnist and editorial writer for the Mill Valley Record and the Marin Independent Journal, she continued to write magazine articles in an effort to educate the public on the necessity of wetlands’ preservation and restoration, detailing the efforts of environmentalists and governing institutions to insure that these areas remain protected.

            A tireless advocate on the conservation front, Azevedo went on to write and publish a book entitled Environmental Overdose: California’s Environmental Law Needs Treatment. The text presents case studies illustrating the failings of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The law, argued Azevedo, was well intentioned but poorly written, leaving the door open for its misapplication and abuse. Taking the problem-solving stance she’d become so well known for, Azevedo offered possible solutions to each case cited in her book.

            Azevedo continued working on behalf of another important cause, serving on the League of Women Voters. She chaired the league’s Campaign Watch committee, a group that sets standards for and monitors the integrity of local elections.

            Always speaking out in support of the citizens of Marin, Azevedo served on dozens of committees to preserve the quality of life in the county. She served on the Bay Area Transportation Study Commission as well as the Citizens Advisory Panel for Transit of the Golden Gate Bridge District while consistently advocating for a high-quality mass transit system. She worked closely with the Association of Bay Area Governments Housing Task Force and pushed for low and moderate income housing for the working citizens of Marin. She encouraged the building of second units, or “mother-in-law” apartments, reminding voters that second units provide more housing for less money with the least environmental damage. In campaign literature published during her run for county supervisor, it’s noted that Azevedo was “not exactly a deft politician, lacking at least one important attribute: an ability to shift ground easily. To the contrary, once she’s made up her mind on an issue, she stands firm and speaks plain.”

            One might conclude that a public servant who put as much time and effort into environmental, community, political, and social causes as did Azevedo would be left with little time for indulging personal passions. But Margaret Azevedo loved baseball and followed the Giants avidly. Well into her eighties, she could be spotted riding the ferry into the city to root for the team. “She knew the game and its players inside and out,” recalls Janet.

            She was a lifelong skier, a backpacker, and a talented, all-around athlete. Azevedo took up the Dipsea race at the age of 60, making it an annual tradition for ten years, achieving her objective: a medal awarded those who finish in less than two hours. She trained for the race by running for miles on Mt. Tamalpais with Opie, the family dog, a Mother’s Day gift from her son.

            She studied ballroom dancing, taking first prizes in tango and fox trot competitions. Margaret loved cooking and wine; Sauvignon Blanc was her favorite varietal. She was a skilled seamstress and cared for her many cats. Henry, the longest living of her feline companions, continues to thrive in Monterey.

            Margaret Azevedo, an articulate, energetic woman full of ideas to make government work for Marin County citizens from all walks of life, inspired others to enter government service, including former Marin County Supervisor Gary Giacomini and U. S. Senator Barbara Boxer. Upon receiving her award from the Marin Women’s Hall of Fame, when asked what advice she would give to young women thinking of careers in community involvement, Azevedo, as usual, was at no loss for words.

            “If you know you’re somebody who likes to take charge, don’t back off from the challenges. If you like to be in the limelight, follow it. Whatever your interest by way of community activity or advocacy, know your subject. Go look up the facts, talk to people. Get involved with organizations like the League of Women Voters—an organization like that gives you tremendous opportunities to learn the issues. And when you know the issues, you get respect.” Margaret Azevedo paused, flashing a fearless grin. “So know your subject, girls, and speak your minds.”