Greenbelt Alliance Origins: Building the Movement for a Better Bay Area
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Greenbelt Alliance Origins: Building the Movement for a Better Bay Area |
Greenbelt Alliance * The Newswire
Volume 2, March 2003
2003 marks the forty-fifth anniversary of Greenbelt Alliance's work to protect open space and promote livable communities. Throughout this year we are highlighting our history in the Newswire.
In its first three years of existence, Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks, which later became Greenbelt Alliance, clearly demonstrated the importance of citizen participation in land use decision-making. Through vigilance and hard work, Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks helped protect Fort Funston, part of Fort Baker, and 6,500 acres around San Pablo Dam Reservoir from development. In addition, the group convened three landmark regional conferences: "Our Vanishing Open Space in 1959"; "Now or Never," a meeting focused on ways to establish a system of regional parks, in 1961; and "San Francisco Bay—A Great Recreational Resource" in 1962.
In June 1962, California voters were asked to authorize $150 million for the state to purchase recreation areas. The bond measure was announced only four weeks before the election, but in a mammoth last-minute campaign, Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks printed and distributed 25,000 fact sheets to let Bay Area voters know that the money would be used to protect the Golden Gate Headlands(Marin), Salt Point Beach in Sonoma County, and other scenic areas. The bond measure lost at the ballot because of opposition from Southern California, but voters in eight of the nine Bay Area counties voted for it (Sonoma County was the exception). The success of the bond measure in certain areas was largely due to the outreach by Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks, the Sierra Club, and other local organizations -- when voters were educated about the measure, they supported it. Although the campaign didn't win at the ballot, it educated Bay Area residents about the need for better regional planning, creating fertile ground for subsequent victories to protect open space and promote livable communities.