Some Defeats and a Remarkable Victory : Sierra Club’s Jay Powell Leaving for S.F.

Not long after Jay Powell was hired by the Sierra Club to manage the activities of its San Diego chapter out of a small office in Balboa Park, the membership rolls began to grow like wildflowers in Yosemite Valley after a summer rain.

Membership doubled from 4,400 to 10,000--in spite of a conservative flood tide and rising Republican strength. Soon it became clear to Powell that he could thank James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s outspoken and untameable secretary of the Interior.

“Every time that guy opened his mouth, you could predict a flood of membership,” Powell recalled in a recent interview, looking back on the chapter’s eventful past five years. “He was the Sierra Club’s main recruiter. I think that kind of spoiled the club.”

Now Powell is leaving San Diego and the Sierra Club, arguably the most influential environmental group in the county. He leaves behind him a group that has transformed itself in the Reagan era through a series of losses and one remarkable coup.

During Powell’s tenure as conservation coordinator, the chapter waded into politics, for the first time endorsing candidates in local elections. First came a series of defeats, then victories, culminating last November in the passage of San Diego’s managed growth initiative.

That crusade for Proposition A, Powell said, was an expensive gamble: It soaked up limited resources and eclipsed other issues. But in retrospect, he says, the bet paid off. The club emerged with a victory, new political muscle and respect.

It inspired other groups like the clean-ocean activists now fighting attempts to cut treatment of sewage discharged off the San Diego coast. Powell believes the Proposition A victory also impressed upon politicians that they must hear environmentalists out.

“I think there has been a shift,” Powell said, specifically citing Councilman Bill Cleator’s new openness in his unsuccessful mayoral campaign. “Whether it’s going to slip back is going to be largely dependent on how the citizens are able to keep the pressure on.”

As for Powell, he is moving to San Francisco where his wife, Rosalind Hirst, will be working toward a masters degree. Later this month, he begins work as an organizer for an open-space advocacy group called People for Open Space.

He is to be replaced Monday by Jerry Wingate, a long-time activist from South Carolina who has spent most of his career in community organizing around issues including occupational health, the environment, peace and nuclear power.

Wingate, who is 36, moved to San Diego in January, 1984, and since that time has worked as a chef and a business writer. Before that, he had worked for the federal Community Services Administration, the Carolina Brown Lung Assn., and the War Resisters League.

Powell, who is 40, came to the Sierra Club via a Julian orchard, the Pacific Crest Trail and a model city in Arizona. Though his political campaign work helped qualify him for the conservation coordinator’s job, his resume was dappled.

A former Navy man with an interest in urban planning, Powell fled Los Angeles for San Diego County in the early 1970s. He and his wife took up residence in an apple orchard in Wynola, outside Julian, and Powell began working in housing restoration.

From there, he moved on to blasting rock on the Pacific Crest Trail, on contract to the U.S. Forest Service. Later he moved to Cardiff, studied commercial aviation and worked construction, and finally began volunteering for a citizens’ energy group.

Powell gravitated increasingly toward anti-nuclear issues, intrigued by the group’s process of decision-making by consensus. He toiled on Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s 1978 re-election campaign and a statewide initiative to tax oil company profits to support mass transit.

“A lot of people think, since you’re going to San Francisco, you’re going to Nirvana,” remarked Powell, a small, blonde-bearded man curled over a cup of coffee during a recent interview in Balboa Park, looking back over five years.

“But I like the challenge here,” he insisted. “In spite of San Diego’s reputation for being laid back, conservative, apathetic, there’s a good core of people who will work on issues.”

In June, 1981, he arrived in Balboa Park, just months after the Sierra Club endorsed its first political candidate in California. That fall, the San Diego chapter endorsed a slate of City Council candidates and the concept of district elections. All but one lost.

Those defeats were followed by another unsuccessful campaign in support of Richard Roe for the state Assembly. It was a loss, but Powell says it built political expertise. From there, the club’s campaign workers moved on to Roger Hedgecock’s 1983 mayoral race.

In that race, Powell said, the Sierra Club made a difference. By a narrow margin, Hedgecock was elected. Over the next months, his growth-management program took shape and the Sierra Club helped form the “confederacy” that became San Diegans for Managed Growth.

That confederacy drove Proposition A to victory against the largest war chest ever amassed against a San Diego city proposition campaign. By 56% to 44%, the city opted for a public vote if any of the city’s 52,000-acre urban reserve is to be developed before 1995.

It was the biggest victory in his five-year tenure in its significance both for the city and the chapter, Powell recalled. For months, it had absorbed the chapter’s time and money; but hours on phone banks had toned up activists’ political muscles.

Now people make cracks about the Proposition A campaign when they learn Powell is leaving, he said: “They say, ‘God, you’re sure lucky you won that thing, because if you’d lost it and left, everyone would say you were running away.’ ”

Among the club’s sourest defeats Powell counts the new Navy Hospital in Balboa Park, which environmentalists failed to block after a long, bitter fight. The battle was winding down when Powell arrived, but he still drives past the reminder of it every day.

“I see horrible, horrible waste,” he said angrily. “I see arrogance--just brutish raw power. . . . It was a very stupid decision, and they threw us crumbs. It was a slap in the face to this city. And I have never forgiven the Navy, and the city.”

Still with some amazement, Powell recalled the demonstration on ground-breaking day. Several hundred people had gathered outside the gates. Inside, security was loose, Powell recalled. Dead trees were strewn over the ground.

Finally one woman grabbed a flag, or maybe it was a survey marker. She started up the hill past the security guards, “like Joan of Arc,” as Powell remembers it. A couple dozen others followed, chanting. Then the band started up and their cries disappeared into the din.

“I dwelt on it an awful lot,” he said. “You talk about losses--that was something visible. You see it all the time. And there were alternatives. That’s what you see all the time: They make up reasons they can’t do the alternatives.”

There were many other defeats, too: The City Council allowed North City West to be built in the city’s urban reserve; the emergence of the Fairbanks Country Club development; innumerable quixotic fights to save the city’s canyons; and finally, the City Council vote to permit the La Jolla Valley project--the vote that gave birth to Proposition A.

“La Jolla Valley made it real apparent what was going on,” said Powell. “If we lost that, you might as well kiss it off. I think it represented a real low in a lot of people’s minds. ‘Boy, we’re in trouble. We’re in a rout!’ ”

There were recurrent frustrations, Powell said, recalling the welter of causes too numerous to do justice to. There was the flip side of the organization’s fiercely democratic structure: No quick moves, like an aircraft carrier turning in San Diego Bay.

There were lonely forays to service clubs in remote corners of the county, and always the one “hostile-humorous” agent provocateur in the crowd. Powell came away with an appreciation of being the voice in the wilderness, “the person who brings the conservation line.”

But he said the chapter has lacked aggressive promotion and recruiting--”pro-active outreach,” as Powell put it. Spoiled by the windfall that came with James Watt, it must now turn to cultivating the quantity and qualities of its membership, he said.

And there are issues Powell regrets the chapter neglected, including many of the energy issues that first drew him into public advocacy. He regrets the chapter was not more active on wilderness issues, and, until recently, paid little attention to South Bay.

Powell acknowledged that the group’s “demographics are a little bit skewed (to) upper scale”; perhaps surprisingly, a majority of the membership is Republican. That bias may be reflected in the issues the group chooses, he said, since its volunteer leaders set the agenda.

As for where San Diego might find itself in 10 or 20 years, Powell declined to speculate. He said simply, “A lot of it depends on how much (of the current political climate) is lip service and how much is a recognition that there is a basis in fact in what we’re saying.”

“I think it remains to be seen what kind of a leadership role (Mayor Maureen) O’Connor will be able to play,” Powell said. “I think she has the right ideas. But it’s going to a question if she can provide the leadership to really put the brake on rampant development. Because it is rampant.”