STANLEY REMELMEYER : More Than Any Other Official, the Retiring City Attorney Has Shaped the Evolution of Torrance From Sleepy Town to South Bay Dominance

When a young lawyer named Stanley E. Remelmeyer first saw the sleepy town of Torrance more than three decades ago, Hawthorne Boulevard was just a two-lane street.

Today, the oil derricks and family farms that once covered the land have been replaced by housing tracts and giant shopping malls. Hawthorne Boulevard has grown to an eight-lane thoroughfare.

Torrance has become the dominant community in the South Bay and the fourth-largest city in Los Angeles County. Its strong commercial and industrial sectors have provided stable tax revenues, and the city also has a reputation--reflected in high property values--as a desirable place to live.

Shaped Evolution of City

More than any other city official, Remelmeyer, who is retiring Wednesday, has shaped that evolution as city attorney for the last 32 years.

“He is the one common thread through all those years,” Mayor Katy Geissert said.

“Every major decision the council has been involved in, Stanley has been there,” Councilman Tim Mock said.

Remelmeyer’s recommendations led to approval of new residential neighborhoods and shopping areas, including the massive Del Amo Fashion Center.

He was there when civil rights demonstrators protested at a Torrance subdivision in the 1960s and when the federal government threatened to sue the city in 1980 for dragging its heels on providing low-income housing.

He was at the vortex of battles between pilots and homeowners over airport noise and struggles between environmentalists and developers over Madrona Marsh.

When the time came to wire Torrance for cable television, it was Remelmeyer’s research that helped the city negotiate a landmark deal.

His low-key demeanor has become the style of the city itself--a place where politics are genteel and controversy is frowned upon.

“Because Stanley helps us on issues, they don’t become controversies,” said Councilman Mark Wirth. “Things are quiet, noncontroversial. They are taken care of.”

Former Mayor Jim Armstrong called Remelmeyer “a man of immense talent” who was “always careful to be as sure as he could be that the legal position of the city was on safe ground.”

Council members had so much confidence in Remelmeyer that they had to be led “kicking and screaming” to make a decision contrary to his advice, Armstrong said.

Looking back over the years, Remelmeyer, 70, joked during a recent interview that the secret of his success is simple: “Always be right.”

While his track record in terms of courtroom and council victories is less than perfect--he discovered just this year, for example, that the city has clear title to the municipal airport--no one at Torrance City Hall underestimates the role that Remelmeyer has played since becoming city attorney in July, 1956.

But Remelmeyer has been an adviser, not a policy maker, Mock said.

“He doesn’t take positions, he lays out options. . . . He tells us when we may be in legal jeopardy.”

Mayor Geissert said Remelmeyer is “a very practical person. He has a great way of foreseeing difficulties, pitfalls, traps down the road.”

Salary Steadily Increased

Council members have rewarded Remelmeyer by steadily increasing his salary to the current $129,780 annually, plus another 10% in special benefits.

Remelmeyer said he had no idea that he wanted to be a lawyer while growing up in Aberdeen, Wash., during the Depression.

After graduating from the University of Washington in 1940 with a bachelor’s degree in history, Remelmeyer entered the Army, just in time for service in World War II. He rose to lieutenant colonel in the anti-aircraft artillery corps and served in Europe. When he returned home, he attended Harvard Law School, earning a law degree in just two years.

Remelmeyer moved to California with his first wife and began working for a downtown Los Angeles firm specializing in oil and gas law.

In March, 1955, he quit the law firm, expecting to be hired by a major oil company.

While he waited, Remelmeyer spent two weeks helping the lawyer who was working part-time as Torrance city attorney. The oil company job never came through, and Remelmeyer stayed in Torrance.

Then and now, no subject has occupied more of his time than growth.

“The town was booming,” Remelmeyer said. “Torrance was being transformed in 1955. There were vast tracts of houses and then a vast tract of agricultural land and some industrial property.”

Between 1950 and 1960, the city’s population jumped fivefold, to 100,000. The city’s overriding philosophy was to foster that growth by approving subdivisions, mapping out roads and sewers, and supervising construction. Later, stores and schools and hospitals were built to serve the burgeoning population.

On Forefront of Growth

“The city fathers were very proud and very happy with the growth because most Westerners like growth. They equate growth with goodness,” Remelmeyer said. “The council was interested in growth. Everybody was out to get commerce and industry in Torrance.

“It was exciting. The amount of planning was enormous. It occupied everybody’s time. People were swamped.”

The council decided in 1956 that Torrance needed a full-time city attorney. Remelmeyer got the job. His office gradually grew to its present core of five attorneys and two paralegals, plus outside attorneys hired for specific issues.

On land-use matters, Remelmeyer is particularly careful. He strives to avoid any action that would curb property rights to the point that the city might lose a legal challenge.

That was particularly true in the long-running controversy in the late 1970s and early 1980s over the massive Park del Amo residential and commercial project, and the related issue of protection for the environmentally sensitive Madrona Marsh. The city wanted to preserve the marsh as part of an agreement allowing the massive development.

Councilman Mock said Remelmeyer was “very nervous” during the negotiations because the property owners “had the money to go the distance” in court.

Urged Discretion

Remelmeyer even suggested that council members not discuss Madrona Marsh--the biggest issue in the 1982 council campaign--to avoid any hint of bias that might affect pending court cases.

“Stanley is very protective and careful with us,” Councilman Wirth said. “He stresses very heavily for us to avoid bad situations.”

When issues got hot, Remelmeyer stayed calm and found a compromise.

Peter Lacombe, a private attorney in Torrance who has represented business interests at City Hall, said Remelmeyer has had “a lot of successes in tight situations because of his ability to deal with people. . . . He tempered all the issues when they were filled with emotion.”

Perhaps the most emotional issues of his career in overwhelmingly white Torrance involved civil rights and federally financed housing.

Racial Issues

In 1963, the Congress on Racial Equality staged a series of weekend demonstrations at a Torrance subdivision to protest the builder’s alleged refusal to sell homes to blacks.

Actor Marlon Brando joined the protests, which culminated in arrests when demonstrators refused to leave a model home.

Remelmeyer said CORE was determined to “swamp the local judicial system” by insisting that every defendant have a trial on the misdemeanor trespass charges.

Ultimately, Remelmeyer said a deal was worked out to drop the charges and settle the civil rights dispute by allowing a black family to buy a home. But the sale was never completed, he said.

Race resurfaced as an issue in 1980, when Torrance became embroiled in a bitter battle with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development over federal efforts to promote housing for low- and middle-income families.

Despite vigorous objections from a large and vocal group of Torrance residents, who warned that such housing would attract what some called an “undesirable element” and would lower property values, a sharply divided council initially agreed to comply with HUD’s demands.

But under threat of recall, four council members--including Geissert and Armstrong--switched sides in August, 1980, and agreed to pull out of a HUD program rather than meet the agency’s demands--a decision that remains in effect today.

At one point some residents and council members wanted to go further than that, with a charter amendment to restrict low-income housing.

Feared Federal Suit

Throughout that period, Remelmeyer warned council members that the Justice Department was planning to file suit against Torrance alleging a “pattern and practice” of discrimination. “I told the City Council we were in deep trouble,” he said.

After traveling to the East Coast and Midwest to study housing discrimination suits filed against white suburbs there, Remelmeyer wrote one of his trademark legal memos advising that a charter amendment would be risky.

“I convinced the council and the council convinced the people, ‘Let’s get off of this thing,’ ” Remelmeyer said.

Geissert recalls the period. “He came on real strong with the council,” she said. “He warned there was a very real hazard of the Justice Department not only bringing suit but winning.

“Stan did the best job he could,” Geissert said. “He warned us of the consequences in the strongest terms he could say.”

Remelmeyer’s acknowledged skill in researching issues and developing legal strategy led to success in the city’s long-shot effort to obtain valuable property at Torrance Beach, where the old Hollywood Riviera Club once stood.

During the beach case, Geissert, who lives two doors from Remelmeyer in the Hollywood Riviera neighborhood, recalls the city attorney waving his arms at her early one morning. “I’m off to fight windmills,” she recalls him saying. “The Torrance Beach windmill.”

Even though the land was privately owned, Remelmeyer found a precedent that allowed the city to acquire it despite strong opposition from the owner. Today the land is Miramar Park.

Other hallmarks of Remelmeyer’s career include the city’s efforts to regulate the Torrance Municipal Airport to limit noise, and his successful negotiation of a citywide cable television franchise that is considered a model for other communities.

Torrance’s efforts to protect residents from airport noise included limits on the number of aircraft allowed to tie down there, a nighttime curfew, tough noise standards, a limit on the touch-and-go landings and takeoffs used in flight instruction, and restrictions on the sale of jet fuel. The restrictions were upheld despite legal challenges by pilots.

To Remelmeyer’s great surprise, he discovered this fall that the federal government gave Torrance control of the airport property in 1956, the same year he became city attorney. Previously, he had thought that a 1948 deed restriction allowed the federal government to reclaim the land if Torrance did not operate it as an airport, and the city’s legal posture had been based on that false belief.

After examining the rapidly changing field of cable television, Remelmeyer urged the council to wait until the time was ripe for the city to negotiate the best possible deal with a cable company. “Everything went right. We hit the market just right,” Remelmeyer said. “We had the right conjunction of the planets.”

Entering New Phase of Life

His research led Torrance to negotiate a franchise that provides more local programming and channels than many cities. In his honor, the council named its modern cable television studios after Remelmeyer.

The white-haired attorney will be honored at a reception Wednesday and a formal dinner in January. He will become a part-time city consultant while the new city attorney, Kenneth Nelson, gets his bearings. Remelmeyer also plans to do some traveling with his second wife, Becky.

As he sits in his wood-paneled office on the third floor of City Hall and a massive American flag snaps in the breeze outside, Remelmeyer marvels that he has been in the same job for more than 32 years. “It doesn’t seem long to me,” he said. “The time has gone awfully fast.”