HUNTINGTON BEACH : Environmentalist to Become Mayor

Councilwoman Grace Winchell, an ardent environmentalist and slow-growth advocate who has been serving as mayor pro tem for the past year, tonight will be sworn in as the city’s new mayor. Her term will be for one year.

Winchell succeeds Mayor Jim Silva in the rotating position as the city’s top elected official.

In an interview, Winchell said that guiding the city through another bad economic year will be the biggest challenge facing her and the six other members of the City Council in the coming year.

“We’re facing a time when the city is not going to be able to be as servicing to the citizens,” she said. “We’re dealing with limited resources. And this affects city (employees) as well as the residents, because next year we have to negotiate new memoranda of understanding (contracts with employee unions).

“So what is going to be needed in the coming year is a sense of pulling together by the staff and the citizens and the businesses of this community,” she said. “My experience is that when people truly understand that there are hard times, they do pull together.”

Winchell will juggle her duties as mayor and her full-time job as a director of international programs and exchange students at Cal State Long Beach.

She said the job, which she has held for the past eight years, “has expanded my horizons, and it’s wonderful.”

A native of New York City, Winchell moved with her parents to Los Angeles in 1947. She graduated from Verdugo Hills High School. She then went to Stanford University, graduating in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences.

In 1969 she and her husband, Bob, moved to Huntington Beach. She said she immediately became interested in the city’s growth and future. Her concern about urban problems was among the reasons she went back to college to pursue a master’s degree, she said.

In 1977, Winchell earned her master’s degree in social ecology from UC Irvine, and in 1979, she was appointed by former Councilwoman Ruth Bailey to the city’s Planning Commission.

Winchell first sought a City Council post in 1986. Running on a slow-growth platform, she won one of four council seats open that year. She won reelection to another four-year term in 1990.

Winchell’s slow-growth philosophy has been a minority position during her six years on the council, but, ironically, the tilt changes tonight, when two new slow-growth council members, Dave Sullivan and Victor Leipzig, are sworn in at the same time she becomes mayor.

Winchell, Sullivan, Leipzig and incumbent Councilwoman Linda Moulton-Patterson are all outspoken environmentalists and now will constitute a majority on the City Council.

A major development issue facing the City Council next year will be the Koll Co.’s plans to build as many as 4,884 homes around the Bolsa Chica area. Winchell said she has serious concern about such development. Ideally, she said, she would like to see all the land kept in its natural state.

Winchell and her husband have three children: Rob, 32, Tim, 26, and Susan, 24.