Claire Dedrick, 74; Was Environmentalist, Member of Jerry Brown’s Cabinet

Claire Dedrick, an environmentalist who served in the Cabinet of former Gov. Jerry Brown and was the first woman to serve on the state’s Public Utilities Commission, died Friday. She was 74.

Dedrick died of cancer at her home in Sacramento, according to longtime friend Adriana Gianturco, a one-time director of the state Department of Transportation also under Brown. Gianturco said Dedrick was diagnosed with the disease within the last two weeks.

Dedrick was a leader of the 1968 Save the Bay campaign that resulted in curbs on industrial development along San Francisco Bay.

A native of Logan, Utah, Dedrick graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biological science from Arizona State University.

She spent 14 years at Stanford doing research in microbiology while working on her PhD. At Stanford, she contracted tuberculosis in the laboratory and was in isolation for some time.

She became interested in environmental issues when she battled a road expansion project in front of her Menlo Park home. “When the county engineer yelled, ‘Get back to your kitchen, lady, and let me build my road!,’ I became an activist,” she said some years ago.

She succeeded in blocking the road and started a public relations firm that dealt with land-use issues. In 1970, she was a founder and the first executive director of the Peninsula Conservation Center on the San Francisco Bay Peninsula. She also served as a national board member of the Sierra Club.

In 1974, Brown asked her to join his Cabinet as secretary for the state Resources Agency. The job included oversight of the Departments of Conservation, Fish & Game, Parks & Recreation and Water Resources and the State Energy Commission.

Three years later, Brown named her to the Public Utilities Commission. While with the PUC, she angered fellow environmentalists by supporting the New Melones Dam and a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal at Point Conception. The dam was built, but the terminal plan was dropped.

Gianturco said that Dedrick “was attacked by development interests as well as environmentalists. She had a solid scientific background and used it.”

She worked in Republican and Democratic administrations because, Gianturco said, “she was not an ideologue. She called them as she saw them.”

Dedrick left the PUC in 1980. A year later, she was named a member of the state Air Resources Board. In 1982, she became executive officer of the California State Lands Commission, which manages, among other things, offshore petroleum resources under state jurisdiction.

After leaving the Lands Commission in 1989, she retired from government work and served as a consultant to environmental and land development groups.

Her two marriages ended in divorce.

Survivors include several nieces and nephews.