Few things illustrate the unforeseeable reach of the butterfly effect as powerfully as the 20 years Bob Klausner spent in Santa Barbara, during which time he emerged as the city’s most influential power broker and civic activist since the days of T.M. Storke and Pearl Chase. Back in 1972, Klausner was a successful business executive living in New York City, leading a textile company and happily married with three kids. But one Saturday afternoon, as Klausner was pulling into a parking spot near his office, another driver blatantly poached it. “That was the last straw,” recalled his youngest daughter, Kathy. Back at home, Klausner announced to his family: “No more,” and soon they were heading west to California. The plan was to settle in either Santa Barbara or Atherton. Santa Barbara won — as local folklore has it — after Klausner met a young arts advocate, the photographer Tom Moore, in a chance encounter. If Santa Barbara could attract such creativity as Moore’s, Klausner concluded, it had to be the place. For Bob Klausner, it marked the beginning of a passionate romance between man and city that lasted until the day he died.
Were it not for such seemingly random events, the political history of Santa Barbara from 1973-1993 would have been profoundly different. It is almost impossible to exaggerate Klausner’s impact in that time span. Arriving in the turbulent period following the 1969 oil spill, Klausner fused his business acumen, high-beam intelligence, and political genius with Santa Barbara’s burgeoning environmental movement. Were it not for Klausner, the city’s first successful recycling program would never have happened. Without the revenues from that enterprise, the Community Environmental Council (CEC) — now celebrating its 46th year in operation — would not have survived. He fought against megaresorts and for growth management plans that sought — however unsuccessfully — to balance the creation of new jobs with the city’s limited housing supply.
Klausner never operated as a lone wolf. He collaborated creatively with the alphabet soup of environmental and political organizations — some of which he did not always see eye to eye with — in pursuit of mutual goals. “If there was no organization to do it, he would create one,” said Harvey Molotch, retired UCSB sociologist and author of “The City as a Growth Machine,” the Magna Carta of Santa Barbara’s slowgrowth movement of the 1970s.
