So Long to Jerry Beaver
Poodle Gets Misty over a Cordial Developer
Back in the day, when the psycho-politics of Santa Barbara needed someone to play the Big, Bad Developer, Jerry Beaver was it. And he didn’t merely play at it; as they say in Hollywood, he inhabited the role. He owned it. He embraced it.
In one particularly bruising campaign against the slow-growth majority then controlling the Goleta Water Board, Jerry famously declared, “I’m a developer, I’m a developer, I’m a developer.” For those slow on the uptick, he had a T-shirt made proclaiming the same thing.
In that particular instant, Beaver — who just died this past week at the age of 86 — was leading an effort to recall three members of the water board before their terms were up. At that point, the Goleta sub-basin was in serious overdraft and the board was refusing to issue new water meters, even to sympathetic young families who’d just bought their first homes. Beaver thought that was wrong. And he pounced. Though the recall failed, Beaver played a key role in the next regularly scheduled election, making sure the board majority changed.
