By Tanli Su
Harvey Rarback, who serves on the Executive Committee of the Sierra Club Loma Prieta Chapter Peninsula Regional Group, is a Half Moon Bay City Council member with a passion for the environment that motivates him to preserve the beautiful coast.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Harvey holds a PhD in physics from Stony Brook University and has worked at three national labs including Brookhaven National Lab and Argonne National Lab. In 1998, Harvey moved to California and worked for fourteen years at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) National Lab. After retiring from his scientific work in 2012, Harvey became involved in public affairs and was elected to the Half Moon Bay City Council in November of 2016.
Having lived both near the ocean on the East Coast and far from it in the Midwest, Harvey chose to move to Half Moon Bay because he loved being near water. Harvey recalls the first time he and his wife went to the beach at Half Moon Bay, where he smelled the ocean, mist, and salt spray and thought, “This is where I want to live.” Harvey also says, “I really feel an obligation to preserve that coastal environment, the small-town feel, the wonderful place—I’ve never lived in a better place.”
Not long after Harvey moved to Half Moon Bay, a developer decided to build a row of large mansions that would have blocked the views of the ocean from the neighborhood that Harvey lived in, one of the poorest areas in Half Moon Bay. In addition, the developer wanted to build a thirteen-foot-high opaque fence and plant trees and bushes as separation. Harvey and his neighbors gathered together to talk to the developer with the motto of “Welcome to the neighborhood, please share the view,” and the developer eventually agreed to build transparent fences only six feet high, not plant big trees, and build the houses in such a way that neighbors could still see and access the ocean. Despite this successful negotiation, when the agreement was presented to the Half Moon Bay City Council, Harvey realized that the developer had little intention of abiding by the agreement, and the city council was not going to enforce it either. “That was my introduction to local politics,” Harvey recalls, “Ever since then, I have wanted to make sure that we have better local government, and that’s why I ran for city council.”
Currently, Harvey is focused on pushing the Local Coastal Program (LCP) Update. As Harvey explains, every ten years, the coastal communities in California are supposed to have an update to the Local Coastal Plan, which is a wide-ranging document dealing with land use, transportation, sea level rise, and more. Once the Planning Commission issues the update, it will go to the Half Moon Bay City Council for approval and then be submitted to the California Coastal Commission.
Harvey states that the LCP Update will “set the tone probably for the next twenty years of what Half Moon Bay is going to look like”—therefore, Harvey believes it is crucial to have environmentally-friendly people on the Planning Commission, which works on the update. Jimmy Benjamin, a local resident of Half Moon Bay, was recently appointed by Harvey to the Planning Commission. Benjamin is known for his successful lawsuit against the city over the Kehoe Watercourse (in 2009, the city had violated its own Local Coastal Program* by clearing out without a permit in spite of the presence of threatened species in the Watercourse), and Harvey describes him as a hard working, inspirational person and “champion of the environment.”
Other people who have inspired Harvey range from local environmentalist Mike Ferreira, who also serves on the Executive Committee of the Sierra Club Loma Prieta Chapter, to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders for his straightforward assertion that climate change is the biggest issue of our time. Another inspirational figure to Harvey is Tom Steyer, billionaire political activist who works to effect change for the environment. Steyer recently visited the Coastside Democrats, which Harvey is involved with, and listening to him talk greatly inspired Harvey. Although Steyer is currently busy fighting against President Trump’s anti-environmental administration, there is speculation that he may run for California governor in 2018. Harvey sincerely hopes that he will, saying that “He’d just be the most environmentally-friendly person.” Steyer and his wife Kat Taylor are also being honored by the Sierra Club Loma Prieta Chapter’s 2017 Guardians of Nature Benefit (for more information, please visit http://www.sierraclub.org/loma-prieta/benefit).
While people like Sanders and Steyer work to protect the environment on a national level, Harvey is eager to deal with the local consequences of climate change and believes that the important work is ahead of him. “I want to keep the coast as beautiful and unspoiled as it has been. I want to deal with local issues that are really important like the erosion of watercourses and sea level rise… Climate change is the single most important environmental catastrophe we have, and we need to address it in lots of different ways.”
*certified by the California Coastal Commission as required by the California Coastal Act of 1976