If you spent part of this morning biking one of Larkspur’s pathways, hiking in the hills, walking along the marsh, playing in a park, marveling at the redwoods or strolling our historic downtown, you have Joan Lundstrom to thank.

The first woman elected to Larkspur’s City Council in 1972, Lundstrom served on the city council for 28 years. She was named the first female mayor of Larkspur in 1974 and served as mayor seven times before retiring in 2011. At the time, the Marin County Board of Supervisors formally thanked Lundstrom for “all she has done for the community of Larkspur and the County of Marin.”  

Lundstrom’s illustrious public service career began when she organized Larkspur’s first Town Meeting in 1970 to give citizens a voice, rein in rampant development and preserve our hills, marshes and historic downtown. Larkspur’s multiuse paths, expansive open space and Piper Park are just a few of Larkspur’s assets that would not exist today if Lundstrom and her fellow citizens had not spoke out against the city’s plans.

Oh, and she co-founded the Larkspur Community Foundation in 2014 and continues to serve as its grant chairperson. 

“Things were going wrong… and everybody was apathetic”

Lundstrom grew up in suburban Chicago and studied American History at the University of Illinois. It was there that she first held leadership positions in student government and for her sorority. She came to SF in a stuffed station wagon in the late 1950s with her husband, an architect who had heard there was a lot of opportunity in California. They made a home in the Larkspur hills a few years later. 

In the 1960s, only about 50 percent of Larkspur’s land had been developed—but city leaders were gunning for explosive development. In fact, the town hoped to double its population to 20,000 in less than a decade. 

According to Larkspur Past and Present, “The 1965 General Plan designated every square inch of land within city boundaries for development: no new parks, no open space and homes on steep hillsides eerie quarter acre. Public access to open space was limited.”

Plans were in place to subdivide and develop all of the hills above Larkspur into hundreds of homes and apartments, with a two-lane scenic road running along the North Ridge above town stretching from Kentfield to Mill Valley. Part of the hillside development process involved shaving off hilltops and moving hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of dirt to fill in the marshland around the creek.  

Downtown, the old buildings were looking shabby so city leaders hoped to raze the entire stretch and replace the blocks with offices and shops. The new downtown would be conveniently connected to Highway 101 by a Williams Street exit.

Residents were shocked at what was happening to their small town. At the same time, the city was basically saying, “Do it.”

“There really was a vacuum at the local level,” Lundstrom told the SF Chronicle in 1974. “Things were going wrong. There were terrific problems, and everybody was apathetic.” 

Here’s where Lundstrom and other concerned citizens stepped up to hold the first Town Meeting in 1970 and changed the course of Larkspur’s history.  

“We have to be careful because whatever goes in now, that’s it,” Lundstrom said in 1974, explaining the citizens’ opposition to developing the hills and marshes of Larkspur. “It takes a lot of hard work behind the scenes before the big battles come up. But it means you can have a lasting effect on what’s going on.”

We spoke to Lundstrom about her decades of civic service, how the Town Meeting and her leadership changed the course of Larkspur’s history and her secret to success in local government.

LCF: How did the first Town Meeting in November 1970 come about?

Lundstrom: At the time, the creek was dredged to build the Creekside neighborhood and building on South Eliseo was also going on. Bulldozers and trucks were going through town, moving fill from one site to another to allow developments to go up across Larkspur.

Helen Heitkamp and I were active in the League of Women Voters. We were shocked about the state of Larkspur and began to speak with other residents about it. “Isn’t anyone else concerned about this?” 

We talked about the need for a “Town Meeting.” These forums for airing citizens’ concerns originated in New England and involve a gathering of residents to discuss local issues and create resolutions for action. 

We knew the organization for the meeting would take a bit of doing and began to put our first Town Meeting on the calendar for spring—but residents realized we needed to act now.

The first Larkspur Town Meeting was held at Redwood High School in November 1970. About 300 people showed up for a full day of discussions—an incredible show of support and the largest turnout for any Northern California Town Meeting to date.

We were prepared with an agenda and handouts and posters. We laid out our concerns about unfettered development, downtown redevelopment, recreational and open space needs, zoning and population targets, traffic and the ferry system.

We had panels convene for discussions on a particular topic, zoning, for example. They would research the density of certain areas, connect with county planning and other experts in the field. A moderator would then lead the group to formulate conclusions and create resolutions to present to the other Town Meeting members.

LCF: What was the city’s response to the first Town Meeting?

Lundstrom: In December, we took our resolutions to the Larkspur City Council, a group of men, many of whom had ties to real estate developers. 

We had carefully researched and presented 15 resolutions, including measures to cease development along the creek and in the hills, ensure the marshland is preserved at the dump site that would become Piper Park, preserve trail access in Madrone Canyon, acquire public land for multi-use trails and create a committee be created to revitalize downtown.

Their response? “We don’t need a bunch of citizens telling us what to do.” We requested a series of public hearings to discuss our resolutions and follow up but nothing happened.

The reality was that there were many conflicts of interest in Larkspur’s government: The City Attorney and City Manager both worked for Schultz Development, the real estate development company that built Greenbrae. And we later found out years later that the then Planning Director had received a free lot on Murray Ave. from another landowner. 

We knew we couldn’t let the council ignore these critical issues facing Larkspur. We started our own Town Meeting newsletter mailer to stay in touch with concerned citizens.  At the time, no one ever went to city council or planning commission meetings so we began to make sure we had representatives at every meeting.

The Planning Commission was a very important target of our resolutions. The Planning Director had no background in planning. One member who would regularly fall asleep in meetings said that he was on the board simply to get out of the house and have something to do. 

Openings on the Planning Commission were not publicized but we finally inserted ourselves into the loop to the point where we could get our own nominees considered for the commission. But the council refused to approve our appointments.

LCF: When did you decide to run for city council?

Lundstrom:  When it became apparent that nothing would change, we decided to run our own slate of candidates. 

I ran for office in 1972 and became the first woman elected to the Larkspur City Council. Others followed me and citizen interest was finally represented on the council and in the planning commission. 

By 1972, Larkspur’s General Plan began to reflect the resolutions of the Town Meeting, including a mandate to preserve open space and ridge lines, effectively halting development on the North Ridge development and preserving the tree-covered hills above downtown. In 1977, the city worked with Mill Valley and the county to purchase the land and preserve it as open space. 

We held Town Meetings again in 1971, 1972 and 1974 and after that, the city government began to better represent residents’ interests. 

Part of our work on the city council was to figure out how the Town Meeting resolutions and ordinances would be put into action to help the city and its citizens. For example, we decided that when a new subdivision was approved, there must be land set aside for a public park. 

When a landowner became frustrated by the city putting the brakes on development, he started to illegally bulldoze his land atop Little King Mountain and cut down all the trees in 1972. The Larkspur city attorney fought to stop the development in the state appellate court arguing that the massive project would have a great environmental impact on the city—and won. 

The 1975 case also served as the basis for the city’s first tree ordinance: No more cutting down mature, heritage trees without city approval. 

During my first terms, we also helped found the Larkspur Heritage Board and Downtown Historic District to preserve the city’s character, which led to the downtown being added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

And we all worked together to turn the former county dump into Piper Park. The city had originally planned to fill in all the surrounding marsh with fill from the area’s many developments but we succeeded in keeping the area around the park as marshland.

LCF: Larkspur is threaded with dozens of multi-use pathways and trails that residents use daily. How did you help make these trails a reality?

Lundstrom: Each bit of open space and pathway in Larkspur was a fight. These didn’t nicely happen. And the city had to buy every single piece of it.

The need for biking and walking paths first became obvious in the early 1970s. Kids were biking on the street and getting hit by cars. The city manager and I looked at the map and decided that we could relieve some of the problem by having no parking on one side of Magnolia Ave. between Bon Air and Doherty. Then the residents there became angry about where they would be able to park. So we began to look into how to acquire the railroad right-of-way through town and make it into a path—and we received significant public support for the idea. This section was the first multiuse pathway set aside in Larkspur.

Around the same time, there was a proposal by the Northwest Pacific Railroad to develop the land at the end of West Baltimore near the electric booster station into 13 homes. A grass roots group of residents scrambled to raise money, the public works director hunted down state and federal grants and we succeeded in acquiring the land to add to our network of multi-use paths. 

But neighbors along the proposed pathway resisted the idea of paving the path. There was a huge outcry because they felt that a paved trail would lead to outsiders coming into their area, causing trouble and making it more noisy. Hundreds of residents signed a petition against the paved path.

In the end, our reliance on government funds meant that the path had to be accessible by users with disabilities, which led the city to be able to pave the path. Decades later, it is difficult to imagine the Twin Cities without its many paths.

LCF: What caused you to take a break from city government in the late 1970s?

Lundstrom: I was re-elected to the city council in 1976 but by the late 1970s, I went through a very difficult divorce and had to take a break from serving in order to take a full-time job to support myself. But the ball was rolling and during my break from the council, others took up the preservation mantle and stopped a 1980 proposal to develop both Little and Big King Mountain, eventually acquiring and preserving most of the land as open space for public use.

My experience in civic service led to a position managing grants at the Coastal Commission and then as a Coastal Analyst for the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) in Oil Spill Prevention and Response. In that capacity, I was appointed by the state as the first woman to chair the San Francisco Bay Region Harbor Safety Committee, a group representing all the port authorities around the bay. 

But I remained drawn to local governance. I served as an aide to Supervisor Hal Brown in 1983, guiding him through county politics during his first year in office. And after my professional career was established, I ran for Larkspur City Council again six more times, beginning in 1989, and served a total of seven times as mayor.

During my latter terms, I was proud to represent Larkspur as chair of the Corte Madera Creek Flood Control District and President of Marin County Council Mayors and Councilmembers. And by that time, women were far more common in Marin government.

LCF: What was your secret to success as a community and city leader? 

Lundstrom: Looking back, I believe my strength was as a problem solver. I had a knack for finding common ground with different groups of people. I was always trying to figure out, “What’s the real problem? What’s its background? What are all the alternative ways we can solve this problem? How can we get input from all parties and experts on how to solve it?”

My initial terms on the city council helped bring my problem solving experience to my career. I worked at the Building and Planning Department of College of Marin when we responded to protests by students with disabilities who demanded access to all campus buildings. And at the BCDC, we incorporated input from everyone from bar pilots to oil tanker representatives to figure out how to prevent near-miss collisions in the bay. I was proud to receive a national Coast Guard Medal for preventing commuter ferry accidents as a result of my service there. 

As mayor, I knew from my experience launching the Town Meetings that it was important to feel heard and involved. When a citizen would take the mic at a city council meeting to voice their side of a tremendous argument between neighbors, for example, I heard them out but then worked to return to the agenda. “Thank you for your input but we need to get back to the agenda for tonight and vote on tonight’s items…”

I don’t think people were as angry back in the 1970s as they are now. To be sure, people were angry at me when I was mayor—in fact, there was one woman who would yell at me about something every time she saw me in town. But overall, people were more civil to each other. 

We had the city council formally adopt rules of conduct. We had to treat each other with respect and not call names. Our code was adopted by a number of other cities and it was a very important guide to how people should interact in a public setting. 

As mayor, it was my job to ensure debates were productive and civil. If participants became too worked up, I would have everyone take a ten minute break. We always strived to have people feel heard but also need to arrive at some kind of resolution. I’m proud to say that, as mayor, I never had a reputation of being tumultuous and disrespectful—and I was never the target of a recall.

LCF:  Would it be accurate to call you the “Woman who Saved Larkspur?”

Lundstrom: I’d like to feel that would be accurate. At least we saved the hills. Without the Town Meeting, I don’t think it could have happened. We didn’t just elect a new group of leaders, we completely changed the town’s trajectory—and changed it in a way that got the citizens involved. 

And I’m excited about what’s next in Larkspur. At LCF, we have several new projects coming up. But every single thing I’ve been involved with takes time—and you just have to roll with it. It’s all worth it in the end.