Clarkson Set To Go away 22-12 months Profession As Native Elected Official

SAN RAMON (BCN)

After 9 years as San Ramon’s mayor, Invoice Clarkson is pleased with how the town has grown and advanced over the previous decade, right into a multicultural metropolis with an revolutionary downtown mixed-use growth. He additionally performs up how it hasn’t grown — at the least outward.

“There hasn’t been any new growth accepted since 2011 within the hills west of city, or these to the east,” San Ramon’s outgoing mayor stated this week. “And there have been no new developments within the Tassajara Valley since 2011. We’re working exhausting to maintain that space agricultural, and we have succeeded at that.”

Clarkson, 68, had beforehand spent 12 years as a San Ramon Valley Unified Faculty District trustee. And with a virtually 22-year profession behind him, he stated he seems ahead to being a “little extra egocentric with my time.”

Clarkson has served 4 phrases as mayor. Whereas mayors in San Ramon are elected to two-year phrases, one in all Clarkson’s phrases was three years, led to when the town shifted from odd-year to even-year elections, extending every then-current official’s time period by one yr.

These phrases got here as San Ramon has been present process main modifications. He is pleased with the town’s standing as one of many most secure in California, and of the work of the town’s police drive. Town has operated its personal police division solely since 2007; earlier than that, the town had contracted with the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Workplace. Clarkson additionally praised the town’s joint dispatch middle from which each the native police and the San Ramon Valley Hearth Safety District are dispatched. It opened in 2016.

Town’s demographics have been altering, too. Whereas nearly 77 % of the town’s inhabitants in 1990 was white, that quantity by 2017 was about 50 %. Town’s Asian inhabitants, in the meantime, has gone up from 15 % in 1990 to nearly 36 % in 2017. That pattern, Clarkson stated, continues.

“It is made the town a extra attention-grabbing place to reside, a stronger group,” Clarkson stated. “Twenty % of our residents have been born outdoors america. Now we have 28 cricket groups; we are the cricket capital of the East Bay.”

In response, the town shaped the San Ramon Valley Range Coalition about three years in the past to advertise inclusion for all residents, he stated.

Clarkson stated he needs his metropolis had a standard downtown, with ground-level storefronts and flats or different makes use of above. However by the point San Ramon was integrated in 1983, the heyday of such buying areas had handed. So with out that point of interest, San Ramon created its personal, the Metropolis Heart undertaking east of Interstate Freeway 680, which first opened in 2018 as a shopping mall. Accompanying residential growth will observe, and Clarkson stated that housing will assist maintain strain off of creating on the metropolis’s outskirts.

San Ramon Metropolis Councilman Dave Hudson has identified Clarkson for 40 years, he stated, since each have been younger actual property brokers. Clarkson has succeeded as a mayor, he stated, partly to what he known as “campaignability,” a capability to get together with everybody, to specific typically sophisticated government-speak in easy, direct phrases and his dedication to the “course of,” to hold out public features by the ebook, in a good manner.

“He treats everybody equally, by way of doing every little thing by way of the proper processes,” Hudson stated. “He’s exhausting to dislike, and his preparedness and data are well-known.”

Earlier than he was first elected mayor in 2011, Clarkson had served three four-year phrases on the San Ramon Valley Unified Faculty District board. San Ramon Valley colleges (and college students) have remained prime performers, he stated, even through the metropolis’s explosive development within the late 1990s and early 2000s. He additionally counts among the district’s greater initiatives, together with model new Dougherty Valley Excessive Faculty (constructed 2007) and the rebuild of Pine Valley Center Faculty (2008).

This is not to say he is retiring — he is been a Realtor for 4 a long time, and plans to maintain that going.

“I type of look ahead to working solely a 40-to 50-hour week,” stated Clarkson, who particularly seems ahead to spending extra time along with his household, particularly his grandchildren.

A historical past buff, Clarkson will even proceed main his native historical past excursions of San Ramon. He additionally was closely concerned within the metropolis’s 150th anniversary celebration in 2017 and its historic ingredient.

Hudson stated Clarkson’s educating of historical past could also be his biggest final contribution to his metropolis. “His legacy, to me, is that he gave us a basis of the place San Ramon got here from.”

Clarkson, who has been concerned with a number of group management growth applications, stated there are many younger individuals who have been getting ready for a lifetime of public service that can maintain San Ramon in good arms. And for him, that service is finest carried out regionally.

“There is not a greater job on the earth, for my part, than being the mayor of your city,” he stated.

Copyright © 2020 by Bay Metropolis Information, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or another Reuse with out the categorical written consent of Bay Metropolis Information, Inc. is prohibited.