After 28 years of volunteering on the public’s behalf, a rest from the routine is in order, says Portola Valley resident Jon Silver, but public issues will continue to matter to him.
Mr. Silver is leaving the San Mateo County Planning Commission after 12 years of meetings every other Wednesday morning. Before that, he was on the Portola Valley Town Council for 16 years, including three times as mayor, from early 1978 to late 1993.
The Planning Commission oversees development on unincorporated county land, most of which lies west of the Coast Range from Pacifica south to the Santa Cruz County line.
“It’s a good time to make a change,” Mr. Silver told the Almanac. His third and last allowable term ended in January, but he agreed to stay on until October, when county Supervisor Rich Gordon plans to recommend his successor for District 3. The Board of Supervisors makes the appointment.
“It’s unfortunate,” Mr. Gordon says about Mr. Silver’s departure. “He’s been a fantastic planning commissioner.” During his tenure, Mr. Silver deftly addressed coastal protection and found the “right places” for new developments, Mr. Gordon says.
Nonprofits may miss Mr. Silver, too. His commissioner’s stipend of about $2,300 a year has been going to causes such as the Audubon Society, the Greenbelt Alliance and the county hospital.
“I’ll miss not having that free money to give away,” he says.
Mr. Silver, 54, earns his living as the owner of the Quicksilver Delivery Service (it delivers the Almanac), and he shares his house with two large poodles. “One’s a socialist and one’s an anarchist,” he says. In keeping with their unconventional politics, he says he lets their coats go natural and avoids the “frou-frou” poodle look. “They look like regular dogs.”
With his life less regulated, Mr. Silver says he plans to spend his time finding a permanent site in Portola Valley for the small home left over from the Gold Rush era and known as the Chilean woodchoppers house.
The aging little house on Portola Road at the northern edge of the Jelich Ranch is the only remaining house of five or six that served as refuges for Chilean prospectors turned woodcutters.
The men had been expelled from the gold fields by racist white miners, so the story goes, and had found work making charcoal from willow wood, which was abundant then in Portola Valley. Sailing back to Chile was out of the question since San Francisco Bay was packed tight with idle ships left there by gold seekers.
“To me, (the woodchoppers house) is just as valuable as slave housing in Virginia or a house along the underground railroad in a (Civil War) border state,” Mr. Silver says. It is also a reminder that people of small means once lived where homes now sell for millions, he added.
Small is beautiful?
The woodchoppers house is not alone as a small dwelling in Portola Valley today. Second-unit cottages offer homes for people with lower incomes. A Town Council in the 1990s that included Mr. Silver amended the general plan’s housing element to specify inclusionary zoning, which requires subdivisions of seven or more homes to reserve 15 percent of the project for below-market-rate homes.
Mr. Silver says he remembers a meeting during the zoning deliberations that “resembled a lynch mob.” A resident complained that she had left South Africa to escape racial issues, that she’d left Atherton to escape proximity to East Palo Alto, and now “you want to do it here,” he recalls.
The woman may have sounded incorrigible, but she later accompanied the council on an affordable-housing field trip to Palo Alto and came away heartened, Mr. Silver says.
A family matter
Being upbraided during a public hearing, and holding one’s tongue, come with the territory of being a public official. Decision makers are advised to let everyone speak before closing the hearing so that legislators can then discuss and/or act on the matter before them.
Mr. Silver remembers that during a hearing held over several months on a controversial effort to amend San Mateo County’s Coastside master plan, one man accused him, early on, of knowing nothing about big families and their need for big houses.
Unable to respond for months, by which time the moment had passed, Mr. Silver says he had no doubt that his accuser was wrong. That’s understandable, given that his maternal Mormon grandfather had had three wives simultaneously, and his paternal Mormon grandfather had had four.
“They didn’t get divorces along the way,” Mr. Silver explains. At the time, most of the marriages had been covertly sanctioned by the Church of Latter Day Saints, he says.
Eventually the church distanced itself by excommunicating his paternal grandfather, Mr. Silver says, adding that his grandfather later redeemed himself by arranging to have three of the marriages annulled and getting himself re-baptized.
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