Will Travis, Executive Director

Bay Conservation and Development Commission

One of my predecessors said that the most important word in the agency name is "AND". His point was that BCDC is a management agency - not just a single purpose environmental protection agency and not just a single purpose economic development agency. What BCDC does is balance these two objectives and reach sound policy decisions. I think the Legislature was very wise in putting us in that role. If you look at the Commission’s record over the past 35 years, I think you will agree we have achieved our primary objectives: keeping the Bay from being unnecessarily filled and increasing public access along the shoreline. The Bay is actually larger than it was when we were created because of wetland restoration projects and breaching dikes to enlarge the size of the Bay. Public access, which in 1965 was limited to about 4 miles of the 1,000 miles or so of shoreline around the Bay, has been increased to a couple hundred miles. At the same time we’ve approved some 10 billion dollars of development along the shoreline. So I think we’ve shown that BCDC can be both a conservation and a development agency. Our primary products are sound public policy decisions, which I think the Commission has delivered.

I guess the answer to that is who I disagreed with last. I think that it’s also not me so much as the Commission as an institution people take issue with. BCDC is probably seen by the developers as being too protectionist of the Bay and it’s probably seen by environmentalists as working too hard to solve permit applicants’ problems. Our role as BCDC’s staff is not to try to find ways to deny applicants’ permits, but rather to work with applicants to try to refine their projects so that they can be approved by the Commission. Fortunately, we have found that there are, with a few exceptions, three types of applicants. They’re either people who want to live on the Bay shoreline because they love the Bay and want to see and use it everyday. Or they are people who have projects that have to be on the Bay shoreline, like ports, marinas and other water-dependent uses that require Bayfront locations. Or they run businesses like restaurants and hotels that have a distinct competitive advantage by having a waterfront location. Whichever of the three categories they fit into, we have found that these applicants want the Bay protected as much as we want to protect it. So our staff approaches applicants not as enemies but rather as potential allies in the ongoing effort to protect the Bay. We try to understand their needs and try to have them understand why our policies make some sense. Our greatest thrill is when an applicant says, "I didn’t want to have to go through your process, but I have to admit that my project is better for it."

Will Travis is the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, commonly called BCDC, which was the nation’s first state coastal management agency when it was created in 1965.

Will, who is a native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, earned Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Regional Planning degrees in 1967 and 1970 respectively, both from Penn State University. During 1966, he studied architecture in London.

Will began his professional career as an assistant planner and urban designer at BCDC between 1970 and 1972. He then spent a year as a consultant on the master plan for the East Bay Regional Park District. In 1973, he joined the staff of the newly-established California Coastal Commission where, between 1973 and 1985, he held a number of positions including heading the coastal agency’s offshore oil drilling permit staff, directing its public access program, and overseeing its budget and administrative functions. He returned to BCDC in 1985 and spent the next ten years as the Commission’s deputy director. He has been BCDC’s executive director since 1995.

Will has written many articles on coastal issues and has provided advice on coastal matters to other states and nations. He has also been a lecturer at colleges and universities throughout North America.

He serves as the chairman of a trustee committee which manages a multi-million dollar oil spill settlement fund set up by Shell Oil Company after a 1988 oil spill in San Francisco Bay. In that capacity, he directed the public acquisition of a 10,000-acre property along the northern shoreline of San Francisco Bay which will become the largest coastal wetland restoration project in California’s history.

Will serves on the board of directors of Friends of the Estuary, on the committee of policy advisors of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, and on the editorial board of the newsletter Estuary. He is a member of a group which is providing advice on coastal management to the National Coastal Services Center in Charleston, South Carolina, and serves on the National Ocean Service’s Advisory Group for the San Francisco Bay Project. Will also served a four-year term as a member of the Berkeley city planning commission.