As director of Sustainable City, Beryl Magilavy pioneered sustainability planning in San Francisco. She was responsible for the creation of the city's advisory commission on the environment in 1992 and its Environmental Department in 1996, serving as president of both commissions and the first director of the department. In 1995 and 1996, she organized the community process that drafted the city's sustainability plan, passed by the Board of Supervisors in 1997. She led the interdepartmental effort that resulted in the city's green building ordinance and its municipal integrated pest management plan and drafted much of both pieces of legislation, as well as Board and Commission resolutions on a wide range of other environmental topics. Magilavy ran a nonprofit recycling company for several years and has been among the leadership of political campaigns to reform the city's transportation system; replace a freeway with a landscaped, surface-level boulevard; and to stop chain store expansion into a neighborhood commercial area. She is author of many papers and articles on sustainability planning and local government reform. She would particularly like to acknowledge the Columbia Foundation, its boardmember Christine Russell and executive director Susan Reed Clark, for its ongoing support of local sustainability planning. Beryl Magilavy recently finished writing The Third Era, a book on climate change, accountable government, and sustainable development programs in seven European cities. She divides her time between San Francisco and Paris. |