Stanford's Homegrown Opposition
Leader of anti-growth alliance has The Farm in his blood

By Bill Workman

As the son of parents who both were Stanford professors, Palo Alto environmentalist Peter Drekmeier was raised with high expectations for the university.

"When I was a kid, there were always students and community people meeting at our house to discuss how to end the Vietnam War and make the world a better place," recalls the 35-year-old Drekmeier. "I always associated that with Stanford as a beacon of hope."

That childhood optimism has since undergone change as Drekmeier has emerged as one of Stanford's most outspoken critics on campus development issues.

It was Drekmeier who mobilized Stanford Open Space Alliance, largely composed of Stanford students and employees, to push, along with other environmental groups, for permanent protection of the foothills during the nearly two years of public debate over the university's recently approved expansion plans.

Among other things, Drekmeier's "Save the Foothills" campaign organized demonstrations, filled numerous public hearings and, as the day approached last November for a final county vote, galvanized a large-scale e-mail campaign urging the supervisors to adopt a proposal for a 99-year ban on growth for 1,000 foothill acres.

Although the idea for an extended ban was eventually dropped after Stanford's howls of protest, the university did accept a 25-year growth moratorium for 90 percent of the hills, as well as permit conditions that include a "sustainability" review of the first million square feet of build- out. Stanford had initially offered only a 10-year pledge not to build in the hills.

"It was unlike any other campaign I've worked on," says Drekmeier, who in 1990 helped found Bay Area Action, a Palo Alto-based environmental advocacy group that recently merged with the Peninsula Conservation Center Foundation, with Drekmeier as a co-director. "People were so passionate about our vision for the foothills that dozens were coming back night after night to make telephone calls to enlist public support."

Drekmeier played hardball in the final days before the county vote. He took out full-page ads in local newspapers to publish highlights of a 1987 Stanford "Foothill Region Plan" that purported to show that although the university might say it had no hillside development plans, the document proved otherwise.

The ads angered Stanford. Larry Horton, the university's director of government and community relations, denied the 1987 study had ever been seriously considered, and accused Drekmeier's campaign of "distortions and misinformation."

Drekmeier has been a community organizer almost from the day he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a political science degree in 1987.

Even though he's a Cal grad, he points out with a smile, it was The Farm that paid for his tuition under a Stanford employee benefits program that picked up the tab for his parents.

In the late 1990s, Drekmeier helped organize a series of efforts by Stanford neighbors in Menlo Park and Palo Alto that put the controversial widening of Sand Hill Road on campus before voters on three different occasions. The last time was in 1997 when Palo Alto rejected an environmentalist alternative, and approved the widening. The $342 million project was completed a few months ago.

Drekmeier and Horton, a Stanford graduate who took political science classes with Drekmeier's father, first ran into each other in the early days of the Sand Hill Road dustups, and not surprisingly, find little to agree on about campus development.

Nonetheless, they share a mutual respect. Both recall with amusement the time a news photographer wanted them to pose together holding up opposing campaign posters, but ran into a problem: The 6-foot-4 Drekmeier towered over the slightly built Horton. The Stanford official solved things by standing on a chair.

Meanwhile, Drekmeier says he is encouraged by what he sees as signs that the image-tarnishing ordeal that Stanford has endured in the public relations war over its land-use plans may have been a wake-up call.

He cited a recent article in Stanford Magazine, the university's alumni publication, in which trustee Chairman Isaac Stein said: "We absolutely have to be more thoughtful about long-term growth. If the goal of our opponents was to send us that message -- and it is a legitimate message -- it has been received."

As a youngster, Drekmeier roamed the Santa Cruz Mountains, catching lizards and snakes. He says he began his transformation from "naturalist" to "environmentalist" at the age of 10, when he and a few buddies armed with BB guns went hunting lizards, and he killed a half dozen.

However, instead of feeling like a big shot, he wrote recently, "I felt terrible because in trying to impress my human friends, I had turned against my reptile friends. . . . I realized I had to do more than just try to understand the world, but also take action to protect it."