Thanks for the planning Thanks for the planning (September 24, 2004)

City celebrates Brian Swift's achievements
by Jeb Bing

Brian Swift retires this year after nearly 30 years of service in Pleasanton, including the last 19 as Director of Planning and Community Development, with a gala party in his honor tonight at the Pleasanton Senior Center.

Swift, 58, joined the city staff as a Planning Department intern in 1975 shortly after receiving his law degree from UC Davis. Earlier, he had earned a bachelor's degree in Economics from Stanford University. Like his four brothers and a sister, he graduated from Amador Valley High School. Married to Karen Swift, who teaches third grade at Walnut Grove Elementary School, the couple has three children: Lily, 23, also a Stanford graduate; Holly, 20, who attends UCLA; and Rose, 16, a junior at Amador. Lily and Holly Swift also are graduates of Amador.

Not only is Swift the longest serving Planning Director in the city's history, he also managed the department during Pleasanton's meteoric rose from a 30,000-population suburb with few jobs and stores for its residents to the 68,000 population commercial center it is today. Most of the large developments, including Hacienda Business Park and the Stoneridge Shopping Center, occurred on Swift's watch.

Swift also has the unique background of having served as assistant City Attorney and for a short time as acting City Attorney until 1985, when he was tapped by then City Manager James Walker to take the Planning Director's job, succeeding Bob Harris, who had quit. That followed the City Council's decision that year to hire as full-time City Attorney Peter McDonald, who was later succeeded by the current City Attorney Michael Roush. McDonald is now in private law practice on Main Street.

Besides holding the two top legal and planning posts, Swift may be the only municipal official who approved his own work. While still a city planner, Harris had assigned Swift the job of reviewing the land use changes and development agreement for Hacienda. Later, as acting City Attorney, Swift certified his own document, although objections to the business park ultimately required that a new environmental impact report be prepared.

Even earlier, as one of his first assignments, Swift worked on the initial land use plans for Stoneridge, a Taubman Company development that had won out over a competing bid for a major mall farther east on I-580. In his work, Swift helped Taubman and contractors plan the first three major department stores for the center - The Emporium, Macy's and J.C. Penney's - as well as the parking lots and the Ring Road, now called Stoneridge Mall Road.

"Believe me, everyone greeted this shopping center with enthusiasm," Swift recalled. "Finally we were going to have a mall. We rolled out the red carpet."

Two decisions added to Swift's workload early on.

Soon after being hired full-time, Swift was given the job of unraveling and correcting a sewage capacity shortfall that had brought hew home construction to a halt. At the time, half the city's sewage was fed into the Dublin San Ramon Services District sewage treatment facility, with the rest being given only primary treatment before being discharged into the Alamo Creek that flowed along the freeway to Sunol. At Swift's recommendation, the City Council transferred all sewage treatment to the DSRSD, and authorized a pipeline for fully treated wastewater that would handle future growth across the Dublin grade and into the Bay. A second pipeline designed to handle new growth is now under construction along a parallel route.

Swift also was given charge of Growth Management, a program fairly new to municipal government but required by the newly passed federal Clean Water and Clean Air acts. Following those guidelines, Pleasanton was able to resume residential construction, with the number of permits issued by Swift and his planning team growing from 125 a year in the late 1970s to over 1,000 in 1988 and 1989, the city's two largest home building years.

"The result is that we have gone from roughly 13,000 housing units in 1976 to about 26,000 today, a growth rate pretty much in accord with both our General Plan and the Clean Air and Clean Water regulations," Swift said.

In 1996, Pleasanton voters approved a measure placing a 29,000 housing cap ceiling on city dwellings. With currently approved additional housing and units under construction, that total is expected to reach 27,500 shortly.

Voter approval of Proposition 13 in 1978 also affected Pleasanton. Swift said property assessments were rolled back to 1976 rates, with growth limited to just 2 percent of the previous year's tax at a time when inflation was exceeding 5 percent.

"Prop. 13 changed dramatically the way we looked at how we built infrastructure," Swift said, because the reduced tax revenue was not keeping pace with actual costs. "That's when we set up special assessment districts to handle those costs, such as the North Pleasanton Improvement District that covered infrastructure costs in Hacienda."

The measure also caused dramatic reductions in city staff, including Swift's planning department. For a time every other street light was turned out as the city coped with suddenly reduced revenue. For Pleasanton, however, Swift's growth management plan that called for increased housing development over the next two decades allowed the city to escape the severe consequences of Prop. 13. With inflation and rising housing costs, each new home resulted in more property tax revenue because of higher assessments. Those same ongoing higher home prices and assessments have now made property taxes the major component of the city's tax revenue stream.

Although the completion of the Hacienda Business Park and Stoneridge capped Swift's early days in planning, he had the lead planning position and ultimately became the department's director during two decades of rapid commercial and residential growth. Nordstrom and later Sears were added to Stoneridge. Wal-Mart, new five-story buildings by PeopleSoft and now Kohl's Department Store have been added to Hacienda, along with 1,500 housing units in a business park originally designed for office buildings.

Swift worked with regional authorities to design and position the first BART station in Pleasanton, to annex Ruby Hill and lay out the Vineyard Corridor and Vineyard Avenue traffic plan. Also on his shift, specific plans were advanced that now control the development of North Sycamore, the Callippe Preserve golf course and open space, Applied Biosystems on Sunol Boulevard, the Stoneridge Drive plans to allow Standard Pacific to build homes on the east side of Pleasanton, Golden Eagle, the Stoneridge Drive overpass and Rose Pavilion on Santa Rita Road near I-580.

In terms of residential growth, Swift's greatest effort in time and land use negotiations came in 2000 when Greenbriar Homes put an investment group together to buy the 502-acre Bernal property from its owner, the city of San Francisco, for $126 million. San Francisco officials, exasperated by years of failed negotiations with the Pleasanton City Council over its plans to develop the property, set a midnight deadline of Oct. 31, which required hundreds of hours of meetings, public hearings and research in a short period of time, all headed by Swift.

The transaction included a building agreement with Greenbriar to allow the construction of 591 homes and apartments and an office park in return for giving the city of Pleasanton 318 acres of the property free of charge for public uses.

Now, with his last major development as Planning Director under way with the construction of 191 homes and 172 senior apartment at Valley Avenue and Busch Road by Ponderosa Homes, Swift is retiring, his city largely built out. He plans to continue for a few months as a consultant on the revised General Plan now being considered, or until February at the latest, until his successor is named.

Then he'll turn to "honey-do" projects his wife Karen has lined up for him at their Willow Wren Way home, which she said he had promised to tackle if he ever retired. The time has come.

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