Teacher gives Wal-Mart a lesson in civic activism

By Tom Lochner

CONTRA COSTA TIMES

Sherry LaVars/Times

If it weren't for a luxury housing developer and the world's largest retailer, Steve Kirby might be just an energetic schoolteacher and man-about-Hercules with a million hobbies.

But today Kirby is an anti-Wal-Mart poster boy on the strength of an impassioned speech last month to the Hercules City Council, which invoked eminent domain to strip the retail giant of a lot near the waterfront.

Wal-Mart had wooed the city with promises of jobs and sales taxes. Kirby and Friends of Hercules, the grass-roots group he co-founded, warned that a big-box store would ruin the pedestrian-friendly new neighborhoods west of San Pablo Avenue.

"Wal-Mart will never, ever understand what we want," Kirby told the council. "I say, throw the bums out."

That sound bite, carried on radio, television, the Internet and in newspapers, also made the rounds at Castro Elementary School in El Cerrito, where Kirby has taught since 1983.

"A couple of first-graders came up to me when I was on recess duty and said, 'Hey, Mr. Kirby! Throw the bums out!' and we had a big laugh," he said.

He turned the episode into a writing exercise for his third-graders. "I'm trying to teach them to write certain kinds of essays, to inform and influence opinion. It became a good civics lesson."

Wal-Mart spokesman Kevin Loscotoff, without naming Kirby or Friends of Hercules, described Wal-Mart opponents as out of touch with mainstream Herculeans, who, he said, widely support a Wal-Mart store and are being denied a chance to evaluate the company's latest store proposal.

The Wal-Mart fight is not Kirby's first against a well-heeled applicant. In 2001, a Southern California developer announced plans to build more than 500 houses, a hotel, offices and stores on a wildland tract on the eastern edge of Hercules.

Kirby and some other residents formed the Friends of Franklin Canyon -- which later would evolve into Friends of Hercules -- to fight the development.

They canvassed neighborhoods, set up tables in front of stores, started a Web site, made phone calls and wrote to a growing e-mail tree, warning of an environmental debacle. Eventually, they sponsored a successful ballot initiative that rewrote the city's general plan for the Franklin Canyon area, restricting land use there largely to agriculture and recreation.

The Franklin Canyon area remains undeveloped.

"David brought down Goliath," Jeffra Cook, another founding member of the group, said after the November 2004 vote.

Kirby is not the leader of Friends of Hercules, he said, nor does it have any leaders.

"We're a coalition, a network, a committee," Kirby said. "We're on HOA boards, the chamber (of commerce), the NAACP, youth groups. We're an eclectic group of people.

"We receive information and disseminate information. We're not Republicans or Democrats. We're not that kind of political group."

Kathy Parsons does not know Kirby well on a personal level but, like many other Hercules residents, knows him through Friends of Hercules.

"He is certainly one of my heroes," Parsons said. "I would hate to think what Hercules would be like without him and his vigilance with issues, big and small, in our community."

In 2004, frustrated by what they perceived as waffling by the council over Franklin Canyon, Kirby and his group ran a slate of three candidates. One, Charleen Raines, won.

The slate lacked a campaign manager, so Kirby volunteered

"He just comes through," Raines said, "time after time after time."

Kirby, 56, was born in Berkeley and lived in El Cerrito until 1988. He attended Harding Elementary, Portola Middle and El Cerrito High schools and received a bachelor of arts in psychology and a master's in education administration from UC Berkeley.

He is not the kind of single-minded, single-issue activist who invites the comment, "Get a life."

"Steve is active in so many things, I don't know how he keeps so many balls in the air," Raines said."

Kirby is the past board president of Contra Costa Civic Theatre in El Cerrito, where he acted in four musicals, one of which he also produced. He has been his school's union representative for most of his career and has been a delegate to the National Education Association. He is president of his Bay Pointe Homeowners Association in Hercules and a member of the executive committee of the Sierra Club's West County chapter.

He plays guitar and sings with Scouts of the Cascades, a cowboy trio. He is a scuba diver and a photographer. He plays golf. He is the announcer for the Hercules Fourth of July parade. He develops Web sites and teaches in the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education's academic talent development program. He has been a mentor teacher, master teacher and summer school principal and has a long list of academic awards.

He moved to Hercules in 1988, he said, "to be nearer to the open spaces, hills, hiking areas."

Although he helped block development in Franklin Canyon, elsewhere in the city, hills were flattened, traffic worsened and commercial areas went "south," Kirby said.

A series of city-sponsored neighborhood planning sessions in 2000 culminated in the Hercules Waterfront Plan and the Central Hercules Plan.

The plans favor pedestrian-friendly development such as live-work studios, houses with back alleys for car access, upscale boutiques and restaurants, a Capitol Corridor train station and a ferry terminal.

"I'd like to see it as a real nice destination for people to come to and meet friends, go to the restaurants, have some coffee, read the paper. Maybe an Internet cafe," Kirby said.

Wal-Mart's tract is 171/4 acres roughly midway between San Pablo Avenue and the Bay. A 2003 development agreement limits store size there to 64,000 square feet. Wal-Mart's latest scaled-down application calls for 99,000.

Wal-Mart is reviewing its legal options, Loscotoff has said. He disputed that the 64,000-square-foot figure is binding and added, "How is it fair to the residents of Hercules that they cannot see this project? The fact is residents have not been acquainted with our recent application."

Kirby said he hopes talks between the parties result in a deal in which "we'll buy the land and Wal-Mart will leave."

"We're not afraid that they (the city) are going to have legal fees. We want them to stay the course. We want them to prevail," he said.

"Meanwhile, we can be an inspiration to other cities bullied by Wal-Mart."

Reach Tom Lochner at 510-262-2760 or tlochner@cctimes.com.