Supervisor Mary N. Piepho says her basic philosophy has helped during her first year in office.
“There is only so much we have control over,” she said. She finds that accepting this fact, which she learned in her childhood, helps her to focus on her demanding job as District 3 county supervisor.
Piepho, 44, has detractors who dismiss her as a “Republican princess” because she is the daughter of John Nejedly, a Republican, who represented the area as a state senator from 1969 to 1980. Her supporters, the conservative Republicans who helped get her elected, now expect a lot of her.
She is one of five supervisors in Contra Costa County who meet each Tuesday in Martinez, the county seat, to deal with issues from county employee compensation to appointing members for 186 special districts to settling zoning issues.
Piepho also must contend with a geographically split district, the largest in the county, which reaches from Discovery Bay in the east to Alamo in the west. She has offices in both Danville and in Brentwood. The current district lines were drawn after the 2000 census was reviewed in 2002.
Piepho lives in Discovery Bay with her husband David, a firefighter, and their 8-year-old daughter Mariah. But she was raised in Walnut Creek so she said the district, although physically challenging, all feels like home to her.
Another challenge is the unincorporated community of Alamo, with its many factions, including the Alamo Improvement Association, an organization formed in 1955 to preserve the semi-rural character of Alamo.
One of Piepho’s first actions has been to explore forming a Municipal Advisory Council to govern Alamo. She held a Town Hall meeting in July to explore the option, telling the audience that a MAC would provide unity and one voice for the community.
But AIA members barely suppressed their anger as they responded. One said it sounded like a way to reduce the minority’s voice, and another said he would not like to see the AIA diluted. They also asked why a MAC would be more effective than the current form of government.
Piepho noted that the AIA is a membership-based group that only serves a small percentage of Alamo.
“I want a MAC in Alamo to make the county more accountable,” Piepho said last week. She had met that morning with the Alamo Area Council, which is working on how best to form a MAC.
She also said she thinks incorporation would be good for Alamo. “Absolutely. I said that a year ago,” she noted. “It’s the size of a junior city.”
“The county has not done a good job in Alamo,” she added. “There are a lot of big issues that need a local government leader.”
Piepho noted the problems on Danville Boulevard in the heart of Alamo where vehicles pull out every which way from the myriad driveways of several shopping centers.
“There have been discussions for 20 years on the Alamo signals,” she said, “and things were allowed to continue for whatever reason. We need to move forward.”
Phase I of improvements will add a left-turn lane from southbound Danville Boulevard onto Stone Valley Road. Phase II will include either another signal or a roundabout at Orchard Court to slow down traffic entering Alamo’s commercial area.
“The community as a whole needs to engage in discussions,” Piepho said. “Let’s see how Phase I functions.”
“The signal/roundabout (discussions) created divisions,” she added. “Both sides of the fence have pretty deep voices.”
“Deep voices” also spoke out in protest when she disbanded the membership of two county service area advisory committees last summer: R-7A for parks and recreation, and Zone 36 for lighting and landscaping.
“The action I took was necessary for the success of the committees and the overall benefit of Alamo,” Piepho said. “Unfortunately, many projects had been stalled for years by the prior committees. A few of the former members have tried to debate this issue in print …. They know where their own accountability lies, and I refuse to debate that in public.”
She said she decided it would be best to restructure the entire committees, although only some of the members were responsible for the problems.
“I came in and engaged the Public Works Department to a higher level of accountability, and expected the committee members to engage as well,” she said. “They did not. So, in an effort to make the committees more effective and productive, it was necessary to restructure their appointments.”
She added, “My responsibility is to the betterment of Alamo as a whole, and I will continue in that effort.”
Piepho was elected to office in November 2004 with 58.5 percent of the vote against incumbent Millie Greenberg, former Danville Town Councilwoman, who was appointed to the Board of Supervisors by Gov. Gray Davis in July of that year.
Piepho previously had been elected to serve on the Byron Union School District board, was president of the Los Medanos Community College Foundation Board, and had been a founding member of the Highway 4 Safety Task Force. She had also worked as an aide to Assemblywoman Lynne Leach and as a senior field representative for Assemblyman Guy Houston, both Republicans representing the 15th district.
She said that as a young adult she had not intended to get into politics, despite her father being a senator in Sacramento throughout most of her childhood and teen years.
“I obviously have a history of political influences in my life – my father, working with Lynne Leach,” Piepho said.
She first became active in her community when she was general manager of the Clipper Newspapers and became a board member of the Discovery Bay Chamber of Commerce. “That got me involved in that community,” she recalled. “In the Chamber, you are meeting people and they are encouraging you to do more.” She later ran for the college board and worked with Assemblywoman Leach.
Piepho said she struggled over whether she should get politically involved, despite the encouragement of others. “Mariah was a baby,” she said. “And I wasn’t sure I had the skills.”
Back then, she recalled, the two meetings a month seemed like a handful, something that brought a wry smile last week.
“There are still challenges,” she said, noting her husband’s schedule as a firefighter, working days at a time.
“I hadn’t groomed myself but there was a naturalness to it,” she said. “I had the opportunity to project myself into leadership.”
During her run for supervisor, the Republican Party endorsed her, although the position is non-partisan.
“We do have inherent philosophies that drive our actions,” Piepho said. “My father voted on issues rather than the party platform. Social issues were important to him. He fought for the underdog.” Nejedly is also known for his environmental legislation when he was chairman of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Wildlife.
“The Republicans were instrumental in supporting me but I was supported by a diverse group of folks,” Piepho said. “We are a diverse county. I see myself needing to be open…. We need to work on common ground. If we are too rigid in our political philosophy, it won’t happen.”
“That’s a challenge,” she added. “The conservative Republicans expect a lot out of me.”
She compared politics to marriage, saying that she and her husband don’t agree all the time but they have to work together. “If we don’t, we will doom ourselves,” she said. “We can disagree but we don’t have to be disrespectful.”
During the election, detractors said Piepho was “born with a silver spoon in her mouth.”
“Certain assumptions were made about me that were not true,” she said. Her formal education ended with her graduation from Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek. And her childhood was difficult, she said, with her parents divorcing when she was very young and her father leading the busy life of a state senator.
The struggle taught her that she was not in control of every aspect of her life, and this is the lesson she brings to her District 3 office: “We are only in control so much.”
Piepho’s stated priorities during the election were stopping unmanaged development and easing traffic congestion by improving Highway 4 and Interstate 680; extending BART into East County; and fast-tracking the fourth bore of the Caldecott Tunnel.
She is a member of the Transportation, Water and Infrastructure Committee. “I have created the ‘Three-County Task Force,’ involving Supervisors (Scott) Haggerty, (Leroy) Ornellas and myself representing Alameda, San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties in supporting regional issues of concern,” she said.
“I have made headway with Supervisor Haggerty on the Caldecott Tunnel effort and have his support in it benefiting Alameda County. To date, the Alameda County folks have not seen it as a priority to them, or a benefit to them, so a change in that mentality to recognize the Caldecott as a regional route with regional significance is vital to its ultimate design and development.”
She had pledged, too, that she would target waste and inefficiency in county government, and she has become chairwoman of the Finance Committee.
“I will continue working hard to move projects forward,” she said. “I can’t be afraid to make decisions to move forward.”
