Brandyn Iverson, newly installed mayor of Orinda, takes the helm with a focus on thoughtful development, vibrant downtowns and preserving the city’s charm.
Brandyn Iverson is ready to take the reins.
The city council member was installed as mayor of Orinda during a recent meeting in December.
“The nice thing about Orinda is we mostly have (first-world) problems,” Iverson said. “We almost are never fixing something that is broken.”
As a small general law city, Orinda operates under a council-manager form of government where the authority is concentrated in the elected council, which hires a city manager to implement its policies and a city attorney to serve as chief legal advisor.
The mayor performs various ceremonial duties on behalf of the city and council. Iverson is one of five elected city council members who serve staggered four-year terms and rotate through the mayor’s office. Their service is voluntary with no monetary compensation. She is replacing out-going mayor Latika Malkani.
So, who on earth would sign up for such a job?
Well, Iverson and her four colleagues on the council. She said her interest in economic development and city planning spurred her desire to run for office and devote considerable volunteer time toward public service.
This comes as little surprise considering her exemplary background in these areas, including roles as legal officer, chief operating officer and chief financial officer for various organizations that involve commercial and residential real estate management, development and investment.
On top of that, she holds an undergraduate economics degree from Stanford as well as law and MBA degrees from Northwestern University.
Iverson said she hears residents’ desires to see Orinda more commercially viable, especially where vacancies exist in the downtown theater area and the village side of town.
“Residents are tired of the empty storefronts,” she noted.
She said the city is doing what it can to accommodate the Texas-based owners of the Theatre Square mixed use development. It also has been trying to shed its lingering reputation for not being business-friendly by listening to business owners more than ever before, attempting to implement policies that encourage new business and expansion, she said.
“Orinda has been so averse to growth (that) it has been uniquely passed over,” she said.
Of course, strong businesses translate into higher revenue, and “we need sales taxes” to make other improvements to city parks and infrastructure. “Our community park is ready for an upgrade (but) you have to invest” in such projects to make them a reality.
The other half of the development coin is residential and multi-family home building.
One could characterize her position as pro-development but with a specific eye on scope, quality and scale that enhances the town’s natural beauty and charm, not big development for development’s sake.
Iverson said that the council took the appropriate stance to adopt a city housing element, paving the way for compliance with a controversial Sacramento directive that mandates cities to earmark pre-approved zoning for increased housing development.
The measures will rezone parts of the city to allow Orinda to build more multifamily housing to meet the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) guidelines.
The plan should assure that Orinda avoids the so-called “Builder’s Remedy,” which would have allowed developers to bypass Orinda’s zoning regulations and attempts to mitigate fire dangers and transportation issues.
Without the amendments, the city would have lost much of its oversight over future development, wreaking havoc with critical city planning functions.
“We avoided some of the worst laws that we could,” Iverson said. Looking at the arduous process with a glass half-full, Iverson said that “the pressure from the state to create housing might give us an opportunity to get some of the development that we want. (The plan) is still being implemented in a very Orinda way,” she said.
“I do want to see apartments, condos and townhouses. There is a lot of product diversity that we don’t have and a few projects will be built,” she said. “We can have our natural beauty, great schools and smaller homes.”
To be sure, there are myriad issues facing the city beyond development and planning.
Iverson applauded the council’s decision to install a new welcome sign behind the Orinda Theatre facing Moraga Way at Brookwood. The Art in Public Places committee would have preferred to have an original piece of commissioned art in that location, but the city council decided to go with a more traditional “budget-friendly” approach, investing $60,000 in a new sign, she said.
“We feel that the city deserves to have an attractive sign in that location, and we believe that our citizens deserve something nicer than the state PG&E left the area in when they removed tall trees that had masked the backside of Theater Square,” Iverson said.
Another third-rail issue confronting the council is private roads.
The council is aware that the large percentage of private roads in Orinda has been a controversial issue going back many years, which is why, at the initiative of councilmember Darlene Gee, the council formed the infrastructure subcommittee to get quality data on the ownership and condition of those private roads.
The council recently finished a survey of private road owners to understand their priorities and concerns so that all parties could engage in a meaningful way on this issue.
“The issues around private roads in Orinda are as varied as the location, conditions and owners of those roads, which is why we are addressing them in a data-driven and structured way, trying to go beyond some of the generalized arguments in the past that have proven to be unnecessarily divisive,” Iverson said.
Development, planning, housing, roads and retail are all issues facing cities big and small, and Iverson is optimistic that the council is on the right track.
“I love our little town,” she said. “And we don’t want to screw it up.”
