By Libby Tyler, FAICP, Northern Director-Elect, July 6, 2024
This past Spring, Scott Davidson, AICP, a remarkable local planner, mentor, and friend, passed away. I had the honor and pleasure of working with Scott at MIG, where he was a Principal and leader of the Contract and Professional Services team for the past several years. He was a brilliant, hard-working planner who had a deep understanding of the planning process and conducted his practice with integrity, skill, emotional intelligence, and great good humor, achieving superlative outcomes. He passed away on March 11, 2024.
Scott received his degree in Environmental Policy Analysis and Planning from UC Davis in 1987. After graduation, he worked as the planning services coordinator for Marin County, then as an independent consultant serving as acting planning manager for the City of Pinole, and later as a principal with MIG in Berkeley. While with MIG, his major projects included the coordinator of the Sonoma County Cannabis Program, the development of the Morgan Hill Park Master Plan and the Zacharias Annexation and Master Plan in Patterson, and a sewer capacity study for the City of El Cerrito. Scott was an APA California-Northern volunteer serving as Advertising Director.
I started with MIG as a contract planner in 2019, joining a talented team of veteran part-timers like me, along with emerging planners eager to learn from their assigned projects. At the time, a major part of our workload involved processing a backlog of dozens of cannabis projects in Sonoma County, along with a variety of current development projects, while the County staff worked to recover from post-fire recovery and rebuilding. Scott was an inspirational team leader, keeping us organized, building upon individual strengths, providing mentorship, and pivoting to keep us on track. It was a tremendous pleasure to work with him; I was so impressed with his abilities and his commitment to our work. Like everyone who has known Scott, his warm personality and wise and sensitive approach to work and life made a deep impression on me.
In 2019, Scott assigned me to San Pablo to serve as Interim Planning Manager. He encouraged me in the posting and told me what a great place it was to work. Amidst the budget uncertainties during the early days of COVID, I jumped ship to become a regular staffer at San Pablo. Scott was very gracious about this, and we continued to stay in touch during the COVID shutdown. We talked about his love of music as a regular attendee of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and the wonderful backcountry trips he would take.
It was just about 18 months ago that I learned that Scott had been diagnosed with a relatively fast-acting form of ALS. This was devastating news to his family, friends, and the community of planners. Even during his illness, he remained a good friend and was steadfast in his love and support for his family and friends.
I attended Scott’s gathering on March 16, 2024, at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakland. It was a standing-room-only, beautiful, and diverse crowd of Scott’s family, longtime friends, neighbors, and associates from his community in Oakland, and a great show of planners from MIG and elsewhere. There was so much more to Scott than any of us could have known. The event was simply breathtaking in the celebration of this outstanding friend, Lacrosse player, nature lover, father, son, brother, uncle, and urban planner.
To memorialize Scott as he wished, please consider donating to the ALS Foundation, the Oakland Youth Lacrosse Club, or the Options Recovery Services.
About the Author
Libby is the planning manager at the City of San Pablo. Previously a senior project manager at MIG, Tyler was also a consulting planner in the Bay Area and adjunct lecturer at the University of Illinois. Before that, she was the community development director for Urbana, Illinois, 2000-2017. She holds a PhD in regional planning from the University of Illinois, a master of landscape architecture in environmental planning from UC Berkeley, and a BA in environmental conservation from the University of Colorado Boulder. A resident of Albany, CA, Tyler has been Northern Section Ethics Director since 2018 and Vice Chair of the American Planning Association’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee since January 2020.