Belvedere environmental leader tapped for California water board

In 2016, Jared Blumenfeld through-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, tracing the Sierra Nevada crest whose snowmelt supplies much of California’s water.

A decade later, the Belvedere environmentalist will help govern that water.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has appointed Blumenfeld to the State Water Resources Control Board, which allocates water rights, protects water quality and works to ensure clean drinking water. The board also sets flow rules on the Russian River and oversees the water-rights and dam-removal process tied to the Eel River’s Potter Valley Project, contested issues in the North Bay.

Before the appointment, Blumenfeld held a range of prominent positions: president of Laurene Powell Jobs’ Waverley Street Foundation, a $3.5 billion climate fund; the U.S. EPA’s western regional administrator; secretary for environmental protection in the Newsom administration; and director of the San Francisco Environment Department under Mayor Willie Brown.

In the late aughts, he was also interim general manager of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, where he helped coordinate the first Outside Lands festival in Golden Gate Park in 2008.

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