William Marshall Kier

William Marshall Kier

October 5, 1935 - November 14, 2024

Bill Kier was born in Berkeley, CA in October, 1935 and spent his little-boy years on his parents’ ranch east of Walnut Creek, on the southwest toe of Mount Diablo where, with his big brother, Sam, the boys spent a good deal of time roaming and camping in the nearby foothills when they weren’t fishing or playing in Walnut Creek, which ran right behind their grandparents’ Walnut Creek hotel, the Colonial Inn.

 In 1946 Bill’s father acquired an interest in a steel fabricating business in Roseville, California and the family relocated to Orangevale, in eastern Sacramento County. Bill attended San Juan Union High School, where he served as class president, played basketball, football, and ran track. He graduated in 1953 and began studies at the University of California, Berkeley that fall. He would move on to the University of California, Davis and, finally graduate in 1958, with a degree in the biological sciences, from Sacramento State University.

 Bill worked in heavy construction to pay for college, beginning with pouring concrete on the Folsom Dam project (where he was hit on the head by an errant piece of steel and knocked unconscious while 80 feet in the air) and on a drilling crew creating the tunnel outlet for Cherry Valley Dam, a unit of the City of San Francisco’s high Sierra waterworks. In his final college summer, 1957, however, Bill found work as a scientific aide on the State of California’s Department of Fish and Game’s study of striped bass and sturgeon life histories in the Sacramento-San Joaquin rivers Delta.

 This 1957 summer experience would then shape Bill’s life’s work – the science and policy surrounding the conservation and restoration of fish and wildlife.

Bill and Helen Douarin, who he met at Sacramento City College in 1954, were married in 1957 at Trinity Church in Folsom (which Bill had attended as a boy in Orangevale). Bill and Helen were blessed over the next four years with son Rob and daughters Kathryn and Mary Claire.

After a stint as a chemist at Aerojet-General’s Rancho Cordova liquid rocket plant (State of California hiring had been politically ‘frozen’), Bill was hired in 1959 by the State Department of Fish and Game, where he became a district biologist and deputy warden in the Department’s 14-county foothills-northern Sierra region, fending off damage as best he could to the region’s streams and aquatic life during a period of feverish development of dams, powerhouses, freeways and more in California. Bill led development of scientific methods with which to determine how much streamflow need be left undisturbed in streams to protect public trust resources. He was next responsible, as a Fish and Game biologist, for advising the State Department of Water Resources on how to protect and improve fish and wildlife in the development of the State Water Project’s Oroville Dam Complex (one result of such advice is the 12,000-acre Oroville State Wildlife Area)

In 1964 Bill traded in his khaki uniform and State Jeep for a suit and a desk, first as the new State Natural Resources Agency’s water policy coordinator and then as chief of Fish and Game’s water projects branch in its downtown Sacramento headquarters.

In 1967 Bill left the State administration to become the California State Senate’s Natural Resources Committee (and, in time, consultant to the Senate committees on Fish and Game and Water Resources, as well). In 1970 Bill was ‘kicked upstairs’ to join the fledgling State Senate Office of Research and Policy Development as the Office’s environmental policy specialist. Two years later he became the Office’s director, a position he held for the next nine years.

Because of California’s ranking among the states, invitations literally rain down upon California Senate and Assembly Members to attend conferences, sit on nationwide committees, join in overseas learning trips, etc. California legislators are quick to accept such offers, but quite often are then reined in by their legislative schedules (if not their wives) – and it became standard procedure to task Bill with covering such conferences, committees, and overseas travel – a time of enormous professional growth for Bill. Bill gave a paper on California’s growing use of remote sensing at a NASA conference in Houston in 1974 – and represented the California Senate in 1977 on a learning tour of Germany’s innovative environmental and natural resources management policies and programs.

In this same late-1960s to mid-1970s period, Bill became heavily involved in Sacramento County politics, part of a ‘throw the rascals out’ movement triggered by a scathing assessment of Sacramento County’s longtime, developer-controlled political elite conducted by ‘Nader’s Raiders’. Bill chaired the Sacramento County Recreation and Park Commission, 1971-1975, a position from which he engaged in end-to-end land-use battles, including that over creation of Stonelake, a proposed 50,000-population planned community ten miles south of the Capitol in the headwaters of the Cosumnes River. The ‘Stonelake’ site is now the Stone Lake National Wildlife Refuge.

As Bill gained status among California’s legislative staff he became increasingly assertive crafting and managing legislation of his own initiation, including a State policy on wetlands protection (Keene-Nejedly California Wetlands Preservation Act), creation of a state trails and hostels system (Collier-Keene State Hostels Facilities Act) and more.

In the late 1970s Bill joined forces with State Senator Nick Petris  and young researchers from the University of California in developing legislation, and funding, with which to aggressively advance development of integrated pest management (IPM) -- the Senator because of his concern for agricultural worker safety and Bill largely because of his unrelenting determination to protect the state’s aquatic ecosystems.

The deep dive into IPM set the stage for Bill’s exit from his State Senate staffing career. After a dozen years of the Senate being led by ‘pro-environment’ Senators, a wave of voter conservatism, unleashed by Proposition 13 in 1978, ushered in new, lobbyist-friendly Senate leadership. At the request of the Chevron Corp. lobbyist (Chevron being a major pesticide producer) Bill was fired by the new State Senate leadership in March 1983, after 16 years of what some might regard as valuable public service.

At this point, a less-than-clearheaded Bill (there was a severe economic recession going on) bought into historic Strawberry Lodge on Highway 50 high in the Sierra as managing partner, an experience into which he dragged Helen, Rob and Mary Claire and from which he was downright lucky to have exited unscathed in 1986.

Bill and Helen relocated to Mill Valley, in Marin County, in March, 1986 so that Bill could help an old pal, Bill Davoren, launch an environmental non-profit, The Bay Institute of San Francisco, to fight for the water quantity and quality needed to protect the public trust resources (read ‘salmon’ so far as Bill was concerned) of the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary, the most valuable estuary on the Pacific coasts of North or South America.

This placement of Bill back in conservation action led to requests for his help with a number of other challenges. Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals was officially launched in 1987 and soon thereafter was contracted by the federal government to prepare a plan for the restoration of salmon resources of the 16,000 square-mile Klamath River watershed, what proved the initial steps toward this year’s removal of four dams on the Klamath. (See that 1991 Kier Associates Klamath Plan here)

The Kier Associates team developed a computer ‘platform’ (before that term became common) with which to capture, synthesize and manage data, including historic documents, pertaining to salmon watershed condition, habitat restoration needs, restoration progress and more. The ‘Klamath Resource Information System –or ‘KRIS’, named for the watershed in which the initial project was developed, took off like a rocket. The Kier team was contracted to develop KRIS projects up and down the Pacific Coast including the Columbia River basin, and the historic Gulf of Maine salmon watersheds.

In 1994 Bill went down to Australia, at their request, to help the small-boat commercial fishermen deal with coastal habitat destruction issues driven by an out-of-control federal flood-control agency. That same year he took Helen with him to France’s upper Loire River to assess, for a river conservation non-profit, SOS Loire Vivante, the government’s proposed salmon-ladder facilities for a dam that fortunately never got built. This work gave Bill a chance to take Helen on to Brittany to visit Plouézec, the village her great-grandfather, François Marie Douarin, sailed from as an ordinary seaman in the1850s, to reach California.

Bill was summoned back to Australia in 2000 to explain to a Sydney-based conference what was going on with consideration in the western US re removal of century-old dams – the Aussies were ruminating about perhaps having over-dammed the Murray-Darling watershed. Bill took Helen on this run ‘Down Under’, and they took time to travel/savor much of eastern Australia together.

Kier Associates experienced a bit a slump in the mid-2000s, enough to prompt Bill and Helen to leave pricey Marin County and relocate to Humboldt County – to Blue Lake, the same village Helen’s great-grandparents, the Douarins, had helped settle in the 19th century.

 Business revived and so did Bill’s local-politics itch. Bill became focused on how to revive the railroad right-of-way between Arcata and Blue Lake as a multipurpose trail and, as was his wont, Bill ended up getting the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors to appoint him to the board of directors of the North Coast Railroad Authority, the agency which controlled the once-productive rail route between San Francisco Bay and Humbolt Bay. Bill endured NCRA meetings scattered up and down North Coast counties concerned with restoring the 100-year-old rail service knowing all the while that was a fool’s errand – the coast mountains are ‘in a rush to get to the sea’ – the maintenance of such a railroad these days is simply unaffordable – Bill’s only interest in the NCRA/its defunct rail line was hanging onto the right of way for a potential public multipurpose trail.

The NRCA board has, mercifully, been put out of its misery and a new State agency, the Great Redwood Trail Agency has replaced it. 

Bill lost his Helen in 2020, but, as he said, he couldn’t find the ‘off button’ – Kier Associates and its work for the Klamath River Tribes, State and federal natural resources agencies and more continued apace.

When dad sent this bio (above) to his friend, mentee, fellow water warrior and pen pal, Patty Schifferle, she wrote him an email and told him she thought he’d left out the mentor / friendship side of his life in the bio, to which he responded:

Thank you for your fond recollections. Helen was always welcoming, particularly to Capitol folks. She was raised that way. Her father, Thad Douarin, was the CHP Commissioner’s right-hand man during a major CA highway crisis – ex-GIs driving repurposed, deteriorating war surplus ‘logging’ trucks during CA’s post-WW II timber boom/ a high rate of related fatal North Coast highway crashes. Thad regularly had North Coast legislators ---most of whom he’d known from his former Humboldt County life (where he’d been, among other things, a CHP patrol officer and Sgt.) home for drinks and dinner (this when the then-part-time Legislature camped in cheap downtown hotels on their per diems). 

You probably did meet the family around the dinner table (as did many of the Capitol folk Bill worked with...Bill would call Helen and ask if it’d be okay to bring whatever senator, assemblymember, lobbyist, or intern home for dinner, she always agreed. We [Bill’s family] experienced many a strategy session for whatever water or salmon conservation plans they were hatching around that table).

What came off as my tendency toward mentorship was driven largely by my natural laziness – why try to corral all that’s going on in the Capitol yourself if you can have a half-dozen mentees rounding up the info/sharing it with you? I can remember during particularly hectic times, with thick draft bills and agency reports flying, how I’d often start the day swinging by my old friend Fred Styles’ desk at the Assembly Office of Research, knowing that Fred would have read it all and was ready to share his (keen) findings/ thoughts with me. I’d head immediately to the Capitol after my sessions with Fred and start spreading (our) advice around.

As for the innkeeping escapade I’ve always thought the photo (below) spoke volumes. Helen with her usual smile, thinking ‘you got us in this mess, Bill, you’ve got to get us the hell out of it’. 

‘Best,

Bill

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