Some 14 years ago, when I was an occasional columnist for this news outlet, I wrote an ode to Bob Field, a conservative Republican who became my hero for eschewing mindless partisanship in order to defend a liberal candidate because she was the best person to extend the environmental protection that he supported. In these frantically hyperpartisan times, Steve Lavagnino is even more heroic.
Steve usually votes for oil and gas projects because he supports the economic value of those jobs, and because he believes that we enviros are hypocrites for trying to kill these projects even while many of us continue to rely on fossil fuels. On November 4, confronted with the choice of voting to approve the transfer of permits from Exxon to Sable Offshore to operate the Las Flores pipeline, Steve did a Bob Field. He embraced facts over the politics of the moment. He sided with his environmental/liberal colleagues on the Board of Supervisors to vote against a company whose record of violations and financial misconduct were simply too blatant to disregard. That is, if you aren’t a hyperpartisan person who disregard facts that are inconvenient for your ideology.
A few hours later I found myself in the audience as public intellectual and avowed liberal Ezra Klein spoke about engaging openly with people you disagree with rather than insisting on fitting them into square or round holes according to your sense of who they are. That’s what Steve did today. He didn’t fit himself into a neat ideological hole. He did what we all need to be doing: He looked at the facts, he looked at the law, he considered what’s best for his community, he spoke honestly, and he voted accordingly.
We need more Steve Lavagninos. Desperately.
