Terpstra lets reins of Hillcrest Town Council go

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Hillcrest Town Council chair, Luke Terpstra is retiring after cementing the neighborhood organization’s role as an influential voice in San Diego politics and planning policy during the past five years.

Widely regarded as a unifying figure amid a personality-rich and passion-charged Hillcrest community, Terpstra’s colleagues say he will be missed for his ability to give everyone a voice while also moving the council’s agenda forward.

“We have a lot of different characters and personalities,” says Hillcrest Town Council board member, Mark Zangrando, who is also retiring from the group’s governing body this year. “But it’s a neighborhood meeting and you have to let them have a voice.”

Also key to Terpstra’s efficacy as the nearly decade-old council’s chair is his willingness to attend other organizations’ and governing bodies’ meetings throughout the county – especially when issues of importance to Hillcrest residents are being deliberated.

“He’s just this presence, this face, if there’s a forum or an event; Luke’s always there,” says Zangrando. “So, it’s a big thing that he’s decided to move on.”

Terpstra, who in his day job works as a surgical orthopedic technician, agrees that his leadership style is respectful, yet firm.

“At the end of the day, you want to get things done,” he says.

Looking back, Terpstra recalls one of the first grassroots issues he was called upon by the council’s membership to resolve. An early minefield of controversy that presented ample opportunities to either exacerbate or resolve conflicting interests in Hillcrest centered on one of the neighborhood’s perennial concerns: traffic.

“I started as treasurer for a few months,” Terptsra tells San Diego LGBT Weekly during our interview at a local purveyor of gourmet cupcakes. “Then I took over a subcommittee, the 163 Ramp Committee. We took the disfigured intersection of 10th and Robinson, where the [State Route] 163 ramp comes into the neighborhood.”

By the end of the last decade, increased traffic and a complicated engineering solution at the intersection of Robinson Avenue (a busy, quintessentially Hillcrest two-lane street) with ramps to and from one of the region’s busiest freeways had become a nightmare for drivers.

“It became clear, the solution was to put it back to the way it was,” Terpstra recalls. “It took a couple of years to actually make that happen.”

According to Terpstra, the intersection’s old configuration, designed several decades earlier – though abandoned later, was the best solution for modern traffic congestion.

“Within hours after the city came out with trucks and tractors and returned it to the original design, the bottleneck that had been frustrating people for years was gone,” Terpstra says.

Another Hillcrest Town Council board member, Benny Cartwright, agrees Terpstra’s effectiveness in championing grassroots neighborhood issues, not least among them traffic and parking, will be missed.

“Luke has been a true champion of Hillcrest and has become a beloved figure throughout the neighborhood,” Cartwright tells LGBT Weekly.

Echoing fellow board member, Mark Zangrando’s thoughts, Cartwright says equal to the outgoing chair’s ability to get things done is his ability to do so without alienating opposing voices.

“During his time presiding over the Hillcrest Town Council, he has guided the organization with fairness, kindness, a touch of humor, and never forgot that first and foremost, HTC serves as the voice of the residents,” says Cartwright.

Luke Terpstra has been a Hillcrest resident and homeowner since he and his husband moved here from the lush bohemia of Vashon Island in Washington state in 1995. Terpstra says he’s seen the neighborhood evolve significantly not just since he arrived 21 years ago, but even since his tenure on the town council began in 2009.

“Vashon Island is one of the islands in the Puget Sound; we were just looking for a little sunshine and we found it in San Diego,” he says. “We also wanted to live in a gay neighborhood.”

According to Terpstra, the sunny gayborhood he found is just as warm, but it isn’t as LGBT as it was circa 1995.

“There really has been a big change,” he says. “When we moved here, we moved to Essex Street. One of the things I always like is progressive little neighborhoods with a lot of hippies and gays and free-thinkers, if you will. We found that here.”

Though according to Terpstra, elements of the hippie-gay-freethinker esthetic still thrive in San Diego’s historically LGBT neighborhood, the economics of rising property values inevitably gentrify neighborhoods – even neighborhoods like Hillcrest.

Terpstra’s earthy sensibilities are particularly evident as he describes the changes he’s seen in Hillcrest through the years.

“What we saw coming into the neighborhood, and this is just my observation, is a lot of people who made more money,” he says. “They drove better cars. They upgraded their homes and things like that – kind of a revival. You could call it gentrification, although I had no problem with Hillcrest just the way it was in 1995.”

Mark Zangrando, who previously lived in the Los Angeles area where a municipally administered system of nearly 100 neighborhood councils, each of which receives an annual budget of $37,000, is “blown away” by how much Hillcrest Town Council has accomplished during Terpstra’s two terms as chair despite having almost no operating budget.

“I was active in West Hollywood, which is not actually the City of L.A.,” he says. “But boy, oh boy is it a really different deal with the funding they get and the voting that goes on up there.”

Asked how the Hillcrest Town Council is funded, Terpstra replies without even a hint of humor or frustration:

“We are not,” he says, adding a tidbit about the council’s financial status that reveals just how informal the organization’s structure really is.

“We are just now looking at getting nonprofit status,” Terpstra says. “But it doesn’t seem to be really high on the list of urgent things we need to do.”

Despite its lack of nonprofit status, official sanctioning by the city or a meaningful operating budget, Hillcrest Town Council has earned a high degree of bona fides at City Hall.

“We have over time, because of our longevity and because of the hard work of our board members, activists, founders and neighbors, have become recognized by the city,” Terpstra says.

Backing up his assertion that, regardless of the fact that the City of San Diego doesn’t certify neighborhood councils, the city turned directly to Hillcrest Town Council when it needed advice and leadership to restructure the Uptown Parking Advisory Board.

“Because of an inactive board that really wasn’t doing much, they brought in a consultant,” Terpstra says. “That’s when the city formally recognized Hillcrest Town Council as a leading community member.”

The town council’s annual meeting will be held Tuesday, March 8 at 6:30 p.m. at the Joyce Beers Community Center. In addition to the naming of a new chair, the meeting will also feature a candidate’s forum between District 4 city council candidates, Chris Ward and Anthony Bernal.