Del Carlo, Larry: Moscone's inclusivity

Abstract

Larry Del Carlo: When George Moscone got elected and began to put his administration together he was very much open to community opinion, recommendations from community, and so on about which people could be placed in certain jobs. He became much more inclusive in that sense. I think he was more patient with the tactics that were being used and the strategies that were being used in communities and understood them better, and was able to work with it in a different way rather than trying to co-opt people, he became more inclusive with communities. If you look at city government and the transition between the Alioto administration and the Moscone administration, you’ll find that there were a lot more community leaders and just folks that were working in community organizations included in the decision-making process whether it be on commissions or advisory committees, part of the administration, working in city departments and so on. I think George Moscone had more of a willingness for institutional change, and it wasn’t about trying to deal with these people anymore. It was about how can we work together approach. I remember one of the first appointments he made, our family was very, very proud that my mom was appointed to the Fire Commission, and that happened on every commission. He appointed people that had been community activists, that had been seen as community leaders, that weren’t the typical appointments that you would have seen in the Alioto administration, the downtown folks, the Fisherman’s Wharf folks. The establishment folks were the folks who were on commissions, and that was completely changed during the Moscone administration. I remember how proud a lot of us were in a lot of the different communities that folks that we knew could now be commissioners. It was just kind of a new day for us. All of a sudden we’re part of a city government when we never had been before, and we had a whole new level of access because of that. If we needed to discuss a problem, we knew we could go there and didn’t necessarily have to make a deal, but we can go to whoever it was, the department head or the Mayor or a member of the Board of Supervisors, and strategize together to work out a problem that was important to the community whether it be a crime issue or a tenant’s right issue. Whatever the issue was we were able to deal with it in a much different way in the Moscone administration than the Alioto.

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Type

Interview

Date Original

2011-04-20

Relation

The Moscone oral history interviews are part of the George Moscone Collection, MSS 328.

Contributing Institution

Holt-Atherton Special Collections and Archives, University of the Pacific Library

Rights Information

To view additional information on copyright and related rights of this item, such as to purchase copies of images and/or obtain permission to publish them, click here to view the Holt-Atherton Special Collections policies.

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