Former City Manager Thomas Fletcher Dies

Services will be private for former San Diego City Manager Thomas W. Fletcher, who died Monday at his home in Palo Alto after a long illness. He was 63.

Fletcher was city manager from 1961 to 1966 and steered the city through one of its busiest periods of growth. During his tenure, the city broke ground or arranged financing on several landmark projects, including Mission Bay Park, the metropolitan sewer system, the Community Concourse and San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

“As far as his impact on the profession, he elevated it one higher level,” said San Diego’s current city manager, John Lockwood, who called Fletcher “my mentor.”

When Fletcher was a San Diego deputy city manager, he helped implement a then-innovative program that brought bright young college graduates interested in government administration through City Hall. One of those bright young men was Lockwood.

Annexation Campaign

“I was three days out of college and I was assigned to Fletcher,” Lockwood recalled Tuesday, noting that he had remained friends with Fletcher through the years and last saw him in October. Besides Fletcher’s work on major construction projects, Lockwood said it was Fletcher’s vision that was instrumental in launching the city on an aggressive annexation campaign.

It was under his leadership, for example, that San Diego annexed huge areas of the South Bay, including Otay Mesa and San Ysidro.

“If he was in a room or in a meeting, the environment changed because of his dynamic personality and energy,” Lockwood said. “He was bright to the point of being a genius.”

A native of Portland, Ore., Fletcher built a long and distinguished career in public administration. A 1951 graduate of UC Berkeley, Fletcher entered his lifelong profession that same year when he was hired as assistant to the city manager in San Leandro, a suburb of Oakland.

In 1952 at the age of 28, he was selected as the administrator for the City of Davis, which made him the youngest city manager or administrator at that time in the history of the state.

Three years later, in 1955, he moved on to San Diego, where he was hired as deputy city manager. In 1961, the 37-year-old Fletcher was named city manager, replacing George Bean. Fletcher was the city’s 10th city manager and its youngest ever.

Washington Stint

In 1966, Fletcher resigned to become president of Jack in the Box Franchise Corp. It was his only deviation from public administration and it was short-lived. Less than a year later, he quit the job and eventually ended up in Washington, where he served briefly as deputy assistant secretary for housing assistance in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In September, 1967, his career was dramatically changed when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him deputy mayor of the nation’s capital--a high-profile position in a city beset with serious crime and considered one of the nation’s most difficult jurisdictions to govern.

As LBJ stood by, Fletcher was sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas in ceremonies conducted in the White House East Room. Also sworn in that day was another LBJ appointee, Walter Washington, the city’s new mayor and, most important, the first black chief executive of a major U.S. city.

Back to California

Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968 and the new Administration asked Fletcher to stay on as deputy mayor, which he did. But Fletcher’s heart had remained in California, and when, in 1969, he was offered the job as city manager of San Jose, he jumped at it.

There, he found a city similar to San Diego--a once-sleepy town bursting with new residents, bringing with them new demands and expectations. Perhaps more than in any other place in California at the time, the new politics of growth versus anti-growth were being incubated in San Jose.

In 1972, he surprised the San Jose City Council when he resigned after 28 months on the job to become president of the National Training and Development Service in Washington, an organization involved in retraining city managers and other local government officials.

In 1975, he returned to California for good, becoming an assistant professor at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. He later became director of the Center for Urban and Regional Politics at the SRI Corp. think-tank in Menlo Park, a position he held until 1982. He later helped found the Center for Excellence in Local Government. At the time of his death, Fletcher was vice president of Public Management Consulting Corp., a local government consulting company.

Fletcher was the member of several professional groups and the recipient of many awards throughout his career, but his eldest son, Thomas Fletcher Jr. of San Diego, said his father was proudest of a 1968 citation from the National Academy of Public Administration and the 1985 Distinguished Service Award from the International City Managers Assn.

In addition to Thomas, Fletcher is survived by his wife of 41 years, Margerie; a son, Dean, of Portland; a daughter, Heidi, of Palo Alto, and five grandchildren.

The services will be held in Palo Alto. The family requests that donations be made to the American Diabetes Assn. in Fletcher’s name.