 | |
|
| John S. Todd - Father of the ‘Lakewood Plan’  John Sanford Todd, Emeritus City Attorney of Lakewood and best known for establishing the “Lakewood Plan” in 1954 as a model for local government in California, died at age 89 on August 30, 2008.
In noting his passing, Mayor Steve Croft said, "Simply put, without John Todd there would be no city of Lakewood and no Lakewood Plan for other cities to follow."
John Todd’s life story is like Lakewood’s – a story of overcoming obstacles requiring innovative ideas and persistence.
Click for video about John S. Todd Memorial Freeway
With other young men and women of his community, John Todd helped lead a two-year fight to incorporate Lakewood that ended successfully in March 1954. The reason for their success was Todd’s innovative plan to provide municipal services to the new city by contracting with other government agencies and private industry.  Todd’s plan made low-cost and efficient city government possible through contracting.
Todd’s plan has gone down in history as the Lakewood Plan, still followed by Lakewood and more than 125 other California cities and many hundreds more nationwide. John Todd was appointed Lakewood’s first city attorney by a grateful city council in 1954 and continued to serve with skill and deep concern for Lakewood until his retirement in 2004. His 50-year tenure as Lakewood’s city attorney is an unmatched record of public service. We have lost a legend of Lakewood, a pioneer of California’s post-war growth, and an innovator whose contributions to local government still shape America’s cities. He was a good man whose wisdom and vision continue to guide us. | | Biography of John S. Todd Father of the “Lakewood Plan” |
 | |
| | John Todd’s life story is like
Lakewood’s – a story of overcoming obstacles requiring innovative ideas
and persistence.
Lakewood became a city because servicemen returning from World
War II needed a place to live, and
they liked Southern California. For
years, the nation had devoted its resources to building ships, aircraft
and bombs, not houses. But during
the 1950s, construction crews in Lakewood completed as many as
50 homes per day. Left: Lakewood's Pillars of Community display at The Centre at Sycamore Plaza where John Todd is featured as a "Legend of Lakewood." | 
|  |  | | Among the returning servicemen settling in Lakewood was John Todd, who committed the rest of his life to nurturing a new form of city government that would be copied by other hundreds of other new cities in California and nationwide. Download the John S. Todd memoir Download an expanded biography Click for larger photos Click for historic
video segments Click for Lakewood's
community profile Todd, a native of North Dakota, moved to Los Angeles in 1920 with his parents and two sisters when he was six months old.
Following his father’s path to higher education, John earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at USC, and then served his country in World War II as an Air Force munitions specialist in Alaska and Guam.
Todd met Frances McGuire on his way through Seattle to Alaska during the war, and they had married in 1943. (Frances Todd worked as John's stenographer in his law office until John Allan Todd was born in 1953. Michael Arthur Todd was born in 1955.) |  | 
Above: John Todd with former Lakewood Mayor Jacqueline Rynerson in 2003. Circa 1955 photo of John S. Todd and Lakewood's John Sanford Todd Community Center at Mayfair Park.
|  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | After the war, John completed law school at USC and opened a law office in 1949 in Lakewood Village, which was a small cluster of houses and commercial buildings north of Long Beach. He became active with the Lakewood Taxpayers Association, which lobbied the county government to close down some smelly hog farms.
Long Beach officials saw that Lakewood was booming, and they began annexing neighborhoods in the newly built up but still unincorporated county territory.
Many Lakewood residents did not want to be absorbed by Long Beach. Wherever the agents circulated petitions calling for a vote on annexation, Todd and other opponents circulated counter petitions to cancel the election.
It was thought that the young families of Lakewood could not afford to turn their community into an independent city with a large employee work force, but Todd devised a plan that made it possible through the innovative use of contracting for city services with the county and other public agencies and with businesses.
Todd reasoned that Lakewood could continue to receive public services such as law enforcement, fire protection and building inspection from the county through contracts, while entering into agreements with private companies for other services, such as trash collection and street sweeping.
Lakewood voters enthusiastically endorsed the plan in 1954, incorporated Lakewood as a new city, and elected a city council, which then hired John Todd as the first city attorney.
By 1960, there were 18,500 homes in Lakewood. And the city continued to grow, reaching its current size of 9.5 square miles and 27,000 single-family homes and apartments.
Having gained a reputation for innovation, Lakewood was the ideal city to test the use of helicopters in law enforcement. Sheriff's officials approached the city in 1965. When an 18-month test ended, Lakewood picked up the cost of the helicopter program, called Skyknight.
Eventually, six cities served by the Lakewood Sheriff's Station shared the cost of Skyknight, through contacts written by John Todd. Skyknight was the world's first 24-hour helicopter law-enforcement program. It continues to this day as the oldest day-and-night law enforcement helicopter patrol program in the nation.
The mid-1970s was a time of political turmoil for Lakewood during which three council incumbents lost their bids for reelection. John Todd survived several votes of confidence even as some council members maneuvered to fire him as an obstacle to their ambitions. But no one of this new council majority served more than one term. Voters had enough.
Todd held on to his stature as the city's respected senior adviser, and Lakewood returned to form as an innovator in efficient government.
The Lakewood Plan of contract city government worked well. Almost every new city in California copied it. But the older cities resented the upstarts, and Todd was still defending the Lakewood Plan in court more than twenty years after Lakewood adopted it.
As chief legal adviser to the Contract Cities Association, Todd finally resolved the issue in 1977, when an appeals court upheld a law approved by then Governor Ronald Reagan that controlled the allocation of sheriff’s costs to contract cities. Also in 1977, Todd became the legal counsel to the Joint Powers Insurance Authority, a consortium of cities, including Lakewood, which provides insurance to member cities.
In 1978, Lakewood pioneered the regulation of drug paraphernalia sales. At the urging of then Mayor Paul Zeltner, Todd wrote an ordinance prohibiting anyone younger than 18 from entering areas where cigarette papers, roach clips and water pipes were sold. Like adult entertainment businesses before them, drug culture industry businessmen found their match in John Todd.
With his legacy intact, and with five decades of city service behind him, John Todd prepared for retirement in 2004. He planned to close his private practice by the end of 2004 after stepping down as city attorney.
His first wife, Frances, died in 1980, and his second wife, Millie, died in 1990. He moved to Huntington Beach, where he stayed in touch with his five grandchildren: Jason, Bill, Zach, Kerstin and Carley. Bill and Zach were the models for two characters in a children's book their grandfather wrote and published, called "The Goodfellow Boys and the Talking Dinosaurs."
John Todd’s involvement in the civic life of Lakewood and the development of the Lakewood Plan is a record of fifty years of remarkable achievements. He is the “father of the Lakewood Plan” of municipal contracting that empowered more than forty other communities in Los Angeles County to follow Lakewood’s model after 1954.
Throughout his fifty-year career – first as city attorney of Lakewood and later as the city attorney of Pico Rivera – John Todd has been the Lakewood Plan’s most effective defender. Lakewood prevailed, in large measure because he was always there, offering sage advice, practical experience, and his enormous expertise in municipal law.
Every part of Lakewood and its history has been shaped by John Todd’s steady vision of a city that would provide economical local government and responsive public services through contracting. That vision is a powerful one. The innovative ideas that John Todd nurtured in 1954 have given rise to hundreds of other incorporation movements in California and the around the nation. They, too, can call John the “father” of their new cities.
John Todd’s achievements in municipal law have spanned the decades. They have been honored by his colleagues in the legal profession. They have earned the praise of county and state leaders. They have been codified and made legal precedent. They will shape California cities for many more decades to come.
But what is the Todd legacy to us, who make Lakewood our home? Hope for the future. A new form of local government. Solutions to the daunting problems of municipal service delivery. An innovative expansion of the democratic process. The preservation of local values.
These achievements – and more – are the legacy of John Todd, Lakewood’s City Attorney Emeritus, “father of the Lakewood Plan,” champion of local government, a towering figure in California municipal jurisprudence, and enduring Legend of Lakewood. | |
|
| |
| |
