Mission Accomplished: Bill Brand did what he came to do. But his final message was that the fight for the Redondo waterfront is not over

by Mark McDermott

Mayor Bill Brand knew the finish line was approaching.

He’d had a frank conversation with a palliative care doctor not long after being diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer in both his brain and lungs. Brand was an engineer and thought like one, both in his unlikely political career and in his approach to cancer. He wanted facts.

“Look,” Brand asked the doctor. “Just between you and me…if this were you, what would you be thinking —  how long do you got?” 

“Well, Bill, optimistically, I’d say about four or five years,” the doctor said. “Pessimistically, I’d say a good six to nine months.” 

That conversation occurred in June 2019. In the four years and six months that followed, Brand brought the same tenacity to his fight with cancer that he displayed in his two decade-long battle fending off big development on the Redondo Waterfront: first as a citizen activist who helped stir a movement, then as councilman often reviled by his more pro-development colleagues, and finally as a mayor who became more than a mayor, but a regional leader. It is often said that in the labyrinthian American medical system, a patient must learn to be his or her own advocate. Brand fiercely applied himself to this task. He didn’t rely on any one doctor or medical system, but availed himself of the best of each, ranging from Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles to the renowned MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He went through a wild array of clinical trials and treatments. When one treatment ceased to work, he found another, and started all over.

From the outset, Brand wasn’t afraid of dying.

“I was good with it,” Brand said in a 2022 interview. “You know, if this was going to be the end of my life, I’d had such a big, full life, and everybody dies of something at some point. I was 61 years old, I really didn’t have a lot to complain about. So if this was going to be my destiny, I was okay with it. What I was not okay with was leaving Deirdre.” 

Brand had found the love of his life late, in 2015. He and Deirdre married in 2017. She’d lost her previous partner to cancer. Brand didn’t want her to go through that kind of loss again.

“She is my life force,” he said.

Brand approached cancer with remarkable aplomb. He never once voiced a complaint about his diagnosis, even to those closest to him. In fact, he expressed gratitude . In an interview two years ago, Brand spoke of what his experience with cancer had given him. 

“I could write a book about the blessings of cancer,” Brand said. “It refocuses your priorities to a more grounded place of eternal meaning than day-to-day struggles we get immersed in that aren’t as meaningful as they appear to be at the time. You find out who really loves you, who’s really there for you, and you bond closer with those people than you ever had before. Strong bonds get stronger, and the depth of relationships gets deeper, something never would have happened, frankly, without this sort of crisis in your life. So you could say I’ve grown closer to many people and the love is stronger from others in ways that I never would have experienced had I not been facing this tough medical situation. It could not end well for me sooner rather than later, so cancer makes you think of the more meaningful things in life, the present moment, the simple things in life that often get lost when you are trying to make a buck or advance a cause or get a new car or more toys. Experiences and relationships become a lot more important than things.” 

In the latter part of last year, his latest round of treatments stopped working. There was a spot available in yet another clinical trial. But Brand foresaw only further diminishment of his quality of life. He was tired of all the tests, drugs, and endless journeys to hospitals. He wanted to dictate the terms of his remaining days.

“He just sat me down,” his wife, Deirdre, recalled. “He said, ‘I want time to say goodbye. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life getting poked and prodded and hoping that I’ll live another three months. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and with the people I love.’”

In conversations with his closest friends he acknowledged that the fight was almost over.

Jim Light, his compatriot for over 20 years in the battle against big development in Redondo, realized the end was near when Brand called him over the holidays. One of their objectives since the beginning had been to rid the waterfront of the AES power plant, and on December 31, a significant step towards that end was going to occur. The power plant was going to be officially retired. What had been regarded by many as a pipe dream when Brand and Light first started working towards this goal in 2008 was coming to fruition. AES was going to power down for the last time as the year came to an end.

City Attorney Mike Webb and Bill Brand throwing the ceremonial off switch during the plant’s decomissioning celebration on New Year’s Eve 2023. Joining the two are (from left) King Harbor Commissioner Jim Light, Hermosa Council Member Ray Jackson, State Senator Ben Allen, State Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, Hermosa Beach Mayor Pro Tem Dean Francois, and Supervisor Holly Mitchell representative Jessalyn Waldon. Photo by Kevin Cody

Light was in Florida, celebrating Christmas with his in-laws, and wasn’t going to be able to make the “switching off” ceremony. Brand knew this but called to ask Light to change his plans.

“I’m not one who likes the limelight that much, so it didn’t hurt me not to be at that ceremony,” Light said. “But he called me up and asked me if I could be there, to emcee it and maybe even speak his part. Because he wasn’t sure if he could do it.”

Light had watched his friend decline in recent months. He knew what Brand was telling him. He booked a flight.

December 31 was a chilly, overcast day, but on the hill above the AES smoke stacks, a crowd gathered to commemorate the retirement of the power plant. Light did indeed emcee. But Bill Brand rose to the occasion. He spoke for himself. He acknowledged that this was an historic day, and that a lot of work had occurred to make it happen. His larger message, though, was that the work was not done.

“After 20 years of public drama: initiatives, ballots… the public has won,” Brand told the crowd. “After this, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We do know this power plant is closing. There will be something better if the public stays engaged.”

He quoted Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

“The power plant shutdown is obviously a major milestone,” Light said. “But it’s not the end, and that was the big thing he wanted to hammer home. It’s the first step, or the next step, in the fight.”

The larger vision is to restore the land on which the AES power plant sits to its native habitat, which a century ago was a salt lake and wetlands; and establish it as one of the most significant parks in the region. The park also would fit into a larger vision of a revitalized Redondo Beach waterfront, one that prioritizes recreational uses over large commercial and residential development.

It was an audacious vision when it first emerged two decades ago. It has felt less audacious and more like the inevitable arc of history with each successive victory – an accumulation, year after year, of electoral, legal, and even moral victories, each step along the way making the vision a more likely reality. The retirement of the power plant, however, was a very large domino. As it fell, Brand, as unrelenting as he had always been, appeared to finally allow himself a sigh of relief.

Councilperson Nils Nehrenheim received a call from the mayor the very next day. He was surprised, not by the call itself, but the change he sensed in Brand.

“We talked at length, for 20 minutes or a half hour, and he was just reminiscing on all the things that got done,” Nehrenheim said. “And I could just tell, ‘Okay, he’s looking backward, instead of looking forward. This is a major change in his viewpoint.’ It wasn’t like Bill to do something like that. He was always looking forward.”

Nehrenheim also understood that the phone call was also about something besides looking back. Brand was still looking ahead, but into a future in which others would need to carry the vision forward, without him.

“I think the best way for me to describe it is when he realized that there was nothing else that he needed to do, and that he could leave things in other people’s hands. He just gave himself the authority to relax and say, ‘I’m not going to fight anything anymore,’” Nehrenheim said. “…. I can honestly say that after Bill threw that proverbial off switch at the power plant at the end of the year, he just sat back and said, ‘I’m done. I accomplished it. I am going to let other people take it from here.’”

Brand had always been a strapping, athletic man, a dedicated surfer and waterman whose reverence for the natural world came from a lifetime of adventuring in the watery parts of the world. In that final public appearance on December 31, however, the ravages of his battle with cancer revealed a growing frailty.

Last Friday morning, Brand asked Light and Nehrenheim to come see him at his home. He’d been bedridden for four days. He’d been saying his goodbyes to family members and friends, but this was more than a farewell. He wanted to check in one last time.

“Is there anything else I need to do as mayor?” he asked.

“No, Bill. You are good,” Nehrenheim told him.

His relentlessness was intact, even as everything else was nearly gone.

“He’s just barely making it through and he’s still thinking, ‘Is there anything else I need to finish before I leave?’” Nehrenheim recalled. “We kept telling him, ‘No, no, no. You are good.’ And he just sat there and closed his eyes, like, ‘Okay, I’m good. I am at rest. I am ready.’”

Later that night, at home with Deirdre, Brand slipped peacefully away.

“He smiled,” she said. “He was happy.”

Redondo Beach Mayor Bill Brand leads the Redondo Union High School Marching Band during the opening ceremony of the inaugural Swim the Avenues in 2018. Brand organized the race to showcase Redondo Beach as an open ocean venue for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Photo by Kevin Cody

Heart of the City

He was six years old and already had a knack for doing unexpected things in unlikely ways. 

Bill Brand and his family lived in Dallas, Texas, and spent summers down in their “bay house” outside Galveston. Bill noticed that the giant oil supertankers that passed offshore created waves that would come all the way to shore. He found a piece of styrofoam and had an idea. He was going to surf the Gulf of Mexico.  

“I’d see the ship coming, run down to shore and wait by myself for the boat wakes to come in,” Brand said in a 2020 interview. “That’s how I got into riding waves.” 

Those first waves changed the trajectory his life might otherwise have taken, while his creative use of a piece of Styrofoam was a harbinger of a knack he would always have for for using whatever resources were at hand towards audacious ends.

A couple of years later, in 1966, his family moved to Southern California. He retained a vivid memory for the rest of his life of riding down Harbor Drive in Redondo Beach in the family’s red 1960 Chrysler New Yorker station wagon. 

“I’m hanging out the window of the station wagon going, ‘We’re going to live here?” he recalled. “I was eight years old.” 

They stayed two weeks at the Portofino Inn. “Pretty much all I did was go to the Seaside Lagoon,” Brand said. “Loved that place. Still do.” 

This love would animate him for the next 57 years. Brand grew up in Palos Verdes, but moved to Redondo Beach as soon as he was able, in 1980, when he was 21. He would obtain his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Long Beach State, and later his MBA from USC, but he always circled back to Redondo Beach. Despite his education, he spent most of his working life as a crew chief for American Airlines. It enabled him to pursue his insatiable curiosity about the world and his never-ending yearning for adventure. He liked nothing more than going on  solo surf trips, which included sojourns to Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, France, Ireland, Mexico, Barbados, Australia, the Dominican Republic, Fiji, and New Zealand. 

But Redondo always remained home base. And he never stopped feeling like that eight-year-old kid on Harbor Drive, lucky just to be in this place.

“That gratitude never left him,” said LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn, a longtime political ally who became a close friend. “He still couldn’t believe he got to live there. And by golly, he was going to protect that vision, that way of life, that paradise. It’s so easily lost to corporate greed, but he was not going to let that happen.”

His political career began by accident. One night in late 2001, while randomly tuning into the community television station, Brand saw what he perceived as a threat to his adopted hometown. The Heart of the City plan had been in process for two years, and was about to be approved by the Planning Commission. The plan proposed downsizing the AES power plant, but in doing so AES would get into the real estate game – the plan allowed for up to 2,998 residential units on the 52-acre plant site, while a “village core” across the street in King Harbor would be zoned for as much as 657,000 sq. ft. of commercial development.

Brand was aghast, and he wasn’t alone. Despite widespread public opposition, the commission unanimously approved the Heart of the City. In  early 2002 the City Council likewise voted unanimously in favor of the plan. Resident Chris Cagle wrote a letter to the editor expressing his intention to organize a drive against the plan and included his phone number. Brand, along with dozens of other residents, called Cagle.

The movement against the Heart of the City gathered more than 10,000 signatures within three weeks, and forced the Council to rescind the zoning and AES to halt its plans. That battle turned out to be the beginning of a war that included several ballot measures and lawsuits. More than a decade after the defeat of the Heart of the City, another large proposed commercial development in King Harbor was defeated.

Every attempt at development was turned back, while support for a park at the AES site has simultaneously grown to include not only a majority of Redondo residents but regional and state leaders. Brand would serve two terms on the council and was in the midst of his second term as mayor when he died.

Everybody around him marveled at his ability to still tend to his responsibilities as mayor all through his battle with cancer.

“If it were me, as soon as I got that prognosis I would have resigned as mayor and just gone to Mexico to live out the rest of my life,” Light said. “He wanted to stay in the fight, which I think is something that kept him going.”

He was at the center of every fight and paid a personal price. A lawsuit that had its origins with the latest spurned developer, CenterCal, sought to personally bankrupt Brand. The suit, which was ongoing since 2017, was only defeated weeks before his passing.

Brand had no regrets. Ever since that first ride down Harbor Drive, he had loved the Redondo waterfront — both its ramshackle small town feel and the fact that it was built first and foremost for recreation rather than for big dollar commercial attractions. It was a place for community, and for those who loved the water, like himself.

Councilperson Todd Loewenstein, in a 2020 interview, credited Brand with preserving this character.

“I think the city owes a debt of gratitude to Bill Brand,” Loewenstein said. “If you like living here because of its small town feel on the water next to a major megalopolis, Bill is the key reason for that still being the case.” 

“The Heart of the City turned out to be a mirage,” said Frank Angel, a land use attorney who worked with Brand and Light, crafting initiatives and defending their cause in court. “Bill Brand is the real heart of the city.” 

Mayor Bill Brand in 2015 at the peak of his efforts to shut down the Redondo Beach AES Power Plant. Photo by Brad Jacobson

Up the coast

The second to last time Brand rose from his bed and walked by his own power, he startled his wife, Deirdre.

They were in some ways opposites. She is a former environmental manager for the Metropolitan Water District. She likes to plan. He’d tell her, “If you want to know what I’m doing tomorrow, ask me tomorrow.” He called her “a calendar filler-upper.” They drove each other crazy, in a good way. “We are learning from each other,” Brand said in one interview.  

But on this day, with the end of his life approaching, Brand was the one with a plan. He could barely stand, but somehow, he’d risen from bed, and walked down the stairs.

“Pull the car out front of the house,” he said.

Deirdre was flabbergasted. But she went outside, pulled the car up, and helped him to it.

“What are we doing?” she asked him.

“Drive me up the coast,” Brand said. “Drive me up the coast one last time.”

Bill and Deirdre Brand at the beach in 2020. Photo by Bill Brand

As anybody who lives in South Redondo knows, Brand was a fixture on the coast. For years he’d walked every morning on the Esplanade and the beach. Usually, he would also bookend his day with a bike ride or another walk on the beach. In the last year, when he was physically unable to do either, he would go for a drive. In the last months, he would ask somebody, usually Deirdre, to drive him along the coast.

Janice Hahn recalled visiting Bill and Deirdre last year. He invited her to join them on their evening sunset walk. Brand was on a treatment that wouldn’t allow him to drink. He couldn’t even swallow well at the time, and the treatment caused him to spit a lot, but he merrily packed some wine, cheese, and crackers for the others, and together they walked towards the beach.

“We left his house and walked through Veterans Park and then down on the beach,” Hahn recalled. “And there’s a guy, named Bob [Freeman], I think, whose home is right on the waterfront, and he always let Bill sit on his lawn at sunset. But between Bill’s home and Bob’s home, you can’t imagine how many people who were like, ‘Hey Bill!’ And then while we were sitting there, Deirdre and I eating cheese and crackers and drinking wine and Bill spitting, people just kept coming up, ‘Hey Bill, how are you doing?’ Or, ‘I read that Facebook post! Thank you!´ It was like he was a rock star, but he was so humble.”

Hahn had been on the LA City Council when Brand was a Redondo councilmember, and then, when she served in Congress, she became the first elected state official to support the idea of a park at the AES site. She’d admired Brand’s ability to boil any issue down to its essence with folksy, no-nonsense concision, his commitment to environmental issues, and his unfailing sense of humor. She also saw another side of him three years ago when a 13-year-old girl, Ciara Smith, was killed by a Metro bus, and Brand went to the family’s home and put his arms around them, then spoke movingly at her funeral. “I’ll never forget Bill being a grief counselor at that time,” she said.

They’d gone from political acquaintances to good friends. But seeing Brand in his most natural environment, on the beach within his community, she understood something else.

“Everybody thought Bill was their friend,” Hahn said. “That is so unusual for a politician, and a mayor of a city. I thought Bill was my friend, but I realized everybody felt the same way I did…. He was the consummate mayor.”

Mayor Bill Brand after a surf session. Brand was a lifelong dedicated surfer. Photo courtesy the City of Redondo Beach

The very last time Brand walked down the stairs in his house was last Friday. He knew it was his last day, because he’d chosen it. Brand believed in a person’s legal right to die, in certain circumstances. In the end, he exercised that right.

“He had watched his mother die of lung cancer, and it was horrific,” Deirdre Brand said. “She was in a lot of pain. He was only 21 at the time, and he was with her the whole time. He said it was gruesome, and it had a really strong impact on him. He used to say, ‘I am not going to die like that. I refuse to die like she did.’ In the last month, he was in a lot of pain, and on a lot of drugs to keep the pain down. And he chose his right to die.”

For Bill Brand the fighter, it was a final victory.

“Bill was not going to let cancer rule him,” Jim Light said. “He was going to show cancer. He was going to die on his terms.”

And so Thursday the Brands had a little party, a gathering of some of his family members and closest friends. They played his favorite music, including “Ripple,” by the Grateful Dead, and “Born to Love You,” by Ben and Ellen Harper. Brand had met both the Dead’s Bob Weir and Ben Harper at BeachLife festivals; he’d kept a concert ticket stub from 1978 that Wier signed and had a chance to tell Harper how much his music had helped him get through cancer treatments.

But Brand’s choice of this Harper song was for Deirdre. “No matter how hard the fight,” the song goes. “I was born to love you.”

 They told stories and laughed together. That night, Deirdre and Bill spent several hours alone together. Then, the next morning, he had to go downstairs to begin the medical process of ending his life.

Once again, he surprised his wife. She always joked that he was “stubborn as an ox,” but she also loved that quality in him. He was true to himself.

“He insisted on walking down the stairs on his own two feet,” Deirdre said.

Sometimes the way life unfolds seems oddly as if somehow it has been scripted. For Bill and Deirdre, this was mercifully so. In early January, they’d both contracted Covid for the first time, and after the initial worry for Bill – who, it turned out, felt its impacts less than Deirdre – they settled into a time of isolated calm and happiness.

“We had a few weeks in which we were forced into isolation together, and I am so glad,” she said. “Life can be so busy. We had such a weird, great time.”

Friday morning, after he’d made it downstairs, Brand’s final round of goodbyes began. He kept kissing everybody, his family, friends, and his wife, over and over. Later on, when he’d taken medication that would prevent him from retching from the other medications, he settled into bed, with Deirdre at his side. They played a song called “Ong Namo,” by Snatam Kaur, a mantra whose meditative, hypnotic sound feels like a journey home. Its title means, “I bow to the divine wisdom of all.”

Brand faded away as peacefully as was imaginable. For his wife, who’d had the opposite experience with her last partner, bearing witness to a long painful death in the institutional drear of a hospital, the experience was like a parting gift.

“It was so beautiful,” she said. “It just made everything whole.”

Brand left a legacy that is still unfolding. But as is often the case with people who possess uncommon vision, he made it possible for others to see a larger picture.

“He cleared the plate for the rest of us,” Nils Nehrenheim said. “He has given us the ability to jump off and say, okay, now we are moving forward. Now we start with the redevelopment planning. Now it’s our fight.”

“I think there will be a park at the AES site,” Light said. “And it will be the Bill Brand Waterfront Park.”