Fitz leaves LandWatch to help start new progressive nonprofit.

A fter nearly four years on the front lines of Monterey County’s land-use battles, Chris Fitz, LandWatch Monterey County’s executive director, says he’ll step down at the end of the month. But he’ll continue to fight the good fight—advocating public policy for working-class folks—while wearing a different hat, one belonging to UNITEHERE! Local 483 and its soon-to-be-formed nonprofit.

“I’ll be on the LandWatch board, and am still absolutely committed to the work LandWatch does,” he says, “but I’ll be working for the union, helping form a new nonprofit, the Coalition for Working Families in Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties.”

The Coalition for Working Families is modeled after the Partnership for Working Families, a national organization that advocates for high-quality jobs, affordable housing and access to healthcare for working- and middle-class families and communities.

While the group has yet to formally launch—UNITEHERE!’s Mark Weller says the coalition will announce its members in the next month—Weller says the new organization will include peace activists, civil rights community leaders, environmentalists, social justice workers, health-care policy reformers and progressive-minded people of all stripes.

“We envision it being an organization that brings together people from all over the community—not just labor—to work for policy changes, real changes in conditions for working families,” he says. “Even though things look pretty bleak right now, sometimes these crises lead to real opportunity to rethink and re-envision our economy in the future.

“We couldn’t be more happy to have Chris on board. It’s the best thing to happen to us.”

In 2000, after successfully drafting—and winning voter approval for—the county’s first urban growth boundary, located in Marina, Fitz joined the LandWatch board. A year later, he was hired as deputy director. In June 2005, he was appointed executive director. And while the nonprofit is best known for its role as land-use watchdog, LandWatch’s three-pronged approach—protecting the environment, promoting the community’s economic vitality, and encouraging social equity and public participation—is what appealed to Fitz.

“The thing that most inspired me about LandWatch in ’99, 2000, was this whole idea of empowering communities to have a vision,” he says, “this whole notion of civic engagement, participatory democracy.”

A decade later, Fitz says he’s ready to take on the social-equity part of LandWatch’s mission.

“At this time in our country, I want to be part of that shift at the local level, rebuilding the middle-class, completing the New Deal, moving away from this horrible discrepancy between the middle class and the super, super rich.”

In his new post, Fitz will continue to lobby supervisors (Fitz’s partner, Jane Parker, sits on the Monterey County board), and local city councils, advocating for progressive policy change—“That’s where the fun starts,” he says.

Weller and Fitz point to Salinas’ new anti-big box ordinance, and say they’d like to introduce similar laws in Monterey County. They list living-wage ordinances and development agreements (in which developers agree to provide community benefits like child-care centers) as other top priorities.

“We need to rebuild,” Weller says. “We need an economy where workers have enough money to keep the economy going.”