Remembering Dave Romero, a remarkable public servant who helped shape the city of SLO

I had the privilege of knowing Dave Romero from the first year I arrived in San Luis Obispo, 45 years ago. At that time, everyone in my circle of city planners, developers and environmentalists knew that if you wanted to get something done in this town, you needed to talk to Dave Romero, our public works director who compiled 36 years of service in that role.

He won a seat on the council soon after he retired, and then became mayor in 2002 after serving the maximum two terms on the council. His last two-year term as mayor overlapped with my first two years on the council, and I feel privileged to have served on the same dais with Dave Romero holding the gavel.

Few people in the history of this community have had a more profound and positive impact on our quality of life than Dave Romero. He belongs in the same pantheon with our longest-serving Mayor Louis Sinsheimer (1919-1939) and the late Ken Schwartz.

Dave Romero arrived as our city engineer in 1956, shortly after Louis Sinsheimer died. The post-war boom was in full swing, as Cal Poly was admitting thousands of returning GIs. Dave picked up where Louis Sinsheimer had left off, building the infrastructure for steady but slow, sustainable growth.

Over the succeeding decades, Dave forged a strong professional and personal connection with Ken Schwartz, as a great engineer and a great architect often do, respecting their complementary roles in the process of building a strong and cohesive community. While they occasionally clashed over their priorities, I don’t recall either one ever uttering a disparaging word about the other.

Dave Romero was in a class by himself — alternately serious and self-deprecatingly funny — tossing off a rare criticism of one of his adversaries but far more often, placing people around him in a position to succeed. I found that Dave Romero possessed a rare and remarkable ability to forge compromise, to win over those who would come into a conversation with a chip on their shoulder, to listen and even change his own mind when good evidence was presented.

I will miss Dave Romero as a friend, as a colleague and as a dedicated and passionate public servant. All of San Luis Obispo can be proud that such a man came to this town and stayed, dedicated to his community, to his career, to his family and to his many friends of all ages and races and political persuasions. We will recall his legacy each time we see his name on the bronze plaques affixed to innumerable buildings and bridges and skate parks and bicycle paths, and, while his name may not be on them, Dave Romero’s signature enabled the hundreds of miles of sewer and water and fiber optic lines that connect our community in the web that we call “infrastructure.”

Thank you, Dave Romero, for your lifetime of public service to San Luis Obispo.

John Ashbaugh served on the San Luis Obispo City Council and is president of the Board of Directors of the History Center of San Luis Obispo County.

This story was originally published March 30, 2022 at 5:52 AM.