Talking to Jim Eddie at his Potter Valley ranch, one gets a sense of a man with a tremendous amount of history in the area. Delving deeper, one understands that the man's breadth of historical knowledge extends much farther, to the Bay Area and the Golden Gate Bridge, where he has been at home in a large board room and comfortable making far-reaching decisions for nearly two decades.
Eddie spent 20 years representing Mendocino County's 3rd District on its Board of Supervisors. Since then, he has spent 18 years on the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District board of directors, and in December was appointed board president for the first time.
"The bridge is the best example of government, when you get down to it," Eddie said. "Everybody who crosses that bridge pays for it, and consequently when something goes wrong, it's their bridge. People report problems to law enforcement; even if they see somebody being helped they put in a call ... People take that ownership because of being a paying customer."
His seniority on the board has earned him the appointment, a two-year term that will take him to a 20-year mark after which he plans to retire. In the meantime, Eddie said he means to take full advantage of the responsibility, and hopefully draw some of the bridge's immense flow of tourism dollars up to Mendocino County.
"I think Mendocino County now can feed off of the tourism dollars. There are some ways to do that. One thing I suggested is,
everybody packs a cup around," he said, referring to the gift shop's sales of the cups to ferry-goers. "We could put the Mendocino County website on it, and we might be able to get people to come north."Today, San Francisco is California's No. 1 tourism draw, with some 10 million people visiting the Golden Gate Bridge annually, Eddie notes.
"Some weekends, there are 6,000 bikes on the bridge," he said.
The district also manages the seven ferries that carry people across the bay annually.
To illustrate how rare a position Eddie is in, the 19-member board is comprised of nine members from San Francisco and 10 from north of the Bay Area, including three from Sonoma County, four from Marin and one member apiece from Napa, Del Norte and Mendocino counties.
It was the first regional transportation district in the state, and was formed originally to include jurisdictions as far north as Mendocino County in order to garner enough tax revenue to afford the tremendous expense, estimated originally at $100,000. The final expense, according to Eddie, was $33.5 million in local taxes and bonds, at a time when bonds were hard to sell in a bad market.
The original board faced numerous political and practical obstacles, including the fact that the city of San Francisco's engineer at the time thought the bridge couldn't be anchored on the south side because of the 40-foot distance below the water's surface to a bed of shale rock that made setting anchor problematic. That didn't bother engineer Joseph Strauss.
"Strauss was the promoter, and he sold the idea to the counties," Eddy said, adding that the original design was a cantilever bridge. The district at the time hired engineer Charles A. Ellis, who told the district it couldn't be done because "the distance is too far, the weight is too great," Eddie recounted. "Strauss said, design me a bridge that will work."
Given six months to do so, Ellis set to work in 1927 to design the suspension bridge that is currently in place, connecting San Francisco and what is now Marin County.
"He couldn't figure out how much weight it would handle," Eddie said, smiling. "He used the weight of the new Cadillacs, five of them abreast ... and then he tripled that."
The Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District was incorporated in 1928 by an act of the state Legislature to design, build and finance the bridge.
The bridge was finished in 1937. It held the record as the suspension bridge with the longest main span in the world, at 4,200 feet, until 1964, and is now the second-longest, surpassed only by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City.
"It was a bridge built for commerce originally," Eddie said. "Now it's an icon. The architectural structure is something they built that no one would have thought of today. Strauss spent a lot of time deciding how the sun would hit it."
Eddie and his wife -- who later became his reason for joining the district's board of directors -- were among the roughly 800,000 people who came to walk the bridge in 1987 for its 50-year anniversary, but had to turn around and go back because of the unexpected, collective weight they posed to the formidable structure.
"Every once in a while you could feel it letting down," Eddie recalled.
Eddie represented Mendocino County's 3rd District on the Board of Supervisors from 1974 to 1994, and then his wife urged him to join the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District board of directors.
The district is in the last leg of a seismic retrofit that has so far cost about $700 million, according to Eddie, who estimates the expense will be over $1 billion by the time it's done.
Another recent change Eddie said took effect about a week ago is that the bridge went to electronic toll collection. Under the old system, drivers who inadvertently went through the FasTrak lane had a picture taken of their license plate and a violation notice mailed to them.
"Now, we're not saying it's a violation; we're saying, you're now a paying customer," Eddie said.
Tiffany Revelle can be reached at udjtr@ukiahdj.com, on Twitter @TiffanyRevelle or at 468-3523.
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