Farewell, Bill Kier
A Champion for California’s Fisheries and Public Trust Water has Died
Bill Kier has died; he was 89. Bill was one of California’s most knowledgeable and respected fisheries and water policy experts, and the mentor to scores of biologists, politicos, environmental activists and journalists – including staffers with the California Water Impact Network.
Though he lived a long and rich life, Bill’s death still comes as something of a shock. It’s a cliché to describe anyone as larger than life, but that’s perhaps the most apposite descriptor for Bill. When he entered a room, he somehow drew attention – not because of a loud or bluff manner, or his physical size. People gravitated to him because they sensed intelligence, analytical prowess, human warmth – and most of all, wit.
Bill’s knowledge of California’s water and fisheries history, law, and policy was encyclopedic. He had a lot to teach, and he was highly successful at educating people because he wasn’t didactic. He was a gifted raconteur and an engaging conversationalist who relayed facts as part of a dialogue; he didn’t beat his interlocutors over the head with them.
His discussions were free-flowing and opened ended, but always had salient points to make – and he made them during media interviews, at legislators’ offices in Sacramento and Washington, in duck blinds and in drift boats. He was always an advocate for the fish and the responsible and equitable distribution of our greatest public trust resource – water.
Bill was born in Berkeley and spent his early years at his parents’ ranch on the slopes of Mount Diablo. It was an idyllic childhood largely spent roaming, camping and fishing in what was then an open – even wild – landscape. The family moved to Sacramento when he was 11, and he graduated from San Juan Union High School, where he served as class president and played basketball, football and ran track.
Bill studied at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Davis, and Sacramento State University, where he took a degree in biology in 1958, putting himself through school by working in heavy construction during the summers. He poured concrete during the Folsom Dam project, where he was knocked unconscious by an errant piece of steel while working 80 feet in the air. He later joined a drilling crew assigned to the Cherry Valley Dam tunnel, a component of the City of San Francisco’s High Sierra waterworks.
Bill met his lifelong soulmate, Helen Douarin, in 1954 in Sacramento, and they married in 1957. Within four years, their family included three children – son Rob and daughters Kathryn and Mary Claire.
In the summer prior to his senior year Bill secured a job as a scientific aide for a California Department of Fish and Game study on striped bass and sturgeon in the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta. That position established the template for the remainder of his life. A few years after graduation, he was hired by the California Department of Fish and Game as a deputy warden and biologist for California’s Northern Sierra District. In this position, he spearheaded development of the streamflow standards needed to protect public trust water resources. Shortly thereafter, he advised the State Department of Water Resources on strategies for protecting fish and wildlife in the development of the Oroville Dam project. The 12,000- acre Oroville State Wildlife Area is a direct result of Bill’s work and advocacy.
In 1964, Bill was appointed the water policy coordinator for the State Natural Resources Agency. This quickly led to a series of other positions, including the Chief of Fish and Game’s water projects branch and the director of the State Senate Office of Research and Policy Development – a position he held for nine years.
During Bill’s long tenure in Sacramento, he saw how the political sausage was made, and he was by no means pleased with the end product. From 1971 through 1975, he chaired the Sacramento County Recreation and Park Commission, where he waged spirited land use battles to expand habitat, fisheries and wildlife protections. One direct result of his fierce – but always good natured – skirmishing was the spiking of a proposed planned community for 50,000 residents south of Sacramento in the Stone Lakes reach of the Cosumnes River. Thanks largely to Bill’s skilled and unrelenting political maneuvering, this incomparable natural landscape is now the Stone Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.
By the late 1970s, Bill had established himself as both a respected environmental and public trust analyst and one of Sacramento’s most adroit and effective advocates for natural resources protection. He was instrumental in the crafting of the Keene-Nejedly California Wetlands Preservation Act and the Collier-Keene State Hostels Facilities Act, and he joined with State Senator Nick Petris and a group of University of California, Berkeley researchers to develop a strong Integrated Pest Management policy to protect farm workers, fish and wildlife from over-exposure to pesticides.
Shortly after Bill completed his IPM work, California elected a more conservative and lobbyist-friendly Senate leadership. Following pressure from pesticide and petrochemical producers, Bill was fired by Senate leaders in 1983. On impulse, he assumed a managing partnership in the historic but struggling Strawberry Lodge on Highway 50 enroute to Lake Tahoe. This venture did not go well, and the Kier family ultimately decamped to Mill Valley, where he helped an old friend, Bill Davoren, establish the Bay Institute, an environmental non-profit organization dedicated to protecting water quality and fisheries – particularly salmon – in the Bay-Delta watershed.
Bill’s involvement with the Bay Institute led to numerous requests for help from other professionals and activists working in the conservation sphere, and he established a consultancy in 1987. In short order, he secured a federal contract to draft a plan for salmonid restoration in the 16,000 square-mile Klamath River watershed. Ultimately, this seminal analysis served as a foundational document for the removal of four dams on the upper Klamath River; that project was completed in 2024, opening hundreds of miles of historic spawning habitat to the river’s Chinook, Coho and steelhead populations.
Bill and his associates soon developed a proprietary computer program for capturing, synthesizing and managing fisheries data. Dubbed the Klamath Resource Information System (KRIS), it was quickly adopted by fisheries researchers and agencies on both the west and east coasts.
In subsequent years, Bill continued his domestic fisheries work and expanded his purview to the international sphere, consulting on Australian commercial fishing and habitat issues. In the mid-2000s, he and Helen moved from Marin County to Blue Lake in Humboldt County – the town where Helen’s great grandparents settled in the 19th Century. Bill Kier and Associates found ample work with both Northern California’s tribes and the state and federal governments, and Bill also became deeply involved in local environmental and land use issues; he was particularly invested in restoring the railroad right-of-way between Eureka and Arcata as a multipurpose trail.
Bill lost Helen in 2020 – but as he noted at the time, he “couldn’t find his off button.” Committed as ever to the issues that first engaged him as a young Fish and Game employee, he worked with his associates on numerous contracts for the Klamath River tribes and various government agencies until his death.
Bill’s work has left an enduring legacy for both the state and nation and spurred heartfelt gratitude from the people who knew and collaborated with him.
“Bill and Helen took [wife] Carol and me under their wings when we arrived in Sacramento,” recalled Bill Press, a former California Democratic Party chairman and a senior political commentator on CNN. “He continued to be a great friend and mentor. He was an environmentalist and champion for environmental causes before they invented the name. California is a better, greener, healthier state because of Bill Kier.”
Tom Stokely, the senior policy advisor for the California Water Impact Network, described Bill as a mentor who inspired, supported, and challenged him.
“In 1989, Bill got me appointed to the California Advisory Committee on Salmon and Steelhead Trout and that opened a lot of doors for me,” Stokely said. “He also personally paid for me to go to Washington, D.C. in 1990 to attend a hearing on what later became the Central Valley Project Improvement Act. The contacts that I made with Bill in 1990 helped with lobbying for a three-year extension of the Trinity River Fish and Wildlife Management Act in 1995, which was approved unanimously by Newt Gingrich’s Republican Congress – and believe me, that was a tremendous accomplishment, given the anti-environmental sentiment that prevailed in Washington’s legislative circles then. Bill’s grasp of policy and history and his skill at lobbying – and strongarming, when necessary – were unmatched.”
Glen Martin, a media consultant for C-WIN, credits Bill with kickstarting his career.
“One of my first major placements was a cover story in the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday magazine on California’s fisheries decline,” Martin recalled. “Bill was my primary source for that piece, and he gave me wonderful quotes that described the situation with both brevity and humor. One alluded to the massive diversions of water by corporate growers, and it still sticks in my mind: ‘The welfare queens ain’t got nothing on the cotton kings.’ On the strength of that story, a National Park Service whistleblower fed me information on illegal collusion between the Yosemite National Park administration and Yosemite’s concessioner. That led to another Sunday magazine cover story, multiple follow-up articles in other national newspapers, the retirement of a Congressman associated with the scandal, the ejection of the concessioner, and a new Yosemite Park general plan. It’s no coincidence that the Chronicle hired me as a staff writer shortly after that article ran.”
While Bill was a go-to source for both journalists and researchers, he was also a highly gifted writer. His emails were trenchant, vivid, eloquent, and lapidary in construction. His friends, correspondents – and even adversaries – looked forward to receiving them.
“I always thought Bill was writing a book one email at a time,” said David Weiman, an agriculture and conservation analyst and consultant. “He gave a damn and will be missed.”
That’s for sure. Adios, Bill – and thanks for all the fish.