In 1967, Palo Alto voters recalled Byron Sher from the City Council seat he had held for only two years, punishing him and two fellow slow-growth allies in a bitter citywide vote. Sher, a two-time Palo Alto mayor, Stanford law professor and 24-year veteran of the California Legislature who wrote the state's landmark clean air, safe drinking water and waste management laws, died on September 12, 2026, according to his family, at 98.

Sher was born February 7, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied at Washington University in St. Louis before earning his law degree at Harvard Law School, then moved to Palo Alto in 1957 to join the Stanford Law School faculty, where he taught contracts, commercial law, consumer protection and legislation, according to his son, Benjamin Sher, in an obituary published by The Almanac. He later held the title of professor of law, emeritus, at Stanford Law School.

He got his start in local politics during a fight over the Oregon Expressway in the late 1950s, a divisive proposal to widen two-lane Oregon Avenue into a four-lane county road that passed by a razor-thin margin in a 1962 election. Three years later Sher won a council seat as one of the city's original residentialists, a slow-growth, pro-conservation faction that also included Enid Pearson and Kirke Comstock. When the entire council faced a recall vote in 1967, Comstock and Pearson survived it. Sher did not.

Joe Simitian encountered that history firsthand. As a college student in 1973, he interviewed Sher for a term paper on the recall, and years later Simitian himself held Sher's old council seat, then his Assembly seat, then his Senate seat. "Essentially, he paid the price for being a premature environmentalist, a premature residentialist," Simitian said of the 1967 vote.

Sher rejoined the council in 1973 and served until 1980, including two terms as mayor. The council was still split between growth and slow-growth factions, and it took 37 ballots for members to elect him mayor the first time, in 1975. That same year he helped negotiate the city's purchase of more than 500 acres of foothill land for 7.5 million dollars, ground that became the Enid Pearson Arastradero Preserve. He also helped shape Palo Alto's first Comprehensive Plan, completed in 1976, which set the template for the city's zoning. Looking back in 2004, as he wrapped up his final term in the state Senate, Sher called the foothill purchase "the best purchase the city ever made."

He carried the same priorities to Sacramento, winning election to the California State Assembly in 1980 and, sixteen years later, a special election to the state Senate. He chaired the Assembly's Natural Resources Committee and later the Senate's Environmental Quality Committee before being termed out in 2004, after 24 years in the Legislature. His bills became some of the state's foundational environmental statutes, including the California Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Integrated Waste Management Act governing garbage and recycling, and a law requiring double-walled containers for underground fuel tanks and pipes. "He had the vision, he did the work and he worked well with his leadership to make sure that when he needed their help, he would be there. I thought that was a model worth emulating," Simitian said of his approach.

Because term limits did not yet exist when his Sacramento career began, Sher was able to stay with an issue for decades in a way few legislators can today. "He had the commitment and the patience and the persistence to just keep it on the agenda for a quarter of a century," Simitian said. In a 2004 proclamation, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors marked his retirement by declaring January 30 Byron Sher Day, calling him arguably the most effective environmental legislator in the state.

After leaving the Capitol, Sher and his family moved to the Sierra Nevada foothills, where he took up managing a pear orchard in Placerville, at one point delivering about 500 tons of Bosc and Bartlett pears in a single harvest. "He became a kind of a hobbyist farmer," his son Benjamin said. Sher stayed close to environmental policy even so, serving on the Sierra Nevada Conservancy Board and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.

Benjamin Sher traced his father's political consistency to the place and era that shaped him. "Because of the particularities of Stanford, the Peninsula and the Bay Area, it was easy to be an environmentalist from a political standpoint because there was broad bipartisan support," he said, describing how the issue crossed party lines on the Peninsula. "Whether you're Republican or Democrat, you supported environmental regulations. It was very natural for him to fall into that role because it just blended in."

Sher was married to Linda Sher, who served as his campaign's chief assistant through his Palo Alto council races. He is survived by their children, Adrienne, Benjamin and Katherine Sher; grandchildren Sarah Burke, Edek Sher, Nathaniel Sher, Dinah Sher Gongora and Noe Gongora; and great-granddaughter Echo Marie Moncrieff. His family has asked that memorial donations go to the International Rescue Committee.

The preserve above Arastradero Road still carries Enid Pearson's name, but its 500 acres remain largely undeveloped because Sher and his council allies chose in 1975 to buy the land rather than let it be built out. The clean air and safe drinking water statutes he wrote in Sacramento are still California law decades after he left the Capitol. His teaching files, correspondence and other papers, donated to Stanford in 2005, fill eighteen linear feet of boxes for future students of California environmental law. And in the Sierra foothills, the pear orchard he came to tend after four decades in public life stood as a second career for a man who had spent his first one arguing that the land itself was worth the fight.