Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and the Board of Supervisors this week honored Beverly Hills resident and longstanding environmental and good-government advocate Ellen Stern Harris on the occasion of her 75th birthday, celebrating a lifetime of activism and engagement.

“You are a model of civic involvement,” Yaroslavsky told Harris after reeling off a list of her accomplishments, appointed service and awards over the years. “If we had [even] 10 people like you in this County, or 10 more people like you in this County, it would be a different kind of place. You have really made a difference.”

Recalling her long acquaintance and working relationship with Yaroslavsky and colleagues Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Don Knabe, Harris warmly thanked the Board members for the tribute.

Noting the County’s perennial budget difficulties, Harris prompted spontaneous applause when she declared, “I just want one thing for this Board of Supervisors and the County of Los Angeles, that there be no further state mandated expenditures without state funds accompanying them.”

As Chairman Don Knabe joked that “we ought to send that recording to the State Legislature and the Governor,” Yaroslavsky quipped, “Ellen knows an applause line when she hears it.”

Harris is the founder and Executive Director of the Fund for the Environment, and has been prominently involved in water quality and coastal protection issues for many years.

She was co-author of Proposition 20, a state initiative passed in 1972 that created the California Coastal Act. She served as Vice Chair of the State Coastal Commission for its first four years, and previously served on the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, where she helped to clean up the heavily polluted Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors and also has led efforts to clean up Santa Monica Bay.

Serving in various appointments for the City of Beverly Hills, Harris also taught public policy at UCLA and has been named “Woman Of The Year“ by the Los Angeles Times, for whom she wrote a consumer advocate column for seven years. The Sierra Club, Audubon Society and United Nations Association, among others, have honored her environmental work.