Fred Etzel is a land use attorney who represents developers and landowners in California's complex, risky, and time consuming development approval process.  He is unique among land use attorneys in that, by education and background, he is also a member of the professional community of California's urban and regional planners. 

     Fred's typical developer client is the proponent of a large scale, multi phase project requiring land use approvals from multiple levels of government, e.g., federal, state, regional, and local.  He advises and directly assists the developer client in obtaining these approvals in the most cost effective, expeditious manner.  Once obtained, he pro­tects these approvals from California's law on vested rights by ne­gotiating development agreements and using Vesting Tenta­tive Maps.  Fred also is skilled in integrating local devel­opment approvals with the municipal financing vehicles (1911/1915 Act Assessment Districts, Mello-Roos CFDs) avail­able to provide the infrastructure needed by the developer's project.

     Fred has extremely close ties, as described below, with the professional community of urban and regional planners who staff city and county planning departments.  He almost always has had personal contact with some member of a local planning department through his previous work as a planning consultant, his current activities in the professional organization of planners, or his ongoing teaching. 

     Fred Etzel holds a master's degree in city plan­ning, and prior to founding his law firm, was a vice president with Sedway Cooke Associates, a planning consulting firm located in San Francisco.  During his nine years at Sedway Cooke, Fred drafted general plans and specific plans, zoning ordinances, and environmental impact reports for California cities and counties. 

     Fred is a charter member of the American Institute of Cer­ti­fied Planners.  He is active in the professional organiza­tion of California planners, California Chapter, American Planning Association, and he is a past member of the Board of Directors, Northern Section of the California Chapter of APA. 

     Over the past fifteen years, Fred has served as a member of the
faculties of the graduate program of the Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley and of the Urban Studies Department at California State University, San Francisco.  At Berkeley and San  Francisco he has taught the following courses: Planning and the Legal Process and Implementing Plans, Land Use Controls and Politics, Law and the Urban Environment.

     At the request of the Governor's Office of Planning and Re­search, he reviewed and contributed to the California General Plan Guidelines and Specific Plans in the Golden State, published by this Office. 

     Fred received his undergraduate degree in Sociology from Colgate University in 1968.  He then served in the U. S. Navy for 4 ½ years, including three years as Engineering Officer on USS Bonefish (SS 582) when she made two deployments to the Western Pacific and completed five special operations.  He holds a master's degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley.  While a graduate student at Berkeley, he received the American Institute of Planners Award for Outstanding Achievement, given annually to one graduate student.  In 1978 he received his law degree from Hastings College of the Law, where he was a member of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly.  Fred has been a member of the State Bar of California since 1978, and his State Bar Number is 83368.

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