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Professional Experience
Wynne Furth is of counsel in the Oakland office and has been representing public agencies for thirty years. Her practice is focused on land use, housing, and environmental law. Before joining McDonough Holland & Allen in 2006, she was a partner in Best Best & Krieger LLP in Riverside, California and City Attorney of Claremont, California. She then worked in-house for the City of Palo Alto, devoting much of her time in Palo Alto to negotiating development agreements for the re-use of commercial and industrial sites in the city with new commercial development, housing, and public amenities. These projects included substantial new affordable and market-rate housing, new public parks and parking structures, and commercial redevelopment. The project sites included important historic and biological resources and superfund sites. Finding consensus was an important council directive as existing neighborhoods needed to be assured that new development would contribute to their quality of life, while landowners and developers, historic preservation and housing advocates, neighboring jurisdictions, and the general public were keenly interested in both process and outcome.
Wynne has extensive experience working for public agencies as city attorney or general counsel and as a land use lawyer. She has written custom zoning for mixed-use projects, transit-oriented development, affordable housing, transferable development credits for open space and historic preservation, downtown districts, and done extensive work with conservation easements of various types. She also has extensive experience in assisting cities with CEQA and NEPA compliance and working with state, local and federal regulatory agencies, including both the state and local coastal commissions. She represented the City in Citizen’s Committee to Save Our Village v. City of Claremont, (1995) 37 Cal. App. 4th 1157, a successful defense of the City’s finding of no adverse environmental affects from a carefully mitigated new building on a historic campus.
She has also advised utility providers on capital projects, urban water management, and regulatory compliance.
In addition to serving as City Attorney of Claremont for 25 years and of LaVerne for fourteen, Wynne has represented such cities as Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana, Ontario, Corona, La Verne, Glendora, Big Bear Lake, Shafter, and Hemet, as well as numerous special agencies and joint powers authorities. She has also served on the counsel committee in complex multi-party litigation cases involving local, state, and federal agencies. | 