Remembering Jan Schmidiger

Jan Schmidiger served on the Community Action Project (CAP) Governing Committee in the early years of CAP and the Calaveras Planning Coalition (CPC).

As a building restoration expert, Jan had great vision. She did not merely see a structure “as is”. She saw a structure for what it once was and for what it could be in the future with a lot of thoughtful hard work. She helped us all to see the County in that same light.  

Jan was also an effective on-the-ground force behind the Sierra Green Days celebrations in Murphys that provided an annual forum for those concerned about the environment. She always made sure that CAP/CPC got a good location for our booth and a good bulletin board for our displays. We used these as a base from which to circulate petitions and as a backdrop for taking photos of all the regular folks who cared about our issues. Because of Jan, our sometimes dry and technical general plan advocacy had a both the power of the petition, and a full spectrum of human faces behind it.

Jan endured the slow pace of the General Plan Update process with justified impatience. She did not like that the government had broken the law in ways that continued to harm regular people. She did not like that the government was taking way too long to make things right.  She recognized that every day the County deferred the resolution of a problem to the future was another day the County was stealing vitality from the present. The spirit of Jan’s realization permeates the CPC’s 145-page legal complaint against the Calaveras County 2019 General Plan Update.  

We regret that Jan passed away before CAP/CPC could secure justice for Calaveras residents in the case against the 2019 General Plan Update. With her ongoing inspiration we will persevere.