Victor Herbert died at home in Berkeley on June 26, aged 96.
He arrived in Berkeley in 1983 from Southern California, where he had been trained as a community mediator.
In 1970, President Carter, who had seen community mediation in Atlanta, gave a small amount of money to set up three model programs in community mediation in Indianapolis, Santa Monica, and NYC. Victor joined the one in Santa Monica, where he got his training in 1981 and did a dozen mediations before he moved to Berkeley. When he came to Berkeley, he and other local mediators quickly got together to form regional training programs in community mediation for the Bay Area.
In Berkeley, he met with other mediators to help establish Berkeley Dispute Resolution Service, and in 1985 he and another mediator, Harriet Whitman Lee, did the first mediation for the Berkeley Zoning Department. This became a model for mediation between residents applying for building permits and neighbors who were concerned about privacy, sunlight, and density.
In 1988, the city of Berkeley decided to make this a permanent part of the permit process.
In 2014 Victor retired as a community volunteer doing zoning mediations after his 300th mediation for the Zoning Department of the city of Berkeley — over half of which resulted in an agreement between all the parties.
The City of Berkeley and the State of California awarded him citations in recognition of his service in 2011. Berkeley Dispute Resolution Service honored him as a “volunteer extraordinaire” for his work as a founding member, zoning mediation coordinator, board member and statistician. Its successor organization, SEEDS Community Resolution Center, honored him in 2015 for his many years of dedicated service and commitment.
Victor said, “I did not bring mediation to Berkeley single-handedly, but I was a member of a very small group of people — less than half a dozen — who brought mediation to Berkeley.”
He is survived by his longtime partner, Susan Goldstein.
