Sheila Lodge, one of Santa Barbara’s most enduring civic leaders, died Wednesday at 97 years old after decades of service to the city.

“This is such a special place, and I am so passionate about Santa Barbara,” Lodge said last year when she was honored by the Santa Barbara City Council and county Board of Supervisors.

That’s putting it mildly; Lodge was involved in city government and planning for a half-century.

She served on the City Council from 1975 to 1981, and then became the first woman to serve as mayor.

She held that post for 12 years, through 1993, and was followed by a long line of women mayors, including Harriet Miller, Marty Blum, Helene Schneider and Cathy Murillo.

Lodge then became a fixture on the city’s Planning Commission and after that the Historic Landmarks Commission, a panel she attended through June of this year. 

Lodge reportedly planned for her own end and even wrote her own obituary.

She is survived by her four daughters and a grandson, and she is preceded in death by her husband of 46 years, Joseph Lodge, a Superior Court judge. 

“What a force Sheila was!” said Blum, calling her smart, insightful and “quite courageous. The first of a parade of women mayors.”

Lodge shared her planning and development acumen at commission and council meetings over the years, including ones where she was not a sitting member. 

“If you appreciate Santa Barbara’s ‘small-town feel,’ you have Sheila to thank for it in large part,” Schneider said. 

“Mayor Lodge’s memory was sharp as a tack. She could make connections about a current land-use issue with a similar event that occurred decades before. Her advocacy promoting Santa Barbara as a small city with a big stature was unwavering. We owe a lot to her.

“And I do not think we would’ve had a strong general plan update without her on the Planning Commission, working with seven very politically diverse council members — all who took her advice very seriously.”

Lodge even wrote a book on the city’s planning history titled “Santa Barbara: An Uncommonplace American Town.”

She knew the full history of the downtown corridor and saw many big changes firsthand, including the construction of the Paseo Nuevo shopping mall.

In the book, she recalls the community pushback to the “horrendous” plan for condo towers on the land where Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden sits now.

In the early 2010s, she played a role opposing the controversial Veronica Meadows housing project. The land was acquired by the city and is now the Arroyo Burro Open Space.  

Even after Lodge left the council, she stayed a visible figure in local politics and made endorsements for local candidates. She was a lifelong Democrat but occasionally supported some independent and conservative candidates, including current Mayor Randy Rowse. 

The contests became more politically polarized over time, more so than her time in the 1980s and 1990s, she said in 2011. 

Rowse recalled meeting Lodge when she was protesting his Paradise Cafe neon sign in the 1980s (he got the permit and permission to keep the sign). 

“We started out as adversaries, we ended up as friends,” he said. “She was a good and fair mayor.”

When Rowse joined the City Council, they would talk about city issues and how different it was when she was mayor, he said. 

“By the end of all this, we ended up being good friends, and she was somebody who was an adviser or confidante to me on lots of issues, like size, bulk and scale, building and planning. She was a wealth of information,” Rowse said. “When I did something she didn’t like, I heard about it right away.”

They didn’t always agree, but she always had the city’s interests at heart, he said. 

He wants to lower the city flag or honor Lodge in another public way, although plans are still pending.

“It’s not like just anybody passed away,” Rowse said. “She was an amazing civil servant for as long as anybody has been.”

City Administrator Kelly McAdoo said she wasn’t aware of plans for a community recognition yet, but the city would support those efforts. 

“We are obviously deeply saddened by the loss of former Mayor Lodge, who has been a tremendous civic leader and who has shaped much of what modern Santa Barbara is as a community,” McAdoo said. “She leaves behind an amazing legacy of public service.”

Details about possible memorial services were not released as of Wednesday.