Mary Gay Maxwell, the chair of the city’s Environmental Board, is dead at age 78 after a head-on collision Wednesday afternoon.
The cause of the crash is unknown, but Maxwell reportedly lost control of her Honda Civic, crossed the Texas 71 median, and crashed into an Audi head-on. The driver of the Audi received medical attention, but survived.
On Wednesday, Council Member Leslie Pool mourned her “friend [and] teacher” in a Facebook post. “She created a legacy of promoting stewardship and responsibility in protecting our city’s unique beauty, and I’m tremendously saddened by her passing – it’s an immeasurable loss to our community.”
Other members of the environmental community expressed their shock and sadness at Maxwell’s passing. Having been the board chair for going on eight years and embedded in local politics for decades, Maxwell had forged deep friendships with many of them. Like Pool, Chuck Lesniak, the city’s environmental officer and liaison to the environmental commission, will miss Maxwell on both a personal and professional level. “When you lose someone like that … the institutional knowledge that she has is just irreplaceable,” he said. “Personally, she and I had developed a friendship, like you do with someone that you work with a lot. I’ll really personally miss her.”
Lesniak said Maxwell was committed to balancing a growing city’s need for development with Austin’s long standing commitment to environmental issues. Her work, especially in educating the rookie 10-1 Council members, will not go unfinished. “You continue to carry the torch that she’s carried for a long time, and you take the lessons that we’ve all learned from her, and we try and continue to carry that forward,” he said. “People look around, they come to Austin, they go, ‘This is this fabulous city, we’ve got these great creeks, and the beautiful lakes, and all of these trees.’ That’s not an accident, and it was people like Mary Gay who made it that way.”
A memorial service will be held in Maxwell’s honor at 10:30am on Sat., April 9 at St. David’s Episcopal Church (301 E. Eighth).
This article appears in March 25 • 2016.