Audrey Zagazeta and the work before the groundbreaking

On August 9, 2022, a Half Moon Bay planning hearing took up a proposed Hyatt Place Hotel. Audrey Zagazeta and her Circlepoint colleague Juliet Martin presented the background to its environmental review and explained the alternatives. The meeting was for receiving comments. A hotel was being discussed, but nobody was checking in.

That evening offers a useful introduction to Zagazeta. By then she was Circlepoint’s president and CEO. Here she was, doing the patient work of explaining a project before a community and its planning commissioners. Another consultant explained how visual simulations had been prepared. Story poles represented one of the alternatives. A possible building had become something people could examine and question.

There is a particular tension in a meeting like this. A proposal concerns the future; the people discussing it inhabit the present. The environmental team has to make the possible consequences intelligible enough for a public conversation. Zagazeta’s career has repeatedly brought her into that space. The report, the presentation, and the questions all belong to the work before the groundbreaking.

A planner’s name in the fine print

Zagazeta is based in San Jose and studied at San José State University. Her degree is a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Studies. Her professional life has crossed public and private sector environmental planning, with transportation and land development becoming recurring parts of the record.

People who have worked with her describe the practical side of that career. Transportation consultant Mark Spencer, who says their collaboration goes back to 2000, praises her project management, attention to schedules and budgets, and communication with agency staff and public audiences. Former colleague Catherine Wade describes her as an effective director and mentor, with an inventive approach to complex environmental review.

Those observations point to a job with several audiences at once. A specialist needs a clear assignment. A client needs to understand where the work stands. A public audience needs an explanation it can follow. Each encounter asks something different of the same planner. A technical answer that works perfectly inside a project team still has to travel beyond it.

When “final” still invites a question

In November 2016, Zagazeta was the project director on a memorandum concerning Santa Clara’s Lawrence Station Area Plan. A planning commissioner’s comments had arrived after publication of the final environmental impact report, but before its certification. The response entered the administrative record. “Final,” in planning, can have a surprisingly active social life.

The memorandum answered questions about traffic assumptions, vehicle miles traveled, parks, and other effects. It distinguished comments about the environmental analysis from matters that could be addressed separately. It also discussed the limits of the city’s control over improvements involving other agencies. The work required attention to what had been analyzed, what could be required, and who could deliver it.

This is a less glamorous view of environmental planning than a rendering of a new neighborhood. It is also a revealing one. A promising idea still needs a record that explains its consequences. Responding to a late question becomes part of the project’s history, alongside the diagrams and the forecasts. Zagazeta’s name appears at the top of that response.

The railway and the neighborhood

The same year, the draft environmental documents for VTA’s BART Silicon Valley Phase II Extension listed Zagazeta as Circlepoint’s director of environmental services. Circlepoint’s contribution included community facilities and public services, environmental justice, land use, socioeconomics, utilities, and visual quality. The list reads like the contents of a neighborhood, because those subjects concern how a place functions.

A railway has an engineering story. It also has a surrounding world. Utilities, buildings, services, and established uses all belong in the picture. The team credited beside Zagazeta included Caitlin Chase, Lily Gilbert, and Alex Casbara. Other firms and agencies contributed their own specialties. The resulting document was a collective undertaking with named responsibilities.

Her rail work continued at another scale. The August 2022 Palmdale to Burbank high-speed rail draft environmental report listed her as deputy project manager and quality check/senior reviewer. The qualifications beside her name recorded 21 years of experience and her environmental studies degree.

That assignment brings a different kind of visibility. Reviewing and coordinating a document is work that a passenger may never encounter, yet it sits inside the preparation of a proposed transport connection. The credit tells us exactly where Zagazeta contributed. It also helps explain the experience she carried into the CEO role: working across disciplines while keeping a complicated whole under review.

The firm comes full circle

Circlepoint announced Zagazeta’s appointment as president and CEO on March 8, 2022. She had spent thirteen years with the company. Scott Steinwert, the outgoing CEO, described experience that encompassed multidisciplinary projects, environmental work, communications, and business management.

The appointment accompanied a return to majority woman ownership. Circlepoint had been founded in 1987 by Kay Annis Wilson, a planner and facilitator. Thirty-five years later, the change in leadership carried a connection to that beginning. Zagazeta was taking responsibility for an established firm with a history of work across California.

She set out a five-year growth ambition: to double the company’s size and extend its work in transportation, land use, water, and sustainability. Those were stated goals. Her description connected additional company resources with supporting clients and communities, and a wish to expand its geographical reach.

“broaden our horizons throughout California and the Nation.”

Audrey Zagazeta, March 2022

The promotion changed the scale of her responsibilities. The environmental planner’s work continued, while the company itself became another undertaking to guide.

A chair with work attached

Zagazeta joined Circlepoint’s board in 2019 and now serves as its chair. The role includes advancing the strategic plan through annual implementation and helping individual directors work together. It gives the company’s ambitions a recurring place on the agenda.

The current board brings different professional backgrounds to that task. Susan Harden joined in 2023. Ivy Morrison has served since 2022 and brings community relations and outreach experience. Mike Lohman’s background includes engineering design management and company leadership. Zagazeta chairs a group whose members approach projects and business decisions from different directions.

There is a useful continuity with multidisciplinary planning here. A board and a project team are different bodies, but each needs individual expertise to become coordinated work. A strategic plan also needs decisions that can be carried out. The annual implementation responsibility is a concrete part of Zagazeta’s chairmanship, alongside her executive position.

Her public exchanges with colleagues supply a smaller view of leadership. Welcoming planner Ashlyn Reining in 2024, she referred to the Circlepoint family and their recent conversation about what they would do together. The welcome suggests an interest in the relationship before the work begins. It is a modest episode, but it gives a name and a conversation to the idea of collaboration.

Housing, judgment, and another set of questions

In San Jose’s environmental review for its 2023-2031 Housing Element update, Zagazeta appears as Circlepoint’s principal and CEO. The team also included project managers and planners, with specialist contributions from other firms. Company leadership and environmental work appear together on the same page.

A housing plan is a different subject from a railway, yet both require people to examine how a proposed future connects to an existing place. Zagazeta’s record moves between those subjects. The common thread is the environmental planning task and the people assembled to perform it.

In 2024, she served on the jury for APA California’s Northern Section planning awards. Fellow jurors included planners from Berkeley, San Francisco’s transportation agency, Hercules, and private practice. That responsibility placed her among professionals reviewing the work of the wider field.

The distinction is useful: she was a juror. Her contribution was to the process of judgment. It is another setting in which professional experience becomes something to apply, this time to award applications and deliberation. Alongside her company and project responsibilities, the jury provides a view of her participation in the planning community beyond Circlepoint.

By August 2026, the work had another San Jose address on the planning map. The Five Wounds Urban Village draft environmental impact report named Zagazeta as Circlepoint’s principal contact. The proposed plan would consolidate four urban village plans over 427.4 acres, with a total planned capacity of approximately 8,022 homes.

The greatest development intensity was proposed near the future BART station. These were planned capacities and proposed uses, figures belonging to a future still under review. They give a sense of the questions around the assignment: how growth, transportation, and an established district might fit together.

For Zagazeta, the connection is specific. Her name sits in the review record for a proposal where rail and land use meet again. The state review period runs from August 25 to October 8, 2026. The project is another chapter in her continuing professional work, with the consequences of change still being examined.

Her public career has rooms of different sizes: a planning hearing, a project team, a board meeting, a professional jury. In each, the record identifies a particular job to do. At Half Moon Bay, it was explaining the environmental review and its alternatives. On the board, it is moving a strategic plan into implementation.

Seen together, these responsibilities make her CEO appointment easier to understand. The title arrived after years of coordinating complicated work. California’s proposed projects still give that work a public audience. Before anyone gathers for a groundbreaking, there are consequences to examine and questions to answer. That is where Audrey Zagazeta’s story keeps returning.