At the age of 27, Lamar Heystek became the youngest member of the Davis City Council since Bob Black won election during the Vietnam War. After moving to Davis in 1996 to attend UC Davis, Councilmember Heystek earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in Political Science and Linguistics, taught as a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at his alma mater and served on a number of municipal boards, including the City of Davis Recreation & Park Commission, Open Space Commission and Finance & Budget Commission. He has been an active union member since joining the United Food & Commercial Workers Local 588 in 1997. He served as shop steward after becoming a head clerk at Safeway in north Davis. He resigned from the position in 2006 to launch his ultimately successful candidacy for public office. To this day, he remains a loyal Safeway customer, thankful for the daily interactions he enjoyed with Davis residents from all walks of life.
Councilmember Heystek is the son of René and Yeap Nee Heystek. An active septuagenarian living in San Leandro, René Heystek was interned in a concentration camp with his family during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies in World War II. He left for the Netherlands in the wake of the Indonesian independence movement in 1956. He finally settled in the United States in 1959. President John F. Kennedy’s call to service inspired him to join the Peace Corps; he met Yeap Nee Cheam in Malaysia and they married in 1976. He began a career as a teacher in the Oakland Unified School District in 1977 and retired in 1999. This tradition of service has inspired all three of his children to follow in his footsteps: Councilmember Heystek’s siblings are United States Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Loretta Heystek and two-term San Leandro School Board Member Louis Heystek, his twin brother.
Councilmember Heystek is currently the Coordinator of Youth Programs at the Yolo Family Resource Center, a non-profit agency in Woodland dedicated to connecting the residents of Yolo County to a variety of social services. He manages the Woodland Coalition for Youth, a $600,000 youth development project of the Sierra Health Foundation’s REACH initiative.
