The longest-serving mayor in the county is leaving politics.

Sand City’s favorite son is pulling up his stakes.

After serving 38 years as Sand City’s mayor, David Pendergrass stunned City Council at a Feb. 7 meeting by announcing he will retire April 30. “I laid a good foundation for the city, and the future’s bright,” he says.

Pendergrass, a lifelong Sand City resident, says his doctor recently told him “to give it a rest.” After discussing it with his family, he agreed it was best to finally retire from a job he’s held since 1978, when Jimmy Carter was in office and Grease was the highest-grossing film in the United States.

But the decision wasn’t easy.

“I really struggled with [it],” he says. “My heart and soul was in the progress of our city and its future.”

And for a man who has spent his whole life in the tiny city, perhaps most surprising is that Pendergrass says he is moving to Redding, to be closer to his grandkids and great-grandson. He and his wife have already bought a house, and he says he looks forward to decorating his new home office with all of the Disney paraphernalia he’s collected over the years. “I’m a Disney fanatic,” he says.

Pendergrass is proud of his accomplishments as mayor, which include a decades-long fight to allow the city to develop its shoreline. The process involved hard-fought negotiations with environmental interests over the course of years, and was made possible by the city forging ahead, at great expense, to build its own desalination plant.

“My goal was always water [supply], and that never changed,” he says.

For the mayor of a city of just under 400 residents, Pendergrass has long wielded outsized power in the region, sitting on a slew of powerful regional boards like the Fort Ord Reuse Authority and the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District.

“My philosophy is to not only represent the city but work together to make it a better region,” he says. “Obviously I’m not anti-growth.”

Jim Heisinger, Sand City’s city attorney, says City Council has 45 days from April 30 to appoint a mayor, and after that, another 45 days to appoint a new councilmember. Heisinger says he expects naming a new mayor to be on the council’s May 2 agenda.

As for who will fill the many board seats Pendergrass holds, Heisinger says other councilmembers already serve as alternates for the majority of them, though ultimately it will be up to the new mayor to appoint representatives.

The imminent departure of Pendergrass is not the only mayoral shakeup of late: After serving as mayor of Greenfield for 16 years, John Huerta was recalled Jan. 24 by a 64-36 margin.

Huerta sat on the boards of the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments and Transportation Agency for Monterey County, and Greenfield Interim City Manager Robert Perrault says he expects City Council to appoint replacements at its Feb. 28 meeting.

But unlike Huerta, Pendergrass is going out on his own terms, and he’s looking forward life’s next chapter.

“It’s beautiful,” Pendergrass says of Redding. “That’s our future as long as the good lord lets me live.”