Point Reyes Light - November 24, 2004
Bayside trails in future of Inverness and Marshall
By Dave Mitchell
A shoreline trail from downtown Inverness to Chicken Ranch Beach is in the long-distance planning of Marin Open Space District, principal planner Steve Petterle told The Light Tuesday.
Board members of the California State Coastal Conservancy at 1 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 2, are expected to allocate $38,000 to the County of Marin, so it can survey 11 easements that already provide the public with access to Tomales Bay’s shoreline.
Petterle said the Inverness trail is "a visionary thing" that may not be built for 20 years.
Besides the six easements to be surveyed in Inverness, the county will survey five more along the bay’s east shore. Petterle said those easements are scattered along the bay from two miles south of downtown Marshall north to Dillon Beach.
The Open Space District hopes to eventually build a trail along this stretch of shoreline too, but the public can’t look forward to walking it anytime soon. "It may be 100 years before they get it," he said.
How the county acquired access easements
During the last 20 to 25 years, the county has acquired a scattering of access easements along both shores when landowners got permits to build on bayside property, Petterle said.
As a condition of getting a permit from the California Coastal Commission, landowners have often had to dedicate public-access easements across some of their property, he explained.
Petterle and Dick Wayman, spokesman for the Coastal Conservancy, told The Light the reason for surveying the easements at this time is that their exact boundaries have never been precisely established.
If the county is to "monitor" the easements so that no landowner builds something that encroaches on them, the county needs to find out exactly where the easements are, Petterle said.
The shoreline trails on both sides of the bay cannot be created at this time, Petterle noted, because the easements are not contiguous.
Have to be ‘visionary’
What gives the Open Space District hope that eventually the two shoreline trails can be built is that each time someone owning land along the bay applies for a coastal permit to develop the land or change what’s already on it, the landowner will need to grant public-access easements.
Over the years, these easements will eventually become contiguous, Petterle said. "You’ve got to be visionary," the Open Space District planner added. "If we’re not visionary, who’s going to be?"
Next week’s Coastal Conservancy board meeting will be in Palo Alto City Hall.
Also to be voted on is a $1 million allocation to Marin Agricultural Land Trust to purchase an agricultural easement over 1,125 acres beside Tomales Bay just to the north of Walker Creek.
Allocations for MALT & Estero Americano watershed
Sheep rancher Martin Pozzi is currently negotiating to buy the property. A conservation easement would prevent in perpetuity any non-agricultural development of the land.
A third allocation to be voted on is $650,000 for restoring ranch lands in the Estero Americano watershed. The estuary forms the countyline between Marin and Sonoma in the Valley Ford area.
Typical restoration projects on ranches involve stopping erosion (often through planting foliage) and erecting fences along creeks so that livestock doesn’t break down creekbanks.
Proposing the "resource-restoration projects" is Sonoma County’s Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District. Although part of the estuary’s watershed is in West Marin, Marin RCD is letting Gold Ridge "take the lead in the watershed," Nancy Scolari of the Point Reyes Station-based Marin RCD told The Light. Most of the watershed is in Sonoma County, she explained.
The Coastal Conservancy got the money for these projects from a series of park-bond acts approved by state voters in the last four years, spokesman Wayman said.