The Light this week interviewed both candidates for Fourth District supervisor, Dotty LeMieux and Steve Kinsey. The same questions were asked of each candidate, and the interviews were equally timed. The interview with LeMieux was published in last week's Light. What follows is the interview with Kinsey. The election will be held Tuesday, Nov. 5.
Since then, he has had to deflect claims that he hasn't been candid about his occupation - he designs and builds single-family houses - and that he is too much of a compromiser, particularly when he represented the community in negotiations with developers of the French Ranch subdivision.
If he's going to beat opponent Dotty LeMieux, Kinsey will have to continue to spread his name in Fourth District population centers like Corte Madera, Larkspur, and Novato. And he'll have to convince voters he's the strong environmentalist he and his supporters always thought he was.
He has played a major role in the school's ambitious longterm planning, and he wrote the grant application that resulted in the school's $50,000 Healthy Start program.
He has brought a branch of the county library to the Valley, coached Little League baseball, and helped start various art and recreation programs for children and adults.
Since 1990, Kinsey has been chairman of Marin Conservation League's Water Committee. He is widely credited for crafting Measure V, a 1991 ballot measure that steered Marin Municipal Water District in the direction of water conservation instead of importation.
A hiking enthusiast, Kinsey strongly supports Measure A, the ballot measure that would raise the sales tax a quarter cent to pay for land acquisition by Marin Agricultural Land Trust and the county Open Space District.
In an interview last Tuesday in Point Reyes Station, here's what he had to say about agriculture, social services, the Lucasfilm expansion, low-cost housing, West Marin Sanitary Landfill, and protection of ranchland on the Marshall shore of Tomales Bay:
The gradual elimination of federal milk subsidies and reduced demand for red meat will continue to take a heavy toll on West Marin ranching, he said.
His plan is to work with county Agricultural Commissioner Stacy Carlsen to define areas in West Marin that are suitable for crop farming. He wants to see dairy and beef ranchers join forces with organic-produce growers.
"Nobody can go in and start raising crops on land they have to buy at going rates," he said. "But if they partner up with the existing ranch families, then their operations can provide the ranchers with supplemental income to augment their existing grazing operations."
"They have come back formally and said that absolutely there was the opportunity for a win-win," he said, "Ranchers could get an agricultural rate for water so that it would be affordable, and MMWD would make a little bit of money each year off water that otherwise was just sitting in the bucket."
Kinsey would also like to see Marin County join forces with other North Bay counties, especially Sonoma, to market agricultural products from more of a "regional perspective."
Lucas, in having to commit much of his land to agriculture, will allow farmers or ranchers to pursue food production on his land without having pay a steep price to buy the land outright, Kinsey noted.
The other essential element Kinsey wanted to see - and eventually did see - was a guarantee that the Lucas plan included a link in the public trail system that Kinsey would like connected from Mount Burdell in Novato, west to the Point Reyes headlands.
"This is the fulfillment of an urban-growth boundary extending from White's Hill to the Nicasio Reservoir," he said. "The real buffer against suburban sprawl into our agricultural lands is now in place."
He said the tax money can be earmarked for the health and human service programs now being cut back due to the retreat of state and federal funding. "This a project that is good for Marin County," he said.
Kinsey called escalating real estate values and the resulting dearth of low-cost housing "the unseen killer" of West Marin's social fabric.
He said he likes the county ordinance that requires developers to price 15 percent of their houses below market rate. He added, however, that if the county expects the requirement to solve the housing problem by itself, it's a failure.
What's needed is "a complete strategy" that would include more flexibility in promoting second units and cooperative housing.
The strategy could also include more ambitious ideas aimed at getting people into existing houses - not new ones - at more reasonable prices. One solution, he said, would be for a land trust to finance a down payment on a given property. In exchange, the owner would be entitled to maybe three-percent annual appreciation on the property - making the house more affordable to next buyer once the first owner sells.
Or, a land trust might take over a homeowner's mortgage payments (or annuitize the house and issue payments an elderly owner might need as income). Once the owner dies, title would revert to the trust.
Kinsey was not specific about what he foresees in the future for the sticky problem of getting rid of West Marin's garbage. He did say "we need a broad-based, community-driven analysis of our options."
He said a top priority of his agenda would be to retain the fulltime services of county Waste Management Director Dee Johnson, whose job lately has been threatened by the county budget ax.
Kinsey's goal is to "give people the tools and mechanisms to keep much of their waste in place and to deal with it on their own properties. So I want to see an ambitious demand-management component."
Kinsey said he supports the idea behind proposed legislation aimed at protecting the east shore of Tomales Bay from development, but said he would not push such a bill in Congress while the affected landowners remain as bitterly divided as they seem to be.
After the election, the candidate said, he'd like to "sit down with both sides and say, 'What are your specific problems with this?' I think that what we can say is that all parties agree with the goal of protecting the east side is a useful one and a viable one. Start from that."
"We may have to go back to state and local sources to try and find funding" to buy conservation easements from willing ranchers.
"I'm confident... we'll find a program that starts to define the management responsibilities and limit those to a local overseer like MALT, someone [the ranchers] are comfortable with," he said.