The county’s recently announced West Marin Vision project is an opportunity to shape the future of our communities. County staff have emphasized the importance of public participation, but they have been vague about how they will select the community advisory committee that will guide the process. If this effort is to be legitimate and lasting, this group must reflect the full range of West Marin. Dillon Beach is not Bolinas, Stinson Beach is not Point Reyes Station. Inverness, Tomales, Marshall, Nicasio, Olema—each community has its own geography, economy, history, social fabric and lived experience of county policy. A visioning process that does not recognize this diversity will fail.
West Marin is all unincorporated, so we live under a peculiar arrangement. We have no governance of our own. Decisions about land use, housing, economic development and public investment are made by a five‑member Board of Supervisors that also governs the suburban corridor along 101. We have spent decades crafting community plans, housing strategies and village‑scale visions that try to balance working landscapes, ecological limits, local jobs and year‑round neighbors. Yet lately those documents, rather than providing binding direction, have been minimized or ignored. Though the county acts as our local government, recent decisions, like the Point Reyes gas station approval and the short‑term rental ordinance, paid little heed to our wishes.
Incorporation is politically and financially unrealistic for small, rural villages, so meaningful local control must come from elsewhere. Formal county deference to locally crafted plans and decisions would be a good start. The visioning project has been described as an invitation for coastal and inland villages to help shape West Marin’s future. If that intent is real, we must solidify the county’s deference to local priorities. A visioning effort worthy of the name would make village plans, community‑based economic strategies and workforce housing the starting point for all major county actions here. It would require clear, public reasons grounded in state law, the Coastal Act, or genuine regional obligations whenever the county departs from them.
A legitimate process would also take representation seriously. Any advisory committee should not be selected in San Rafael, but rather assembled from the ground up, with each village association or equivalent selecting its own representative. Beyond geography, it must reflect those who live and work here, not just those who can attend a mid‑week meeting at the civic center. This means younger and older residents; Spanish‑speaking neighbors; Coast Miwok and other Indigenous people; ranchers, farmers and farmworkers; service and care workers; artists and small‑business owners; and residents of farmworker and affordable housing projects. Local organizations work every day with these communities, so they should help identify participants.
Questions about representation are inseparable from deeper concerns about the county’s emerging economic vision. Our area has long been Marin’s breadbasket: a place where dairies, ranches, row crops, shellfish operations and local food businesses feed the region and beyond, while anchoring a culture shaped by land‑based work. That reality is not accidental; it rests on decades of deliberate policy choices, from the use of the Williamson Act—which allows landowners to contract with counties to keep land in agriculture in return for lower tax assessments—to A‑60 zoning, which limits parcels to one house per 60 acres. Those tools, alongside conservation easements, helped preserve more than 50,000 acres of farmland and a network of climate‑resilient, wildlife‑rich landscapes.
Yet as tourism grows and county staff advance a countywide economic vitality agenda, the language around West Marin increasingly emphasizes “leveraging” our scenic coastline, recreational assets and rural charm for economic gain. When West Marin is framed primarily as a destination, there is pressure to monetize our landscapes, loosen protections and optimize policy for visitor spending and second‑home values.
Were West Marin seen first as a home for farmworkers and families, a source of local food and a network of small, interdependent villages, the priorities look very different: keeping working lands working, year‑round residents housed, communities first and destinations second. A visioning process that ignores this tension risks becoming a marketing exercise for a tourism‑driven economy rather than a serious conversation about the future of a rural region.
Done right, this project could begin to change the consequences of earlier decisions that failed to fully honor local plans and local knowledge. It could recognize that a genuine partnership can only come from county deference to democratically developed community plans, to organizations that have earned trust on the ground and to the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on the outcome. It could promise that future county decisions on land use, housing, tourism and economic development will start from village‑level standards and an understanding that West Marin is a rural home, not just a brand. It could build a community advisory committee that looks the way West Marin actually looks, so that the vision we produce together is not just another document, but a shared roadmap we can recognize as our own.
Chris Desser is a land use lawyer and a Point Reyes Station resident.