The Bolinas Community Public Utility District is asking the College of Marin for a meeting to discuss the future of a historic property on Wharf Road that includes the town’s only public dock and a marine lab that shuttered in 2006.
Last week, the district’s directors approved a letter to the college’s board of trustees. Ralph Camiccia, who signed the letter along with Jack Siedman, the utility district’s board president, said the dock is heavily used by fishermen, children and tourists alike, and he wants to maintain its public use.
“People don’t realize how vital it is to the community,” Mr. Camiccia said. “If the dock was to be sold to a private entity, there would be no access for any boat in the lagoon other than the private boat club.”
The college has owned the Bolinas Bay Marine Center—which includes a lab building, a two-story house, a water storage tank, a maintenance shed and the dock—since the early 1960s. In 2006, the college closed the facility, citing a number of health and safety issues.
According to an assessment commissioned by the college two years ago, the site has declined in value an average of 2 to 3 percent per year because of deferred maintenance.
Diana Conti, president of the college’s board, said the school will decide in the coming months whether to remove the health and safety hazards or build a new facility that meets code requirements.
“It is something that in the next four or five months we’ll start to focus on again,” she said. She added, “Everything we’d do at the Bolinas site would be costly. And we have to make sure there are no viable ways to serve students [there] before we consider selling it.”
Last summer, Marin voters approved the $265 million Measure B to improve the college’s facilities. That bond states that one of its purposes is to “repair and update science labs at the Bolinas Marine Laboratory.” Yet Ms. Conti said the bond money will instead be put toward science labs on the college’s other two campuses.
The college has also curtailed its marine biology program, cutting classes from being offered yearly to every other year. Joe Mueller, a biology instructor, said there have been letters of support for marine biology classes but that college administrators haven’t responded.
Ms. Conti said the college welcomed public input. “We’re part of that community and we want to hear from them in this process,” she said.
Numerous issues plague the property, according to the college’s assessment. It’s located near two major fault lines and sits within a tsunami warning area and a flood zone. Behind the buildings is a major rock slide area, and the two-story house is infested with black mold and mildew.
A presentation on the property given to the college’s board in 2015 concluded that it would cost more to renovate the facility than it would to rebuild it.
The site has also been discussed by Bolinas Community Public Utility District directors in recent years. According to minutes from the February 2015 meeting, Mr. Siedman said it would be ideal if the property were under local ownership and control, and suggested it be used as senior housing or for community meetings.
The district board began to consider the possibility of acquiring the property at a fair market value of $0, due to the required clean-up costs. But the conversations dried up by that summer. According to Mr. Siedman, the college said the idea of selling the property was “off the table.”
This week, Ms. Conti said that possibility will be one of the various options the board will consider when it assesses the future of the site in coming months.
The property was first developed in 1914, when the United States Coast Guard used the location as a life-saving station and lighthouse. After the Coast Guard left Bolinas in 1955, the facility was gifted to the Marin Junior College District, now College of Marin, through an intra-governmental transfer.
The college converted the facility into a marine biology lab and educational center and added aquariums and sea water pumps. In the early 2000s, there were live specimens in the aquariums. But use of the lab began to decline, leaving the buildings to grow musty. The college used funds from a 2004 bond program to pay for mold mitigation and the removal of formaldehyde in the lab. But a failing boiler brought the mold back.