Marin County has sued the former owners of a Lagunitas property over an unpermitted bridge spanning a tributary of San Geronimo Creek. Aldo Tarigo and Adrienne Terrass, who have since sold the property and moved to Maine, are in talks with county attorneys to resolve the dispute, county counsel Brian Washington said on Monday.
The lawsuit comes after years of back and forth over the 12-foot-wide concrete bridge that Mr. Tarigo, an architect, built in 2006. It spans just five feet of Barranca Creek, and it replaced an older bridge that Mr. Tarigo said was crumbling as storm season was fast-approaching. He and his wife had moved onto the property in 1993 and sought to renovate it around 2008. The couple appealed a permit decision to the Planning Commission, and subsequently scaled down the size of their proposed home and moved it further from the creek. But they never received a permit, and the bridge was the biggest sticking point.
The homeowners argued that professional hydrologists had surveyed the work and found the bridge compliant with storm data projections. They said they never received a notice of violation from the county.
But the county’s complaint, which was filed in July, says the structure violated rules that require bridges to clear streamflows by at least two feet during a 100-year storm and keep abutments above the streambank. In 2019, when the project was appealed to the Board of Supervisors, county staffers recommended either mandating the bridge’s removal or the preparation of an environmental impact report.
County planner Tammy Taylor told supervisors, “Due to the fact that the [bridge’s] abutments were constructed below the top of the bank and into Barranca Creek, the bridge does not meet county code requirements with regards to keeping permanent obstructions out of the sensitive creek bank areas, and there remains a potentially significant, unavoidable impact with regards to flood, environmental and safety hazards from the bridge.”
Supervisors sympathized with the couple, whose renovation plans were stalled in part due to legal action by the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network over Marin’s streamside development rules. The county placed an injunction on development in the San Geronimo Valley in 2012 while it wrote a new ordinance for streamside regulations in the valley, per a court order, and Mr. Tarigo’s project was the only affected one at the time.
Supervisors sought a compromise for the couple, directing Mr. Tarigo to modify the bridge and consider mitigation work elsewhere in the creek, saying that removing the bridge might cause even greater environmental impacts.
The Light could not reach Mr. Tarigo or Ms. Terrass for comment, and it is unclear when they withdrew their application. The home was sold several months ago.
In the complaint, the county stipulates that Mr. Tarigo and Ms. Terrass could be liable for all costs incurred by the county in connection with bringing the bridge into compliance, as well as a fee of $2,500 per day. Mr. Washington said the number is a standard for legal proceedings and not necessarily reflective of final fees that may be applied. The complaint asks the defendants to pay for the county’s attorney fees, hearing fees and any administrative expenses that could occur during the process.
A case management conference is scheduled for Dec. 22.