The Point Reyes Station Village Association is vowing to fight the proposed overhaul of the gas station building if the county approves a plan to replace the current checkout counter with a full-scale convenience store, transform the building’s exterior and add five new apartments.
The group maintains that the project would substantially increase traffic at the busy intersection of Highway 1 and Fourth and A Streets and strip the building of its historic character.
“This project will increase traffic and be entirely unsafe,” said Pamela Bridges, a member of P.R.S.V.A.’s leadership circle and co-chair of its design review committee. “It needs a traffic and pedestrian study.”
But a senior county planner says the plan appears to meet the necessary conditions for approval. Immanuel Bereket, principal planner with the Marin County Community Development Agency, explained that a new state law intended to boost California’s housing supply requires the county to consider the project application expeditiously.
A deputy zoning administrator is scheduled to consider the permit application next Thursday. If it is approved, opponents could appeal to the Planning Commission, then the Board of Supervisors, and ultimately the California Coastal Commission
“We can only apply objective design standards,” Mr. Bereket said of the county’s review. “Any denial would have to be based on a specific health and safety code.”
So far, he said, opponents of the project have not identified any aspect of the plan that conflicts with those codes. Moreover, he said, staffers at the coastal commission have reviewed the proposal without raising any objections.
The building’s owner is Julie Van Alyea, the president of Redwood Oil, a California company that owns 23 stations from Cotati to the Oregon border. She bought the station in 2018 and changed the name from Greenbridge Gas & Auto to Point Reyes Station.
“I have been working with the county for quite a while on the remodeling plans,” she wrote in an email to the Light. “I trust that the county will determine what is necessary to comply with applicable county and state rules, including traffic impacts, and ensure that the project integrates safely within the community.”
The renovation would maintain the building’s current footprint but totally reconfigure the building’s interior, making room for three two-bedroom apartments and two three-bedroom apartments, including one affordably priced unit. The cramped checkout counter would be expanded into a 1,900-square-foot convenience store.
The current tenants, Blue Waters Kay-aking and Ink Paper Plate, would be forced to leave to make room for the remodel. The changes would require enclosing the front porch, which P.R.S.V.A. members regard as a historic feature of the building.
“This project will really change the look of the place,” said Steve Antonaros, the group’s president. “If the features that define it disappear, the character is gone.”
Once used as a warehouse for peas and artichokes, the building was first located near the Point Reyes train depot, just behind today’s Building Supply in the center of town. By 1942, it had been moved to its current spot, where it was converted into a feed store and gas station.
Historian Dewey Livingston recently completed an evaluation of the building and concluded that it could qualify for the National Register of Historic Places. “The building is a fine example of vernacular architecture in a rural agriculture-based coastal town,” he wrote.
The farms that stored their crops in the building were operated by Japanese and Italian immigrants, Mr. Livingston said. When both groups came under suspicion during World War II, artichoke and pea farming ended in Point Reyes.
“The cultural importance of these immigrant farmers has not been acknowledged to date, and this is the last extant building in the area associated with that theme,” he wrote.
The hearing on the proposal was originally scheduled for Jan. 18, but Ms. Van Alyea requested a postponement after discussing community concerns with P.R.S.V.A. leaders, who met with her by Zoom on Jan. 15.
According to Mr. Antonaros, she agreed to consider changes to the location of the store entrance—reorienting it from Highway 1 to Mesa Road—to improve the flow of traffic.
Opponents of the project are concerned that the reconfiguration of parking spaces, which includes the addition of a handicapped spot, would make it more difficult to access the gas pumps, especially for drivers of oversized vehicles.
Anne Sands, a Dogtown resident, articulated these concerns in a letter to the county.
“Having a reasonably accessible fueling station in Point Reyes Station has been essential to me and to my friends who are ranchers, equestrian business owners, contractors, landscapers, tree workers and fisherfolk who have large vehicles and often haul trailers or chippers as part of their professional services,” she wrote. “Visitors with R.V.s will also be impacted.”