Caltrans gave a long-delayed update on the dormant Green Bridge project last week that put the issue squarely on the community radar but left many of the roughly 70 attendees at the Dance Palace feeling frustrated and confused.
A dozen or so Caltrans officials mingled with the audience, but they did not give a presentation or conduct a question-and-answer session about their plans for the replacing the century-old Point Reyes Station landmark.
Placards were stationed about the room, but otherwise people were left to pick up fragments of information in a noisy chamber where conversations were hard to follow and it wasn’t always easy to distinguish officials from guests.
“It was a surprise to everyone that it wasn’t a regular meeting, where we would receive information in presentation form,” said Steve Antonaros, president of the Point Reyes Station Village Association. “It became a social event because there was no structure to it. All the locals were talking and standing in front of the boards, which made it hard to find things out.”
Officials at the meeting gave their latest estimates of the project timetable, with construction scheduled to begin in the summer of 2026, and they described the steps they will take to minimize the environmental impacts.
Traffic on Highway 1 will be closed in both directions for at least three weeks, transforming the ten-minute ride from Inverness to Point Reyes Station into a 25-minute commute through Olema, over Platform Bridge Road and past Black Mountain.
The project, which is meant to address seismic vulnerabilities, is expected to take one and a half years to complete. Traffic over the bridge, which is located less than half a mile from the San Andreas fault, will be one-way for unspecified periods of time before and after the new bridge is installed over Lagunitas Creek. The bridge will be fabricated off-site and then pieced together like a Lego set, according to Ron Sangalang, the project manager.
The July 10 session was the first public meeting Caltrans has held on the project since 2017, when it was poised to select a design from five options. But the project became tied up in litigation, challenged by opponents who argued that a retrofit would be less disruptive and would retain the structure’s historic look. The lawsuit was dismissed last year.
The new bridge—a nondescript concrete span—will do away with the existing green trusses in favor of low steel railings. It will have 5-foot-wide shoulders and a 6-foot sidewalk, widening the current crossing by 6 feet to meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Caltrans had previously disclosed much of the information shared at the meeting, including the reasons for replacing the bridge, arguments against retrofitting the existing structure and a diagram of the long detour.
But some of the placards provided new information about how the agency intends to mitigate the project’s impact on wildlife and the creek bed, including a proposal to plant trees and install a walking path on the grassy county-owned lot at the corner of B Street and Highway 1. The agency is discussing the idea with county officials.
“There are tree-replanting ratios that we need to be able to ensure that we meet,” said Brooklyn Klepl, a Caltrans environmental scientist. “Some of those are one-to-one, and some are more than that. Not all of them can be along the creek.”
Preparation work in the creek itself must be done during the dry season, when the creek is low, to minimize disruption to the creek bed and wildlife, she said. Temporary dams will be installed on either bank to prevent debris from falling into the creek or the work from muddying the water.
“We are doing as little work inside the creek bed as possible,” Ms. Klepl said. “We’re not proposing to do any crane work in the creek. And we are working to make sure we can make the creek bed look beautiful again after the construction is over.”
The work is being timed to avoid the nesting season of birds and other animals and to avoid the salmon spawning season, she said.
During the three-week shutdown, crews will work around the clock, said José David, the construction engineer. “Within that window, we want to demolish and build as much as we can,” he said.
Caltrans plans to set up staging areas on either side of the creek, one at the Point Reyes Animal Hospital and another at a private home at 11000 Highway 1. It is currently attempting to negotiate easements with the owners of both properties, including veterinarian Mary Whitney, who has been running the clinic for over two decades.
Power lines and a water main beneath the bridge will have to be rerouted during construction, and a temporary utility pole will be located on Dr. Whitney’s property. She is unhappy about the impacts of that work and worries the disruptions could drive her out of business.
“The plan is to take down my heritage redwood tree in front of the hospital for the temporary power pole,” she told the Light. “That is an environmental impact that wasn’t represented at all at the meeting.”
When she walked into the session, Dr. Whitney said, the first thing she saw was a placard that showed a “grossly inaccurate” project footprint that reduced the impact the construction would have on her property. “I grabbed the lead engineer and showed it to him, and he took it down,” she said.
Several people at the meeting expressed concern about Dr. Whitney’s business—and on the animals she cares for.
Gordon Bennett, whose dog, Chaca, is one of Dr. Whitney’s patients, worried about noise levels. A chart displayed at the meeting said they would reach 92 decibels at the animal hospital during the pile-driving phase of the project.
“It’s going to be louder than the sound of a garbage disposal, 24/7, for three weeks,” he said. “And decibel levels are logarithmic, so if their estimates are just a few points off, it’s going to be way louder.”
Caltrans plans to install a 16-foot-tall sound barrier around the clinic, but Mr. Bennett suggested they install two or three. “If your animal is sick and listening to a garbage grinder, it’s going to be extremely stressful,” he said. “The people who live on the corner are going to go nuts. If I were them, I’d leave town. The animals don’t have that option.”
David Moser is a co-owner of the property that will be used as the second staging area, and he will lose a towering fir and a painstakingly landscaped garden to the project. He told the Light that he was skeptical that the two-way road closure would only last three weeks.
“It’s obviously going to have a very personal impact on us, but it’s going to be extraordinarily disruptive to the community,” he said. “I think people have been lulled to sleep by the lack of news about the project, and I think Caltrans would dearly love to have kept it that way.”
The placards at the meeting did not display the controversial bridge design, which was only visible on an inconspicuously stationed laptop. When Point Reyes Station resident Cathleen Dorinson spotted it, she expressed delight with the agency’s choice.
“I love it,” she said. “It’s going to stand up to an earthquake, it’s going to take the big hay trucks and livestock trucks, and it’s a nice-looking bridge. It’s going to be unobtrusive, it’s going to be beautiful, it’s going to be wider, and it’s going to be safer for pedestrians.”
The state approved funding for the $19.5 million project in October, a development welcomed by Marin County Supervisor Dennis Rodoni.
“We’re really fortunate to have the state commit the funding to get this done,” he told the Light after the meeting. “This is a great opportunity.”
A destructive earthquake would precipitate a much longer closure than three weeks, he said, and if the bridge isn’t replaced soon, the state could impose weight limits that would restrict feed and milk trucks traveling over the span.
The project is in the last stretch of the design phase, which is about 90 percent complete. “This is where it starts to get real,” Mr. Rodoni said, noting the large turnout for the meeting.
Matt O’Donnell, a Caltrans spokesman who attended the session, said the informal open-house format was intended to give community members an opportunity to ask direct questions of staff.
But Laura Arndt, a Point Reyes Station resident who dislikes the new design, agreed with others who said the meeting format was confusing.
“It was noisy and chaotic, and it was hard to hear their answers,” she said. “It might have been better to take one question at a time, so that everybody could hear the same information at once. It was very choppy.”
Her biggest concern, however, was about the impact on Dr. Whitney’s business. “It’s only fair that she be compensated if she has to close or can’t function with all the noise and vibration. There needs to be a reasonable effort to hear her concerns. That seems only fair. She’s more affected than any of us,” Ms. Arndt said.