Inverness voters will have to decide how to vote on a new wildfire prevention tax without an endorsement from the Inverness Public Utility District.
At a special meeting last week, IPUD board members first moved to oppose the voter initiative—which would boost their own agency’s funding with a 20-cent-per-square-foot parcel tax—but after an appeal by the measure’s architect, Jerry Meral, the board chose not to take a position.
“We’re being such wimps, but we’re doing our best,” board president Ken Emanuels said with a laugh at the close of the meeting.
Measure O, as the initiative will be known, will appear on the November ballot. If voters approve it, IPUD will begin receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars intended for projects like fuel breaks, vegetation removal and water supply improvements. But IPUD’s staff and board, balking at a mandate to stretch their responsibilities beyond providing drinking water and emergency response, voiced serious doubts about the measure’s appropriateness. The district will soon provide voters more information through emails, but will not take an official stance.
Mr. Meral said it’s up to Inverness constituents to tell IPUD what they want from their utility district. “Initiatives are undertaken when some government agency doesn’t do everything you want,” he said. “I don’t blame them at all for being neutral.”
In the absence of a formal position by IPUD, a group of five residents signed an opposition argument for the voter pamphlet last week. The argument, filed by Woody Elliott and signed by Francine Allen, Tom Baty, Tom Gaman, Kathy Hartzell and Carlos Porrata, enumerates the district’s own misgivings and calls Measure O a “costly and unrealistic effort to placate our fundamental fear of catastrophic wildfire.”
Even the measure’s proponents agree that IPUD’s concerns are legitimate. The district’s four-person administrative staff is already stretched thin, and board members said they’d rather use any new sources of funding to strengthen their existing emergency services and water infrastructure.
An initiative dreamed up by IPUD itself would have likely funded pay raises, new water tanks and two new positions when operations chief Jim Fox retires, as he is both fire chief and water superintendent. Wildfire prevention would constitute a new mission for the utility.
“I’m worried we’re not going to be able to do what this is asking us to do,” board member Brent Johnson said.
The Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, funded by its own countywide tax passed in 2020, might render Measure O redundant, some board members worry. But so far the authority has focused much of its work in eastern Marin as it secures permits for projects on the coast, and Mr. Meral feels IPUD must answer to its voters and their wildfire fears on a local level.
“This measure did not come out of nowhere,” he told the board. “Almost every year in the last four years, a community about the size of Inverness has burned to the ground.”
Mr. Meral said he understood the hesitancy by the board and staff. “I detect from comments that some of you have made that this isn’t really a role you want to have,” he said. “I suppose so, but it is a role that your voters want you to have. They’re worried.”
He said he found more than 80 percent support for his initiative in a survey of roughly 200 residents.
An ambitious shaded fire break on the Inverness Ridge coupled with focused efforts to stake out defensible space, clear foliage and fortify the local water supply for firefighting would ease voters’ anxiety, Mr. Meral argued. But even with $250,000 in new annual tax revenue, these projects could be a long way away.
The thorny network of regulations that govern large projects in Inverness and its neighboring public lands pose challenges for a small agency like IPUD. Its staff would have to hire a consultant to determine where meaningful work could be completed between its own watershed, private property, Tomales Bay State Park and the Point Reyes National Seashore, and what kinds of separate environmental reviews would be needed under the California Coastal Act, the National Environmental Protection Act and the California Environmental Quality Act.
Mr. Meral told the Light that he thought the kind of work the tax would fund—especially water supply improvements and defensible space clearing on private property—would not pose major regulatory hurdles. He is focused on replacing the three 40-year-old, 10,000-gallon wooden storage tanks on Perth Way, which could go up in flames during a wildfire, and said the district was already familiar with the environmental review process for such projects.
The tank replacement project could easily spend three years’ worth of revenue from Measure O, Mr. Meral estimated. Measure O’s flexible language allows expenditures that “increase the availability of water to fight fires and survive drought,” but he made clear he believes the tank replacement would constitute a wildfire mitigation project.
Indeed, IPUD is eager to replace the three leaky tanks but has never secured a cost estimate, customer services manager Wade Holland said. The project would have clear infrastructural benefits, but Mr. Holland said he didn’t see the tanks as especially important for fire prevention.
“If they burn, it’s because there’s already a fire going through there,” he said. “Our interest in replacing those tanks is that they leak so badly.”
A larger-scale project like an Inverness Ridge fuel break would require more collaboration and compliance than the agency is accustomed to. One line of discussion could lead to a collaborative fix for this problem: Mr. Meral said with a generous pot of local taxpayer money, Inverness could put itself first in line for M.W.P.A. projects by cost sharing with the agency. The agency has already made headway on regulations. Last Thursday, it secured a coastal permit from Marin County to clear vegetation along key evacuation routes in Inverness, Bolinas and Stinson Beach.
Measure O would put Inverness “ahead of the game” for M.W.P.A.’s fire mitigation work, Mr. Meral said, and the authority could take care of regulatory compliance on IPUD’s behalf. “Otherwise, M.W.P.A. will treat us the same way as all the other West Marin communities,” he said. “Those communities are not offering that assistance to M.W.P.A. We should do so.”
Mark Brown, the authority’s executive officer, said Mr. Meral’s suggestion was a “relationship that could work.” But he wondered if the relatively slow march of M.W.P.A. projects in West Marin, which could pick up in the next few months, had given Inverness voters the wrong impression that the agency was not going to do enough for their community.
“Do the taxpayers want to give Measure C an opportunity to have more of an effect in Inverness before they tax themselves again?” he asked.
Supervisor Dennis Rodoni, who became president of M.W.P.A.’s board this month, supports Measure O, describing it as a strong local response to the threat of wildfire. If it passes, he said, its Inverness-specific funds will help bolster the authority’s lagging efforts in West Marin.
“The reality is that the M.W.P.A. contributions to Inverness are not huge,” he said, “so when it comes to IPUD addressing its wildfire issues, I just think it could use the extra support.”