A proposed residence in Stinson Beach received approval on Monday from the Planning Commission, which struck down an appeal from neighbors who feared the home would exacerbate flooding in their low-lying neighborhood—based on what a county planner called a “woefully outdated code.”
The 1,400-square foot residence with an attached 535-square foot garage will be the largest house on the block on Calle del Embarcadero, where rainwater runoff frequently causes nearby Easkoot Creek to jump its banks and flood the neighborhood.
“It’s like a mansion compared to ours,” said Kathleen Hurley during the commission’s hearing on the appeal on Monday. Ms. Hurley has lived in Stinson Beach since 2006 and owns two cottages next door to the proposed development.
In September, Ms. Hurley and another neighbor, Erika Lowry, appealed the Deputy Zoning Administrator’s approval of the project and argued before the Planning Commission that the property will worsen flooding on the road. Lying in a floodplain at the base of Mount Tamalpais, the calle is one of the hardest hit areas in Stinson when heavy rains bring flooding.
Currently, when Easkoot Creek floods, water pools in a vacant lot that acts as a buffer to keep flooding from spreading to several other homes along the calle. This lot is the site of the proposed development, and neighbors are worried that the new house will eliminate their floodwater buffer, increasing runoff during storms.
“Our home, so close next door, is subject to several problems,” said Ms. Lowry, also a resident since 2006. “Flood problems are my number one concern.”
Calle neighbors are also worried the house will be used as a vacation rental.
With a garage similar to the size of the other Calle del Embarcadero houses, the new development has been criticized as the latest addition to the wave of wealthy Bay Area homeowners establishing adjunct residences in West Marin.
“The community is being gutted,” said Bruce Wachtell, who has lived in Stinson Beach since 1961 and attended Monday’s meeting. “These people are trying to get a maximum return, not live here.”
But the house’s future owner, Heidi Hjorth, a realtor from Mill Valley, denies that claim. Mr. Hjorth purchased the 4,800-square foot parcel a year-and-a-half ago and has submitted numerous design revisions since applying for a coastal permit last February.
“I know there have been questions of whether we’ll keep it,” said Ms. Hjorth, a San Francisco native. “But we do plan to keep it.” Although Ms. Hjorth mentioned after the meeting that her husband, Fabricio, will be living at the residence full time, she went on to say that the home will serve as a second home.
To fight the plan, neighbors asserted in their appeal that the development would be located within a 100-year floodplain, violating Local Coastal Program restrictions. They also argued that the property would encroach on a riparian setback that requires a separation of 100 feet between the development and Easkoot Creek.
Two biologists hired by Ms. Hjorth parried the latter claim: revisions to the proposed development, they said, would keep it outside the riparian zone.
Some at the meeting argued that a culvert running adjacent to the calle should be considered a riparian zone; considered such, the findings of Ms. Hjorth’s biologists would be inaccurate and incomplete, they said. Others, including Ms. Hurley and Ms. Lowry, lamented that coastal permit approval for Stinson Beach’s zoning district does not require a design review, as permits for other regions do.
“Architecturally, they just put a huge wall in front of my house” said Ms. Lowry, whose home sits behind Ms. Hjorth’s lot. “And we don’t even get a design review?”
The Deputy Zoning Administrator did not subject the project to design review because project site is located in C-R2 conventional zoning district, where only considerations such as whether properties obstruct highways and public views are made.
Still, at a hearing in October, Deputy Zoning Administrator Jeremy Tejirian noted that the project would not survive a design review. Because of this fact, he approved the proposal “with some
reluctance.”
The Planning Commission expressed the same opinion. “If we had design review considerations, this hearing would be something much more,” Commissioner Wade Holland said.
But the crucial point that defeated the neighbors’ appeal concerned whether or not the property would violate the floodplain restriction in county code.
During Monday’s hearing, staff members from the Community Development Agency’s Planning Division brought forth a loophole in the law that swayed the Planning Commission to deny the appeal. In their report, agency staff cited a short parenthetical portion of county interim coastal zoning code that states that only the Army Corps of Engineers has authority to describe a 100-year floodplain.
Agency staff went on to note that the Army Corps has never described the 100-year floodplain anywhere; instead, that designation was made by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for flood insurance mapping purposes. If the Planning Commission were to deny the permit based on an interpretation of the coastal zoning code to include FEMA’s definition of a floodplain, staff argued, then Ms. Hjorth could have legal cause to accuse the commission of regulatory “taking.”
Many members of the Planning Commission were confused by the technicality.
“Army Corps has never set the standards, and that’s what we’re using,” Commissioner Margot Biehle said. “That seems a little backwards.”
Mr. Tejirian cautioned the commission against setting a precedent for other areas throughout the county described as part of a floodplain by FEMA.
“You really need to be careful about dotting your I’s and crossing your T’s when we’re taking about regulatory taking,” Mr. Tejirian said. “The practice has been, as long as I’ve been here, that this is looked at not as an area where the county will interpret the code. I would urge you to think carefully about what the community effects would be of interpreting this code to include a 100-year floodplain as defined by FEMA.”
Mr. Tejirian’s reading of the code swayed the commission, which voted unanimously to deny the appeal. Though commissioners regretted that the code reads as it does, they said their hands were tied.
“As staff pointed out to us, we do have a serious situation here of an unwarranted taking,” Mr. Holland said. “These are legal lots of record and there’s not a lot we can do. I think, with great reluctance, the appeal doesn’t rise to the level where we could deny the project and sustain [that decision] in a court of law.”
Immediately, neighbors and their advocates at the meeting signaled their intentions to appeal the decision to the Board of Supervisors. “[Commissioners] are being swayed by the threat of litigation,” said Scott Tye, an advocate for the calle neighbors and chairman of the Marin Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, after the hearing. “That’s what this is about. This is not over yet.”
For her part, Ms. Hjorth expressed frustration that her future neighbors on Calle del Embarcadero have not been willing to work with her on the design plans. She said she changed her roof from a modern flat design to a pitched style more in keeping with the other houses on the street after neighbors complained about the potential aberration.
“We feel like we have tried to talk to them, but they have not tried to talk to us,” she said.