Two years after a 25-year reservation of use and occupancy for Leroy Martinelli’s ranch on Tomales Bay expired, several families are preparing to lose their homes and it’s uncertain which rancher will graze cows on the pasture in the future.
Come July, the farmhouse and three trailers clustered around it on the roughly 250-acre Martinelli Ranch will be empty. It’s the consequence of a National Park Service policy that prohibits lease holders from subleasing housing or land for grazing. At 86, Mr. Martinelli said he is too old to take over the operation. “I’m giving it up,” he said.
In a letter sent in September, Point Reyes National Seashore Superintendent Cicely Muldoon asked Mr. Martinelli to submit a plan to remove residential and agricultural sublets. Mr. Martinelli has since told them he will not apply for the lease. Seashore spokesperson Melanie Gunn said grazing will continue, possibly under a temporary lease, but then under a longer-term lease once the seashore finalizes its comprehensive ranch management plan, a draft of which is due for release in the summer.
The ranch, once part of the greater Rancho Nicasio land grant, has been in Mr. Martinelli’s family since the 19th century, according to historian Dewey Livingston.
The rancho was broken up in the 1860s and eventually Swiss immigrant Battista Tomasini purchased it in the 1880s. His daughter, Flora, married Olympio Martinelli, part of a family that owned stores in Olema and Inverness; the couple had a son, Elmer. (Mr. Livingston told the Light that Elmer’s grandfather was unhappy that his grandchild did not have an Old World name, so he told the local elementary school that his name was Waldo. Flora and Olympio corrected it the next year.)
Elmer ran a dairy on the ranch and also operated a landfill up Tomasini Canyon Road. He once had plans to allow a development on the land, with dozens of homes and a golf course, but in October 1987 he signed an agreement to sell it to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Six weeks later, Elmer passed away, and his son Leroy has managed the land ever since.
Mr. Martinelli met with seashore and Interior Department employees in 2012. According to him, officials said he could have a 20-year lease—and, he thought, continue agricultural operations, with Rohnert Park resident Barbara Hall, who leases over 3,000 acres across West Marin, running cattle on the land.
“They told me, the Interior, you have a good operation. We’ll give you a 20-year lease… I said, I’ll take a 20-year lease,” Mr. Martinelli said. (He added that a woman present asked, “Mr. Martinelli, how old are you? And you want a 20-year lease?” He answered that he hoped to outlive it.)
But in September, Mr. Martinelli received the letter from Ms. Muldoon, requesting that he submit a plan for a lease that would have him running the cattle.
According to Ms. Gunn, there must have been a misunderstanding. She said seashore leases have never allowed sublets, and that officials would not tell a rancher that such an arrangement was possible. “The lease permits are direct relationships between the park and the user,” she said. (At the nearby McFadden Ranch, a subletter was given a one-year lease when Jim and Virginia McFadden’s reservation expired and the family did not sign a lease.)
The seashore’s ranch management plan will outline a succession policy for agricultural land, but whoever runs the Martinelli Ranch in the future will not be able to graze quite as many cows as Ms. Hall now can.
Under the reservation of use, the ranch had an annual stocking rate of 40 animals. But after the State Water Resources Control Board instituted a daily sediment load in Tomales Bay in 2007, nearby ranches started fencing cattle away from the bay and the streams that flow into it.
Ms. Gunn said new fencing was installed to meet water quality standards between 2008 and 2012. Because the fences reduced available pasture, the seashore re-assessed the carrying capacity of the land. The rate for the Martinelli Ranch will be 36 cows in the new lease. (The seashore, however, allows ranchers to breach the stocking rate by about 10 percent at any given time, Ms. Gunn said.)
But similar to the fate of other residential uses of park land—like Duck Cove, where the seashore said the homes were contrary to “the purpose for which the park was established”—the house on the Martinelli Ranch, standing just feet away from grazing beef cattle, will soon be empty, and the trailers gone.
It’s a tough pill to swallow for those living on the property, who might be forced to leave West Marin if their search to find a new home does not bear fruit.
Mr. Martinelli argues that it’s not fair to clear the ranch of residential subletters. He claims that other ranches in the seashore lease to people who are not working on the ranch (though he declined to name them). He believes his highly visible location just off Highway One may be one reason he is “being targeted.”
Ms. Gunn said the park has allowed a single ranch to sublet to an agricultural worker who works on another seashore ranch—and determined the fair-market value of the rent. Otherwise, she said, “Every ranch, through its lease, has been notified that subletting is not allowed.”
Though Mr. Martinelli admits that the park service told him the trailers would have to go, he had still hoped they could remain. “I figured something would have been worked out,” he said. “I didn’t take it that serious, because they came around and said they were giving us 20-year leases.”
He hopes to move the trailers to another site and continue renting to tenants, but those occupying the main residence, which is split into two units, are facing a certain loss.
Uncertain future
Cesar Angeles, a 32-year old who cooks at both the Station House Café and Osteria Stellina, has lived at the ranch since he moved to West Marin in 1999, except for a brief sojourn to Mexico to find a wife. He now lives in the farmhouse with his partner and child.
Mr. Angeles said he came to West Marin from Mexico City because of economic struggles, and his uncle lived on the Martinelli Ranch. He started working at the Station House the first day he arrived. “I worked that day and made pretty good money, and it’s a safe place. A good place to live,” he said.
His uncle has since returned to Mexico, but two of Mr. Angeles’s aunts live on the ranch, and another uncle lives in town.
He said he has known for years about the ranch’s uncertain future, but it was not until a few months ago that Mr. Martinelli showed him the letter from the seashore saying their time was up.
Mr. Angeles’s home, family, friends, church and two jobs lie between the bottom of Tomales Bay and Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Olema, and he is hoping to remain. West Marin is safe for his child and peaceful, too; he likes to walk with friends down the Tomales Bay Trail to the water. Cities like Petaluma and Novato are different, and far from his family.
But he might not have a choice. “There’s no houses here,” he said. “I’m looking, I check with all my friends.” Though housing is always scarce, Mr. Angeles said workers from Drakes Bay Oyster Company, fresh out of jobs and housing, are compounding the crunch.
Whether he ends up in West Marin or farther afield, he will likely pay twice as much or more in rent. Mr. Martinelli charges him a reasonable, affordable rent, he said, because he felt Mr. Angeles was a good guy. But those kind of niceties aren’t the norm.
Guadalupe Aparicio, one of Mr. Angeles’s aunts, has lived in one of Mr. Marinelli’s three trailers for a decade. Her husband works at both the Station House Café and the Coast Café in Bolinas, and they have three children—two at West Marin School and one who attends a school for special-needs children in Terra Linda.
If the trailers aren’t moved to a new location, she’s not sure what her family will do. She, too, hopes to remain in West Marin, which she called “muy tranquil.” (Her sons “run with the cows,” she joked in Spanish.) Finding a place even more difficult with her youngest child, who has a wheelchair. Any move disrupts his routine, she said, and if she moves out of the county, her son might have to transfer to a new school.
Mr. Angeles doesn’t have to contend with those kinds of difficulties. But his life will shift dramatically, he said, and keeping his jobs will be tough. Living so close to downtown, he can easily work a morning shift at one restaurant, come home for an hour or two and cook again, in the evening, at the other. If he lives in Petaluma or Novato, that would be all but impossible.
“I will keep working in Point Reyes for now, but what does the future hold? …I think everything is gonna change,” he said.