Last Thursday, a host of agencies, a supervisor and a state senator settled into a packed Dance Palace to hear feedback from residents and offer updates on the work they have been doing in coastal Marin.
The meeting followed up on a 2017 meeting at which residents identified their top concerns about the impacts of tourism; traffic, garbage and signage were highlighted as particular problems. After that meeting, West Marin villagers joined officials from county, state and federal agencies and representatives from the offices of State Senator Mike McGuire’s office and Supervisor Dennis Rodoni in a working group. The group met five times in 2017 and 2018. On Thursday, they presented a status update.
The meeting opened with agency presentations about what they had accomplished in the past 22 months, and the working group—called the Alliance of Coastal Marin Villages—then presented recommendations they had made to the agencies.
The alliance offered both short-term and long-range policy recommendations. Short-term remedies focused on smaller changes, such as road maintenance on specific stretches and an increase in garbage and recycling bins in town centers.
Longer-term recommendations, which comported with community plans and the Marin Countywide Plan, requested the county not expand highway or parking capacity for motorized vehicles, in order to preserve the area’s character. Other recommendations included improving pedestrian and bicycle access to villages and parks in coastal Marin and adopting traffic calming-measures, such as speed bumps and narrower lanes, in villages.
Jennifer Blackman, who chairs the alliance and works as general manager of the Bolinas Community Public Utility District, said some of the recommendations, which were created in January 2018, were outdated: for example, the successful November ballot measure to curtail overnight parking in Bolinas will likely change the town’s parking situation.
Doanh Nguyen, Caltrans’ acting chief deputy district director, said that since 2017 the agency has delivered on a number of capital improvement projects, such as vegetation maintenance and the installation of 30 new pullout locations. Moving forward, he said Caltrans would continue to participate in the working group to get feedback about signage in the area.
He also said the agency is working to obtain a programmatic permit that would enable it to make repairs quickly by bypassing the need to obtain individual permits for each maintenance project.
Richard James, who runs the environmental blog the Coastodian, asked Caltrans to ensure that crews stopped dropping litter and cigarette butts on the road. But he also directed comments toward the assembled residents. “Some of our trash problem is our own,” he said, referencing a dumpster next to Nick’s Cove that locals also use. “Keep household trash at your household,” Mr. James advised.
Suzanne Dowley, a resident of Marshall, brought up chronic flooding on Highway 1 south of Tomales: an especially salient concern for emergency vehicles and school buses. Supervisor Rodoni said one of the challenges of making repairs on that stretch of road is its proximity to private property; he said so far the property owner has not been cooperative with Caltrans.
Mr. Nguyen fielded a number of questions about the replacement of Point Reyes Station’s Green Bridge, the construction of which is currently projected to start in 2021, though that depends on the outcome of litigation brought by the nonprofit group Friends of the Green Bridge.
Inverness resident Peter Gradjansky said the community had not been properly briefed on the bridge design, a criticism echoed by a few others. Senator McGuire promised to get a copy of the agency document available online that contained the final design and send it to the working group.
Lieutenant Jim Hickey, the West Marin watch commander, said his deputies have been working with the homeless in Point Reyes Station to help them dispose of trash, and in Bolinas have given people living out of cars information on how to get their vehicles registered. The Sheriff’s Office is also adding an officer to bolster enforcement during the summer season.
To laughter and applause, Mr. Hickey added that his office was making sure to ticket wayward bicyclists. “A man in Danville called and asked, ‘Don’t you have anything better to do than cite bicyclists on a Saturday?’ I said, ‘No sir, I do not,’” he recounted.
Marin’s California Highway Patrol commander Robert Moda said the agency had increased its enforcement over the last two years; citations in coastal Marin increased from roughly 500 in 2016 and 2017 to around 750 in 2018, he said. (Countywide, C.H.P. issued 21,000 citations last year.)
There has also been a reduction in traffic collisions on both Sir Francis Drake and Highway 1, Mr. Moda said: 108 in 2016, 107 in 2017, and 80 in 2018. He added that the agency is trying to determine the best way to manage special events like bike races to ensure “that events have to pay to mitigate [their] impacts.”
Jeannie Manna, the North Central district manager for the California Coastal Commission, said a major takeaway from the working group meetings was the need for better enforcement of existing parking regulations. She praised efforts to create new overnight parking regulations in Bolinas and Point Reyes Station. “We see these as really good pilot projects,” she said.
Yet longtime resident Elizabeth Whitney took issue with Ms. Manna’s characterization of the parking ban—which must still be approved by supervisors—on Point Reyes Station’s C Street. “Calling that a parking issue when it’s about keeping people living in their cars from living there is a little disingenuous,” she said to much applause from the audience.
For its part, the National Park Service has added two toilets and garbage and recycling cans by the Palomarin Trailhead, said John Dell’Osso, outgoing spokesman for the Point Reyes National Seashore. He warned that due to the government shutdown and the delay in the passage of the fiscal budget, the agency’s spending power will be 3 percent less than normal for the next fiscal year.
Looking ahead, Mr. Dell’Osso spoke of the repaving project on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard through the park and to an upcoming survey from Sonoma State University that will look into the motivations and travel patterns of tourists in coastal Marin.
Senator McGuire acknowledged that there was much left to do, but praised the agencies and community representatives for their suggestions and insights so far.
“We should have been more responsive in years past, and I believe we’ve create a new culture going forward,” he told the Light. “Communities in West Marin will benefit from this enhanced collaboration and cooperation.”
Yet certain issues had no clear solutions. Vicki Leeds, the owner of Cabaline Country Emporium, brought up the issue of bathrooms—and pointed out that one of the alliance’s recommendations, for bathroom signage to direct visitors to the Bear Valley Visitor Center, does not address the patrons of stores in town. Supervisor Rodoni responded that although a discussion about additional bathrooms was needed, it was “just a conversation piece at this point.”
One attendee, complaining about traffic jams in downtown Point Reyes Station, suggested a traffic light near the Wells Fargo Bank: an idea that was met by vigorous boos from the audience. “There is nothing that has ever been agreed on at that stop,” Lt. Hickey said. “There’s a million ways to fix it, and every one of those ways comes with a con that’s unsurpassable at this point.”
Pamalah MacNeily, co-owner of Bluewaters Kayaking, voiced concerns about a long-term recommendation that curtailed the addition of parking. “I don’t see anything that’s going to help support tourism,” she said of the recommendations as a whole.
After the meeting, Ms. MacNeily told the Light that she felt Tuesday’s town hall solely focused on how to stop tourism. “Businesses here need parking,” she said, “businesses like mine that spur thousands and thousands of people a year to come out here and that help bring money to the area.”
Bob Johnston, a retired professor of land-use planning and the alliance’s Inverness representative, responded that the countywide plan includes policies to restrict parking in coastal Marin. While Mr. Johnston told the Light that the working group’s recommendations were not meant to be anti-tourism, he said the group and the public process “was set up to manage tourism and not accommodate tourism” in light of concerns of overcrowding.
“Most progressive city plans in the last 20 to 30 years have tried to reduce parking in downtowns because they realize they’ve taken up, say, 20 percent of their space with parking lots,” Mr. Johnston said. “This is the battle going on all over the world.”
He believes a better solution—one that would help manage tourism—would be another recommendation from the alliance: to intercept parking on Highway 101 and shuttle visitors to coastal villages and the Bear Valley Visitor Center. “Everybody says people are never going to do that, but that’s what they said about Muir Woods,” Mr. Johnston said.
Speaking this week, Ms. Blackman told the Light that she hoped residents took away from the meeting “a lot of encouragement that if you take a little time to personally participate in local government, you’re really going to be heard.”
She added, “All the villages have unique issues, but there’s a lot of common ground, and we think it can be a lot more effective to meet locally and identify common concerns and then speak as a unified voice. If we do our homework, we’re better able to advocate for our community.”