How should Marin County keep its residents and properties safe from wildfires, extreme weather and sea-level rise, all while planning to construct thousands of new housing units in the next eight years? County officials must have answers by the summer, when they will submit a draft of the Safety Element of the Countywide Plan side by side with the Housing Element.
Late last month, supervisors and planning commissioners discussed a raft of potential programs and policies governing emergency communications, evacuation routes and fire prevention, among other safety matters. Several had questions about how these hazard-oriented policies would fit with the county’s parallel housing goals.
After planning commissioner Don Dickenson asked how the policies could hamper a flood-prone potential development on Richardson Bay, Sarah Jones, the assistant director of the county’s Community Development Agency, told him that a review under the California Environmental Quality Act will reconcile housing with safety.
“The environmental impact report is a really important place that these two sets of issues will be linked together,” Ms. Jones said. “That’s where mitigations get identified for development across any sites that develop.”
But planning manager Jack Liebster was quick to add that CEQA is intended to assess the impacts of development on the environment, not the other way around. “There are going to have to be policies that address those coupled questions,” he said. “There’s kind of a quirk because CEQA, as I understand it, doesn’t really take into account the impact of the environment on the project.”
Two other Marin officials also remained focused on the Housing Element. Supervisor Damon Connolly asked whether the Safety Element could preclude specific projects identified on the potential sites list unveiled early this year. Consultant Scott Davidson answered in general terms, saying that information from Marin’s existing Safety Element helped dictate his firm’s list of sites, and that the new element will influence their design and construction. But Commissioner Connolly pointed to the many public complaints the county has heard about the housing list.
“Flooding due to sea-level rise, high fire risk, evacuation routes—those are precisely the issues the community is raising,” he said. “And they’re pushing back, frankly, on some aspects of the Housing Element.”
Supervisor Stephanie Moulton-Peters also gave voice to this pushback. “We need to make a strong case that there are just some areas not suitable for a lot of housing because of these hazards,” she said.
Members of the public shared the supervisors’ concerns over the two intertwined planning projects. Alan Weiler, a San Geronimo Valley resident, saw a dissonance between the specific figures outlined in the Housing Element and the non-specific policies of the Safety Element, which he said was defined by “high-level statements about where we want to be.”
“When there is a general set of principles being applied to something very specific, a lot of things end up in court,” Mr. Weiler said. “We’re setting ourselves up for a lot of litigation, which I think would be a shame, because I personally am in favor of more affordable housing in West Marin.”
Like the Housing Element, a full draft of the Safety Element will be finished over the summer and must be adopted by the end of 2022. Until the draft is ready, the county can only discuss potential policies from a bird’s-eye view. County staff said policies will include improving emergency communications with vulnerable groups like the homeless, people with language barriers and residents of isolated areas.
New disaster preparedness plans could include studying the effectiveness of evacuation routes, streamlining road improvement projects for those routes and turning more existing community facilities into evacuation centers. A new state law, Senate Bill 99, requires the county to identify more evacuation routes in wildfire or flood-prone areas. The tax-funded Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, formed in 2020, will tackle many of the Safety Element’s wildfire strategies, including vegetation management and the evacuation route studies.
The county is working to remain consistent in its adaptations to sea-level rise, which will likely have its harshest impacts on Stinson Beach and communities on the San Francisco Bay. These policies could include always using short-term and long-term projections of sea-level rise when considering development applications and requiring landlords to disclose environmental hazard risks to renters or potential buyers.
In the coastal zone, the county’s Local Coastal Program takes precedence, and the plan’s chapter on hazards is still being updated. Mr. Liebster said staff are “working to harmonize” the two programs, but on a practical level, some of the county’s proposed policies are already in effect on the coast.
When approving a plan to rebuild a home in the Seadrift development earlier this month, the California Coastal Commission required the owner, Matthew L’Heureux, to disclose the hazards of sea-level rise to any potential buyers—and prohibited him from any future armoring to protect the home from rising waters.