People crowded the Dance Palace Community Center last Thursday to hear a panel of local and state leaders discuss how to allay the traffic and waste problems that tourism is bringing to West Marin.
The event, which merged a town hall hosted by Senator Mike McGuire and a community forum on the impacts of tourism in West Marin, drew between 200 and 300 people. Focusing specifically on issues of trash and traffic, the forum included prepared statements from panelists as well as live questions from the audience.
Panelists included Biran Sartipi, the Bay Area head of Caltrans; Captain Dave Augustus from the Marin County Sheriff’s Office; Dennis Rodoni, District 4 supervisor; Robert Mota from the California Highway Patrol; Nancy Cave, from the California Coastal Commission’s North Central District office; and John Dell’Osso, chief of interpretation for the Point Reyes National Seashore.
Attendees came from all over West Marin, a fact made clear by Senator McGuire’s crowd-pumping introduction to the evening. “We want to do a quick survey,” he said. “How many folks from Stinson Beach are here tonight? Representing; all right! Give them a round of applause. How about Bolinas? … Bolinas is in the house. Where is the team from Marshall, everybody?… How about Point Reyes, everybody? Here we go. Anyone from Tomales? Hey, we got one… Olema? Olema is in the house…Inverness is here! Oh my god!”
The discussion was wide ranging, but a few central points arose. Most notably, Sen. McGuire said the town hall would kick off the formation of a working group that will include both panelists from the evening and five to seven coastal Marin residents, to be nominated by village groups. The working group will be charged with devising recommendations to help with traffic and tourism, based on questions from the audience on Thursday and further discussions. The group will report back at a follow-up meeting.
“I want to start out with a promise,” Sen. McGuire said. “This may be our first town hall, but I promise you it will not be our last, and it will not be our last this year as well.”
Other highlights included an announcement that the highway patrol will double its daily presence in West Marin, from one to two officers, and an invitation from the coastal commission for a renewed submission of a parking plan for Bolinas.
But at times during the evening, optimism was tempered by repeated assertions that many agencies are understaffed and facing budget shortfalls and, as is the case with the federal government, restrictions brought by a hiring freeze.
No one in West Marin is unfamiliar with the influx of tourists on weekends and holidays. But Karen Gray, a member of the Point Reyes Station Village Association’s leadership council who was the point person for organizing the event, tried to put it into perspective during her 12-minute introductory speech.
San Francisco, with roughly 24.5 million visitors annually, has a 29:1 ratio of tourists to residents. In comparison, based on visitation numbers from the seashore, there are roughly 1,424 visitors per resident in Point Reyes Station and Inverness Park, which she said together have about 1,700 people. The figures elicited an audible reaction from the crowd.
“I will state the obvious: these pressures are enormous,” she said.
The plight, she added, reminded her of an old Irish prayer: “Oh god, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”
Ms. Gray listed likely causes, including a growing urban population seeking respite in nature, people living in hotter inland areas wanting to enjoy the cooler coastal climate, and social media. Furthermore, she emphasized, West Marin cannot tax itself because it is unincorporated. It is also regulated by the California Coastal Commission, part of whose mission is to provide visitor services and public access. Coupled with the proliferation of short-term rentals—which is to be the subject of a separate village forum later this year—“we’re left with an empty shell of the village” that from the outside looks quite bucolic, she said.
In their introductory remarks, the panelists discussed some ways in which they could address traffic or parking problems. Mr. Mota, of the highway patrol, said he recently reconsidered how many officers to allocate to West Marin. “I really felt that we could do a better job,” he said. The new second officer “will hopefully help in the summertime.”
Ms. Cave, a coastal commission employee since 1977 who moved to the North Central Coast office in 2013, emphasized that new guidelines for Caltrans repairs will help streamline projects, thereby reducing the traffic impacts from roadwork.
She also pled with people to alert her staff to problems the commission could address, even if a past experience did not pan out so well. “Bring these issues to us. We are new. If you’ve had an adverse experience with a parking plan, talk to me and [a fellow staffer] now,” she said. (A committee in Bolinas is now working on a potential parking plan for the town, about a decade after a previous effort failed to get coastal commission approval.)
Mr. Dell’Osso noted that visitation to the seashore actually dropped slightly between 2015 and 2016, from 2.5 million to 2.4 million visitors. He said there’s a possibility of improving bus service through the West Marin Stagecoach, saying that “we want to see if we can expand” stops. But the current federal hiring freeze means that if solutions “[come] down to staffing, I don’t have any really good answers.” Attendees posed a number of questions to the panelists. Can Caltrans create signs instructing cyclists to ride single file? Can someone—either a police officer or volunteer—control traffic at the intersection of Levee Road and Highway 1 in Point Reyes Station as well as in Stinson Beach on busy weekends? Could a roundabout be created at the beginning of Point Reyes-Petaluma Road? Can the seashore implement a reservation system or charge entrance fees? Can agencies stop advertising for tourism in West Marin? Can R.V. camping on Bolinas Lagoon along Highway 1 be curbed? Unsurprisingly, answers typically registered somewhere on the spectrum of maybe. New signage may be possible, and Mr. Sartipi said he “will definitely take that to the working group.” The federal government must approve new Caltrans signs, however, and Caltrans must support “all modes” of transportation.
For weekend traffic control, Capt. Augustus said he would investigate what other communities had done and if they had authorized volunteers to provide traffic control.
Mr. Dell’Osso said the seashore is prohibited by its enabling legislation from charging entrance fees and noted that creating a reservation system would be “a long-term” process.
Mr. Rodoni said the county doesn’t do much advertising for West Marin tourism and that it is doing “less and less,” and Mr. Dell’Osso said the seashore’s social media account tries to focus on posts that are informative rather than enticing, such as warning about full parking lots.
Questions about regulating vehicle camping circled back to a recent enabling ordinance passed by the Board of Supervisors, which gives that board authority to regulate or prohibit different kinds of parking on county roads. But Mr. Rodoni said he would not support new rules in District 4 without serious community discussions.
Ms. Cave chimed in that the coastal commission had denied a request to regulate R.V. parking in Santa Cruz, where there are concerns about homelessness. She explained that the Coastal Act was recently amended to include the importance of environmental justice. Santa Cruz is retooling the proposal.
Trash concerns were also on the minds of residents. Lori Kyle, of Marshall, stressed the strain that garbage can have on a tiny town: on a single day in October, village volunteers picked up 6,000 pounds of garbage, 4,000 in the bay and 2,000 on land. “We need more money,” she said simply, adding later, “We are at capacity, so something has to be done.”
Mr. Dell’Osso said the seashore has some serious trash issues. For instance, the park collected about 240 pounds of trash around Bass Lake, an hour’s hike from the trailhead, a year or so ago, packing it out on horseback. He said that he did not want “to give up on education” as a means of tackling trash problems in West Marin.
Mr. Rodoni suggested, given the fact that government agencies are already “stretched,” that the working group could study the formation of a community services district. If voted into existence, such a district could impose local fees to help ameliorate trash problems.
How the working group will handle the multitude of issues and suggestions presented last Thursday an open question. Sen. McGuire said the group would probably not appease everyone or fix every problem. But he said it was “not acceptable that the state is not engaged in West Marin.”
“Especially these days, [with] how crazy our government has become, I will tell you: we have to show that government can work. That is why we’re here tonight.”