Next week, the Board of Supervisors will wade into a debate over local control that has West Marin village groups on edge. The debate centers on wording in the countywide plan, and it follows a court ruling that has upended Marin’s efforts to comply with ambitious affordable housing mandates.
Strawberry resident Bruce Corcoran sued Marin County last March, challenging an update to the housing element of the countywide plan. He argued that it had inappropriately subjugated community plans to county housing policies designed to ease the way for more multi-family housing.
“It takes years to develop a community plan,” Mr. Corcoran told the Light. “To have them just thrown out and overridden by county staff and unelected state officials is just not right. It strips a layer of democracy and local control. There has to be some respect.”
At the center of the suit was language in an amendment to the countywide plan that stated: “For residential and mixed-use projects where there are land use designation and floor area differences, the countywide plan shall prevail.”
Without such language, county staff maintain, local communities could use height and density restrictions to seal off single-family neighborhoods from multi-family housing development.
But Marin Superior Court Judge Sheila Shah Lichtblau said the housing element language was too broad, and she ordered the county to remove any such “precedence clauses” that prioritize county policies over community plans. The county has a Nov. 12 deadline for addressing her concerns, and the efforts of county staff to do so have proved controversial.
Rather than simply eliminate the precedence clauses, county staff have proposed replacing them with new wording intended to achieve the same end—upsetting advocates of local control.
“Community matters,” said David Morris, a member of the Point Reyes Station Village Association. “Communities in West Marin spent years fashioning highly specific community plans responsive to the needs of their businesses and residents. The county government gave these communities the back of its hand.”
When county staff shared their proposed update with the Marin County Planning Commission last month, most commissioners agreed with Mr. Morris’s assessment. Several of them, including Chris Desser, who represents West Marin on the commission, were upset that staff had shared their proposed update with state officials before bringing it to the commission.
Ms. Desser called their approach “backward.”
“I feel that the way you are handling the process deprives people of their voices and deprives us of any real role in decision making,” Ms. Desser said at the time.
In an interview with the Light, Ms. Desser likened county employees to the “deep state,” working to impose their own policy goals over the preferences of local officials.
Yet Commissioners Greg Stepanicich and Claudia Muralles voted to back the new language, arguing that it would address the state’s concerns and advance the county’s affordable housing goals.
Next Tuesday, the supervisors will consider the issue, and members of community groups are hoping they follow the commissioners’ recommendation by stripping the additional staff language.
Marin’s unincorporated villages began developing area and community plans in the 1970s, and 22 of them are incorporated into the countywide plan. Previously, disagreements between county and local policies were resolved by giving priority to whichever set of development standards was more detailed. That meant community standards typically prevailed.
But county staff have argued that updated language is necessary to comply with several new state laws and regulations intended to ease California’s acute housing shortage. Among them is a requirement to affirmatively advance the state’s fair housing goals by taking steps to racially integrate communities.
Without the new wording, they say, the California Department of Housing and Community Development would not certify Marin’s housing element.
Without a state-certified housing element, Marin would have been vulnerable to something called the “builder’s remedy,” which allows developers to ignore local development policies. The approved housing element, certified in June, identified sites in unincorporated Marin that would accommodate at least 3,596 units of new housing, including 1,734 affordable units.
While a debate over precedence clauses may seem arcane, they hit close to home for some Point Reyes Station residents, who have been closely following a planned development that required weighing state laws against community priorities: the renovation of the gas station.
“This is not the first time the county has turned its back on our communities,” Mr. Morris said. “It recently approved a large convenience store at our gas station against the express will of the vast majority of local businesses and residents, even though its size exceeded the legal maximum limit and existing law discourages chain stores.”
The village association has appealed to the California Coastal Commission, hoping to overturn the project’s approval.
Sarah Jones, director of the Community Development Agency, believes the new language in the countywide plan provides needed clarity. Ultimately, she said, the county will have to comply with state law, and the housing element should be direct about that outcome.
“That’s what a good policy document needs to do,” she said.