The effort to make West Marin a dark-sky reserve has undergone a strategic shift. Instead of West Marin’s communities applying alongside the Point Reyes National Seashore for a dark-sky reserve designation, the seashore will file on its own as a dark-sky park while village organizers file as a dark-sky community. 

Local organizers say this will allow for a quicker process, but there are still obstacles to overcome. The International Dark Sky Association has different light requirements for the park and the surrounding communities, and though the seashore must adapt the bulk of its roughly 1,200 lights to meet new standards, the surrounding area has its own hurdles.

For West Marin to achieve a dark-sky community designation, the county would have to adopt a new light ordinance for West Marin, said Sarah Jones, director of the Marin County Community Development Agency. The rules would regulate things like time limits, light shields and color temperature. The higher the color temperature, the brighter and whiter the light, while lower-temperature bulbs are warm-colored and less obtrusive.

The county had considered creating an addendum to its light ordinance that would conform with dark-sky requirements, but the requirements are too elaborate to be captured in an addendum, Ms. Jones said. 

Dark-sky mandates such as bulb wattage and the duration that lights remain on or off are rules that would have to be written into a new ordinance, and the county currently lacks the resources for that work, she said. Creating such an ordinance is a significant undertaking, requiring staff to allocate time for research, drafting, public outreach, environmental assessments and more.  

“There’s a lot of community interest in it throughout West Marin,” Ms. Jones said. “It’s not something that’s in our work program right now so we would need to make room to be able to accommodate [it.]”

When the village association first undertook the task of gaining a dark-sky designation for West Marin in 2020, Christine Beekman, a spokeswoman for the park, reached out to Peggy Day and Laura Arndt, members of the Point Reyes Station Village Association who have led the dark-sky initiative since 2020, to express interest in working together toward a reserve designation. 

A dark-sky reserve consists of two regions: a core area that meets criteria such as the ability to view the Milky Way with an unaided eye, and a peripheral area—like the rest of West Marin—that supports dark-sky values. In the core, 80 percent of lighting must be 3,000 kelvins or less, or low-temperature lights. An inventory taken in the park discovered that its 1,200 lights failed to meet that standard.

Ms. Beekman told the Light that the park is still figuring out how to address lighting on its leased properties. 

For now, a group called Dark-Sky West Marin, formerly DarkSky Point Reyes, will focus its efforts where it can while members work to build county support for a new ordinance. Ms. Day said volunteers will soon begin taking an inventory of overly bright lights in West Marin, pinpointing their location, size and hours of use and measuring their warmth—all information that must be included in the application.

“We hope to take an official inventory of this winter when the nights are longer and darker,” Ms. Day said. “The park is willing to loan us the machine that will record the GPS coordinates of the lights.”

There are only 21 dark-sky reserves worldwide, including two in the United States. By comparison, the U.S. has 29 dark-sky communities—two in California—and 86 dark-sky parks, one of which is in California.

The local effort includes the villages of Stinson Beach, Bolinas, Olema, Inverness, Inverness Park, Point Reyes Station, Marshall, Tomales, Dillon Beach, Nicasio and the San Geronimo Valley. Muir Beach is too close to San Francisco’s lights to qualify. According to MarinMap, there are 150 county streetlights within those boundaries and each one exceeds dark-sky color temperature requirements. If the county passes an ordinance and Dark-Sky West Marin’s application is successful, a five-year window will open for the county to adjust the lights.

John Barentine, an astronomer and the lead consultant at Dark Sky Consulting, is working with the organizers. He said the separate applications will allow the park to achieve its designation faster, which will bolster the community’s case for a new light
ordinance. “The tough part for the community designation is making changes to the county’s light ordinance,” Mr. Barentine said. “The county doesn’t seem to be there yet, but they may be in the future. If the park gets its designation, it will give [the initiative] an early win and some momentum in the community.”

District Four Supervisor Dennis Rodoni told the Light that he supports the initiative and said the county should consider investing the time and effort in devising an ordinance. “The county needs to revisit what is required [and] find the time and resources for that effort,” he said in an email.