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Open Letter to the BOS regarding proposed Coutywide Plan Revisions

The following is an Open Letter to the Marin County Board of Supervisors.

I’m a 37-year resident of Strawberry. In the past, I worked with the late Al Aramburu and County Planning Staff to successfully resolve serious planning issues in Strawberry that spawned several lawsuits. At that time, I was impressed with the work of the planning staff on that project.

Over the course of my career, I have managed both non-profit and for-profit businesses and have sat on a half-dozen boards. I’ve been fortunate to have had great staffs who I could be trusted to provide complete and honest advice.

That being said, we all have had experiences when we know someone is snowing us - when someone is manipulating information to get us to agree to something. It’s admittedly a small sample size, but in the course of watching the last couple of planning meetings, I have to agree with the Marin IJ that there’s a problem with your current staff.

As the Planning Commissioners and other community members have complained, the staff is significantly filtering and skewing what they are choosing to present, with the objective that the Commissioners and the Supervisors will simply apply a rubber stamp to their recommendations.

It reminds me of college…type and format a good-looking report, put it in a pretty binder and hope the professor doesn’t actually read it.

Fortunately, your Planning Commissioners have taken the time to thoroughly read what’s been presented to them and ask good questions.  I have to say, I was very impressed with the knowledge and dedication shown by your planning commissioners.

Please don’t just take my word for this, I encourage you to critically watch the videos of the meetings on September 9^th and 23rd.

In the September 9th meeting, regarding the North Coast Project in Strawberry, this is what I observed.

The staff’s Powerpoint presentation buried years of Design Review hearings that staff and the then Supervisors attended. The report was also riddled with mistakes, misstatements, and omissions that the Planning Commissioners pointed out. Fortunately, Mr. Dickenson turned out to be the primary planner on the 1984 Master Plan Amendment and two of the other commissioners had personal knowledge of the strawberry neighborhood.

A few specific examples:

• Houses were to be built on landslide areas that the planning staff identified in 1984.
• The developer planned to drop 30 feet of dirt on a field built with bay mud.
• Accepted at face value the developer’s assertion that it could build hundreds of houses and two industrial facilities (150-bed assisted living facility and an array of school buildings) in just four years.
• Asserted that the assisted living facility was somehow “ancillary” to the yet-to-be-defined school.
• Buried in a bullet the fact that a 1,000-student commuter school is not the same thing as the fully residential theological seminary that was the primary condition of the original use permit (which was the crux of the Design Review denial).
• Did not point out or even recognize what commissioner Dickenson pointed out – the seminary property is not even the same property that existed in 1953 – the Baptist Seminary sold off acres of it for prior development over the decades.
• Decided that dropping 700-900 non-residents into the Marin housing environment was not significant enough to mention to the commissioners.
• Misrepresented to the commissioners available housing in Marin by an order of magnitude.
• Left out the CEQA assessments paid for by the community and produced by the same experts that the county uses.
• Chose to not to present the Alternative arrived at through years of community/developer negotiations because “legally we don’t have to.”

All of this and more are in the recordings.

But what eventually dawned on me was a conclusion that the staff was, with intention, presenting only the proposal that the developer had wrapped up for them with a bow and was completely ignoring community (and previous planning staff) input, to secure a vote that staff wanted.

I’m probably a bit naïve, but I don’t play these political games.

That brings us to the Corcoran lawsuit and today’s issue.

The Superior Court judge ordered the precedence clauses removed because they were illegal.

Someone on the staff apparently decided that, since the procedures developed over decades with your predecessors didn’t give them the authority to ignore community plans, they’d simply change the procedures.

They did this without notifying the commissioners (we’re talking months of deliberately not telling them). They also didn’t effectively notify the communities involved.

In the Seminary meeting on September 9^th the commissioners complained that they’ve been accused of not listening to the community in the past. But if the planning staff is responsible for gathering community feedback, who’s fault is that when that input is not asked for?

Representatives from only three community plans attended the September 23^rd meeting – because no one knew about it – in fact, you should ask staff to show you the community feedback they said they sent to HCD months earlier with their proposed language. From the way the staff phrased the answer it gave to the commissioners, I’m betting there’s virtually none, because - like the commissioners – we didn’t know about that either.

There is NO evidence that the staff presented HCD with an option to just follow the judge’s instruction and remove the precedence clauses. Instead they say that simply following the judge’s order will cause HCD to invalidate the entire Housing Element. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that this will happen. Even County Counsel won’t say that HCD would do this.

I refer you to what’s been published in the IJ and, again, encourage you to watch the recordings of the past planning meetings. The commissioners complained on the 23^rd (in their words) that they were being “finessed” by staff and told only what the staff wanted them to know to get the result that staff wanted and then forced into a box to vote one way “or else.” They were angry.

The October 29th hearing seems like a child not getting an answer she likes from one parent, so going to the other parent. You have a clear determination from the Planning Commissioners to abide only by the judge’s order to remove the precedence clauses.

I urge you to support your commissioners.

Steve Disenhof
Mill Valley