Whose vision will shape West Marin?
April 29, 2026
The county’s recently announced West Marin Vision project is an opportunity to shape the future of our communities. County staff have emphasized the importance of public participation, but they have been vague about how they will select the community advisory committee that will guide the process. If this effort is to be legitimate and lasting, this group must reflect the full range of West Marin. Dillon Beach is not Bolinas, Stinson Beach is not Point Reyes Station. Inverness, Tomales, Marshall, Nicasio, Olema—each community has its own geography, economy, history, social fabric and lived experience of county policy. A visioning process that does not recognize this diversity will fail.
West Marin is all unincorporated, so we live under a peculiar arrangement. We have no governance of our own. Decisions about land use, housing, economic development and public investment are made by a five‑member Board of Supervisors that also governs the suburban corridor along 101. We have spent decades crafting community plans, housing strategies and village‑scale visions that try to balance working landscapes, ecological limits, local jobs and year‑round neighbors. Yet lately those documents, rather than providing binding direction, have been minimized or ignored. Though the county acts as our local government, recent decisions, like the Point Reyes gas station approval and the short‑term rental ordinance, paid little heed to our wishes.
Incorporation is politically and financially unrealistic for small, rural villages, so meaningful local control must come from elsewhere. Formal county deference to locally crafted plans and decisions would be a good start. The visioning project has been described as an invitation for coastal and inland villages to help shape West Marin’s future. If that intent is real, we must solidify the county’s deference to local priorities. A visioning effort worthy of the name would make village plans, community‑based economic strategies and workforce housing the starting point for all major county actions here. It would require clear, public reasons grounded in state law, the Coastal Act, or genuine regional obligations whenever the county departs from them.
A legitimate process would also take representation seriously. Any advisory committee should not be selected in San Rafael, but rather assembled from the ground up, with each village association or equivalent selecting its own representative. Beyond geography, it must reflect those who live and work here, not just those who can attend a mid‑week meeting at the civic center. This means younger and older residents; Spanish‑speaking neighbors; Coast Miwok and other Indigenous people; ranchers, farmers and farmworkers; service and care workers; artists and small‑business owners; and residents of farmworker and affordable housing projects. Local organizations work every day with these communities, so they should help identify participants.
Questions about representation are inseparable from deeper concerns about the county’s emerging economic vision. Our area has long been Marin’s breadbasket: a place where dairies, ranches, row crops, shellfish operations and local food businesses feed the region and beyond, while anchoring a culture shaped by land‑based work. That reality is not accidental; it rests on decades of deliberate policy choices, from the use of the Williamson Act—which allows landowners to contract with counties to keep land in agriculture in return for lower tax assessments—to A‑60 zoning, which limits parcels to one house per 60 acres. Those tools, alongside conservation easements, helped preserve more than 50,000 acres of farmland and a network of climate‑resilient, wildlife‑rich landscapes.
Yet as tourism grows and county staff advance a countywide economic vitality agenda, the language around West Marin increasingly emphasizes “leveraging” our scenic coastline, recreational assets and rural charm for economic gain. When West Marin is framed primarily as a destination, there is pressure to monetize our landscapes, loosen protections and optimize policy for visitor spending and second‑home values.
Were West Marin seen first as a home for farmworkers and families, a source of local food and a network of small, interdependent villages, the priorities look very different: keeping working lands working, year‑round residents housed, communities first and destinations second. A visioning process that ignores this tension risks becoming a marketing exercise for a tourism‑driven economy rather than a serious conversation about the future of a rural region.
Done right, this project could begin to change the consequences of earlier decisions that failed to fully honor local plans and local knowledge. It could recognize that a genuine partnership can only come from county deference to democratically developed community plans, to organizations that have earned trust on the ground and to the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on the outcome. It could promise that future county decisions on land use, housing, tourism and economic development will start from village‑level standards and an understanding that West Marin is a rural home, not just a brand. It could build a community advisory committee that looks the way West Marin actually looks, so that the vision we produce together is not just another document, but a shared roadmap we can recognize as our own.
How to design a visioning process for West Marin's future
June 24, 2026
Commonweal was founded 50 years ago in Bolinas by Michael Lerner, a visionary pioneer in integrative cancer care, environmental health, and the emerging understanding of the global polycrisis—the convergence of climate disruption, democratic erosion, economic instability, social fragmentation, technological risk, and environmental degradation.
At a recent anniversary gathering, the organization’s executive director, Oren Slozberg, framed the nonprofit’s future in a manner both sobering and quietly galvanizing. He spoke of the polycrisis not as a set of discrete problems, but as an interwoven condition in which each problem intensifies the others. Commonweal’s work is focused on healing and resilience in the context of this polycrisis.
West Marin faces a similar set of crises. Consider the housing pressures that strain community continuity, the ecological changes reshaping our landscapes and waters, the precariousness of local institutions, the absence of an effective local governance voice, and the broader social and cultural currents that reach our rural edge. Facing such interwoven challenges, many of us may feel despair, while others may jump to reactive problem-solving that treats problems in isolation.
We must take a holistic approach. Nowhere is such an approach more important and timely than in Marin County’s proposed West Marin Vision process. As the county prepares to develop a request for proposals for a consultant to guide the process, we must keep this relational perspective in mind. The R.F.P. must not only define a scope, a timeline, and deliverables, but also lay out a clear understanding of the complex moment this visioning process is meant to address and the future it seeks to bring about.
Commonweal provides a good model. In its work with people facing cancer, it draws a distinction between curing and healing. A cure is the elimination of disease; healing, by contrast, is a movement toward wholeness, a movement toward integration, meaning, and vitality, even in the presence of problems that cannot be fixed. The same understanding can be brought to West Marin’s challenges. We are unlikely to “cure” our converging crises in any comprehensive sense. But we can ask a different question: What would it mean for a place like West Marin to move toward wholeness?
This shift in thinking has practical implications. It suggests that our work is not only to mitigate risks or manage decline, but to cultivate forms of community life that are coherent, resilient, and deeply rooted. At Commonweal’s anniversary event, Slozberg invoked Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, who has said that in times of systemic chaos, “small islands of coherence” can help shift larger systems toward new forms of order. Commonweal, he suggested, has long aspired to be such an island.
West Marin can be that, too, as a bioregional community capable of embodying and demonstrating a different pattern of living. This does not mean withdrawing from the wider world. We will always remain embedded in global systems of energy, technology, and exchange. But we can model more integrated relationships between ecology, economy, and community.
What might this look like in practice? We must begin with a knowledge of place, with knowing where our water, food, and energy come from. Only then can we shape systems that align with these ecological realities. In West Marin, this could mean deepening our efforts in regenerative agriculture, watershed stewardship, and localized energy resilience—not as niche projects, but as core civic priorities.
Our challenges do not fall into neat categories. Housing, water, land stewardship, emergency preparedness, transportation, agriculture, ecological protection, and civic trust are interdependent in practice, even when they are managed by different agencies.
A county consultant hired for the visioning work should not simply collect preferences or facilitate a conventional planning exercise. They should help articulate an integrated vision that is rooted in place—and then translate that vision into a framework that can guide public decisions across institutions.
Equally important is the cultivation of what might be called cultural and imaginative capacity. If we are to plant the seeds of a different future, we need spaces for reflection, dialogue, and creativity, places where new narratives and possibilities can take root. West Marin has long been such a place, through its artistic communities, environmental circles, and spirit of experimentation. The task now is to renew and extend that legacy under more challenging conditions.
Tourism deserves explicit attention in the visioning process. West Marin’s economy and many local livelihoods depend on visitors, yet unmanaged visitor pressure strains housing, infrastructure, ecosystems, and the everyday life of residents. The consultant leading this work should help the community articulate clear principles and practical tools for balancing visitor access with resident well-being and ecological stewardship within the state regulations that govern the coastal zone.
The county should make clear in its search for a consultant that the process must not dilute our myriad perspectives into a generic countywide consensus.
West Marin sits within overlapping systems of authority, including county government, local special districts, and state and federal regulatory regimes. The consultant should be tasked with designing a process that strengthens local control rather than weakening it. In this context, local control does not mean isolation from state law or environmental regulation. It means a durable governance structure in which local knowledge, local priorities, and local stewardship responsibilities shape how outside mandates are interpreted and implemented.
The consultant should demonstrate experience working in communities where governance is fragmented across multiple agencies and where legitimacy depends on meaningful participation by residents, not merely formal hearings.
Just as importantly, the consultant should be asked to organize the work around linked systems rather than isolated policy silos. The visioning process should address housing and demographic continuity, water and watershed resilience, food and agricultural viability, energy reliability, ecological stewardship, mobility and access, emergency readiness and civic participation. The result of this process should show how these systems interact, where tradeoffs are unavoidable, and where local policy can create reinforcing benefits across multiple goals.
Importantly, the consultant should propose governance recommendations, not just offer narrative findings. West Marin does not need another report that sits on a shelf while agencies continue to act in parallel. The consultant should identify mechanisms for coordination among county, local advisory and planning bodies, special districts, and community-based organizations. The Marin Local Agency Formation Commission notes that community-service and related districts provide a wide range of services, which makes institutional design an important part of any long-term resilience strategy.
If the task of public policy is not to “cure” every dimension of the larger crisis, then it is to create what might be called local coherence: systems of decision-making, infrastructure, stewardship, and mutual responsibility that make a community more whole and more capable of acting on its own behalf. The consultant’s role should be to help West Marin define that coherence in actionable terms.
The R.F.P. should ask for concrete outputs beyond a final narrative. These should include a community vision statement, a set of measurable principles for evaluating future county actions, a governance map showing where authority currently sits, recommendations for improving coordination and accountability, and a short list of early implementation projects that demonstrate local benefit. The county should also require an engagement plan that is multilingual where needed, transparent about tradeoffs, and designed to build public trust rather than simply document outreach.
Finally, the county should make explicit that the success of this process will be measured not only by participation numbers or the production of a report, but by whether West Marin emerges with greater civic clarity and stronger capacity for self-direction. In a time of institutional distrust and overlapping pressures, our real objective is to become more able to govern ourselves wisely within legal and ecological frameworks. That is the kind of visioning process this moment requires, and it is the standard the R.F.P. should set.
The temporal dimension of this work is critical. We must hold immediate needs alongside generational horizons. Visioning for West Marin is not simply a planning exercise, but an act of stewardship—creating the conditions from which future forms of engagement and community can arise.
None of this is easy. Building something that endures requires moving beyond reliance on singular figures or moments. It requires institutions, relationships, and practices that are resilient enough to carry a shared calling forward over time. For West Marin, this means transmitting our values across generations, while remaining open to change and innovation.
The question before us is not how to fix everything, but how to live, here, in a way that allows something coherent, life-giving, and enduring to take root.
Measure A, ticks, and West Marin’s future
July 29, 2026
Two recent stories have stayed with me as West Marin embarks on a county-led visioning process. The first is close to home in an obvious way: The Light’s July 8 article about a Marin Civil Grand Jury report on Measure A, the quarter-cent sales tax that funds parks, open space, and agricultural land protection. The second appeared farther afield, in the New York Times—an op-ed on ticks and the diseases they carry—but its implications are just as local. The piece argues that tick proliferation is closely tied to the ways we develop and inhabit land. Together, these stories raise an underlying question: Who shapes the landscapes we live in, and what does that mean for our health, our working lands, and our future?
Measure A has become one of Marin’s most important funding sources for parks, open space preserves, and agricultural land conservation. In West Marin, those dollars are not abstract. They show up in conservation easements, habitat restoration, trail work, and support for sustainable agriculture. As the Light reported, the jury questioned how these funds are allocated and overseen. Among other things, it suggested rethinking the balance between agricultural funding and parks and open space support.
Scrutiny of public spending is appropriate, and tax accountability matters. But from a West Marin perspective, some of the report’s assumptions are revealing. Agricultural easements and support for working lands are treated less as central public goods than as one interest among several competing claims.
But in West Marin, agricultural easements are not peripheral. They helped keep this region from following the development trajectory of so many coastal counties. They protect not only scenery, but food production, ecological function, and the social fabric of rural life. To frame them mainly as a competing use of park money is to miss how deeply working lands are woven into the identity and resilience of this place.
This is not an argument against oversight or a claim that allocations are beyond debate. It is a reminder that who is sitting at the table shapes how the questions are framed in the first place. When West Marin is viewed from a countywide vantage, our realities can become flattened into categories that do not fully reflect the connection between land, livelihood, and stewardship.
The Times piece points toward another set of consequences that is easy to overlook. It argues that tick proliferation is closely tied to land-use patterns: fragmented landscapes, expanding development at the wildland edge, and altered relationships among wildlife, habitat, and people. Fractured habitats tend to favor the small mammals that ticks feed on most; at the same time, it thins out their predators, producing not just more encounters between people and ticks, but often more ticks altogether, and a higher share capable of transmitting disease.
Ticks are not just a nuisance. They carry diseases that are serious, difficult to diagnose, and costly to treat. Lyme disease and the other tick-borne illnesses circulating in local ticks—anaplasmosis and Borrelia miyamotoi among them—are all treated with antibiotics, and early treatment can make a substantial difference in outcomes. An increase in tick exposure is not only an ecological issue but a public health issue with downstream effects on medical care, household anxiety, and antibiotic use.
In West Marin, many people are seeing a rise in tick prevalence. That impression is anecdotal, but it is not trivial. Our local ecology carries an odd advantage: Ticks that feed on the common western fence lizards are cleansed of the Lyme bacterium by a protein in the lizard’s blood, which has historically kept Lyme disease rates far lower than in the Northeast. But that reprieve is narrow. It doesn’t extend to the other pathogens; anaplasmosis and the Lyme relative Borrelia miyamotoi, which produces its own relapsing, flu-like illness, turn up in local ticks at rates comparable to Lyme itself. Tick season is long, especially in moist coastal and grassland environments, and even without precise numbers, local experience suggests that overall tick exposure is the sort of issue that a serious, long-range visioning process ought to notice.
It may also be worth asking, cautiously, whether rising tick-borne disease has broader implications. More disease can mean more antibiotic use. Growing antibiotic use raises concerns about resistance and the presence of antibiotic residues and resistance genes in wastewater and the environment. This underscores a larger point: Decisions about land use can have consequences that ripple outward into environmental systems and health systems alike.
What does this mean for West Marin visioning? The process has been described as an opportunity for our communities to help shape the region’s future. If it is to be worthy of that promise, it should bring into the same frame issues that are usually treated separately: funding formulas, working lands, public health, development patterns, and governance.
The Measure A debate and the tick story both point to the same lesson. The landscapes of West Marin are not just scenery. They are living systems shaped by policy, money, law, ecology, and everyday use. When decisions about those systems are made without a grounded understanding of how they work together, the consequences can be felt years later in ways no one intended or foresaw.
That suggests at least three things for the visioning process. First, it should explicitly connect land use, conservation funding, and health. Questions about agricultural easements, development, visitor pressure, and habitat management are also questions about long-term community well-being.
Second, governance design should be part of the process, not an afterthought. If we want outcomes that differ from those produced by fragmented county systems, then the visioning effort must examine not only what people want, but how decisions are made, by whom, and with what accountability. Another recent grand jury report, this one calling for greater consolidation of Marin’s 50-odd special districts, underscores this point. Fire protection, water, sanitation, and other essential services in West Marin are often delivered by these districts. Wh ether some consolidation would improve service or erode local responsiveness is precisely the kind of structural question that should be examined in the visioning process rather than being decided outside any community conversation.
Third, the process should at least open the question of what democratic tools are available to unincorporated communities that want more durable local influence. Initiatives and referenda may or may not be the right paths, but they are part of the broader question of how local priorities can be carried into law and policy over time.