The Martha Company’s application to develop 43 estate-size homes on a 110-acre Easton Pt. on Paradise Drive, Tiburon, is once again before the public, this time with some probability that it will come to fruition after 35 years. A large group of well-informed Tiburon neighbors and environmentalists, along with the applicants, gathered in County Planning Commission chambers on Monday, April 25, to offer an array of largely negative comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR). This is one of several EIRs that have been prepared (but previously not completed) on a project whose legal history dates to a 1976 stipulated judgment granting the descendants of the original Reed family property owners the right to construct at least 43 dwelling units. The County’s review process was further constrained by a subsequent court judgment that limited the scope of challenges to the DEIR to matters of health, safety and impacts on protected plant and animal species.
For the most part, comments focused on issues such as safety hazards of construction equipment and traffic on narrow access streets and Paradise Drive, the safety of a “temporary” construction road rising at a 25% grade to be in place for at least 10 years, numerous land-slides requiring repair, and noise and traffic disturbance that could go on for decades as build-out of individual residences proceeds. Additional comments  were made on the  removal of more than 700 trees from an oak-bay woodland, many of them protected by ordinance, loss of most of a population of the protected Marin dwarf flax, inpacts on the endangered California red-legged frog, and visibility on prominent ridges that are protected by county policy. A number of comments concerned the excessive size of the proposed homes (from 5,500 to 8,750 square feet) on such a constrained site. A unique comment came from the Keil family, owners of historic (1890s) rights to a spring, including the land and ground water that feeds it, in the middle of the Martha property. The water from the spring is used to irrigate a mature garden on the main Keil property below Paradise Dr. that is registered with the Garden Conservancy. Three mitigation measures intended to protect the spring would require cooperation from the Keil family, which, they stated, they are unwilling to grant.

Several alternatives are explored in the DEIR. One of them, the outcome of an agreement between the applicant and the Town of Tiburon, would limit the number of residences to 32 but allow the size of ten of the homes to increase to 10,000 square feet. Other alternatives in the DEIR would reconfigure some building sites either to reduce visual impacts, or, alternatively, reduce impacts on biological resources. In MCL’s view, neither of them would substantially reduce significant impacts. The DEIR concludes that six project-specific significant impacts cannot be mitigated to insignificant levels; they include impacts on regional roads, construction noise, open space, and visual impacts from several viewpoints. Five significant cumulative impacts are unavoidable: traffic on Highway 101, loss and fragmentation of natural habitat, construction noise, air quality and greenhouse gas emissions, and visual impacts.

MCL has tracked this site for many years, and continues to believe that, given its high visibility, numerous physical constraints, and rich biological resources, it should have minimum clustered development with smaller residences on lower portions of the site only, leaving the majority of the site as a continuation of the adjacent Old St. Hilary’s and Tiburon Uplands Nature Preserves, both owned by the Marin County Open Space District.

The next step in review will be the consultant’s response to comments on the DEIR. These will go directly to the Board of Supervisors for certification of the EIR. The Planning Commission will have one more opportunity to shape the project at a merits hearing, to be scheduled.

2011 Documents and Correspondence

• MCL comments on the DEIR, April 29, 2011