Big Rock, Burdell, Ring, Sonoma, Tamalpais, White… these are peaks overlooking towns of
California’s 6th Assembly District. All but one are crowned with
public parks. Like Annadel, Tilden, San Bruno, and
Diablo, our local mountaintop parks provide inspiration and recreation, letting
people rise above their day to day life and look upon their home town in the
context of the wider world. So why is the City of Petaluma’s Lafferty Ranch on Sonoma
Mountain not open to the public? The answer is revealed in an email to me from 6th
District Democratic candidate Cynthia Murray.
Murray writes that “she is committed to trying to increase
open space and parks in our area”, citing her support for the Tolay project. But she “does not support putting scarce
resources into [the Lafferty Park] effort.” What’s noteworthy is her
rationale-- how she applies standards to Lafferty that have not been met by any
park in Marin and are not being applied to Tolay. For
instance: “It will cost millions of dollars just to improve the rural road to
Lafferty.” It would, but only if the County imposes the AASHTO standard (think
“rural interstate”), instead of the less stringent “Fire Safety Standard”
proposed for Tolay. And anyone who has driven the
road to Lafferty would see it’s no more dangerous than many of the roads serving
other parks in Marin and Sonoma, especially Mt Tam and the coast.
She writes “Public use could increase the risk of fire, and
threaten the homes in the area.” Did this stop Marin County from creating wildland parks adjacent to residential subdivisions
throughout the County? No, because Marin park managers know that the risk of
hiker-started fires is virtually non-existent.
Besides, you can count the number of homes within a mile of Lafferty on
two hands (and these neighbors should have *already* wildfire-proofed their
homes.)
She writes “Opposition by neighbors to the park as well as
the need to cross private property to enter Lafferty are also high hurdles to
overcome.” A brief visit to the Lafferty gate and a look at the public record
clearly shows that the County road easement crosses into Lafferty. By repeating
and accepting one neighbor’s brash assertion of ownership-without-easement as
fact, Murray is contributing to the abandonment of a valuable public asset
without public compensation.
Murray concludes: “Part of being a good steward is managing
the resource so that it will be there for future generations, and directing
public use to where it will do no harm.” But the protections we’ve proposed in
the Lafferty Park plan would make it among the lowest impact parks in the North
Bay. Does she really think Lafferty Park visitors would be doing any more harm
than hikers in Larkspur’s pristine Cascade Canyon or those who freely walk
amidst the rare plants of Tiburon’s Ring Mountain?
Why would Murray, coming from a county with by far the most per-capita
open space parkland in the Bay Area, treat publicly-owned Lafferty like it was,
well, someone’s private estate? Why do her arguments echo those of Lafferty
Park opponent Peter Pfendler? Why is rancher/developer
Pfendler at the top of the list of Ms Murray’s contributors,
giving the maximum allowed from private donors? And why is her campaign so
attractive to contributions from economic special interests, especially land
developers?
Some will say I’m making too much of this “single issue.”
But I’m not alone in believing Petaluma’s fourteen year campaign to create Lafferty
Park is about more than a mountaintop, that it reflects our community’s struggle
to reject secret meetings and sweetheart deals, and our desire to create an
open government driven by people, not money. Lafferty is a litmus test: when
the backroom power brokers turn up the pressure, will a politician fold? Or
will she keep fighting for the “little guy”, for future generations and the
earth?
I don’t question Ms. Murray’s integrity. I do appreciate her
candor. And maybe she’ll her change her mind about Lafferty. But with her rejection
of the volunteer $446,000 State spending limit, her Republicanesque
list of contributors and this suspicious double standard on parks, she deserves
a critical eye from Democratic voters.