Advocates for mariners make bid to gut agency
Activists and people living on boats in Richardson Bay are pressuring officials to cut ties with the agency red-tagging vessels for disposal.
Robbie Powelson, founder of the Tam Equity Campaign, alleges that Richardson Bay Regional Agency harbormaster Curtis Havel is terrorizing and unlawfully evicting poor people living in boats.
The agency, which is in charge of enforcing the 72-hour anchorage rule in the bay, is an authority of Mill Valley, Belvedere, Tiburon and unincorporated areas in southern Marin. Powelson said he would be pressuring each jurisdiction in the RBRA to drop out.
Powelson called into the Tiburon Town Council meeting on Wednesday to demand that the town cut ties with agency.
“If you are trying to rebuild trust with people in the community who are targeted by police violence, you need to be very concerned about harbormaster Havel,” Powelson said. “We want to see harbormaster Havel and the RBRA agendized on an upcoming Tiburon Town Council meeting. If you really want to change the conversation with police you need to end this violence.”
David Kulik, the Tiburon representative on the RBRA board, did not respond to questions on whether the town would sever ties with the agency or place the issue on a council agenda.
Havel and RBRA chairman Jim Wickham released a statement that denies the allegation. Havel said he does not want to seize vessels, but wants boats to be seaworthy to ensure safety.
“The idea that we are perpetuating some kind of police violence out here is simply untrue,” he said. “The transition plan we’re working on has been a multi-year process, transparent and public. We are not hiding the ball.”
Havel denies that he has seized occupied boats since the pandemic started, but admitted that he did tag boats when coronavirus cases began to dwindle. He said he thought the county would reopen, but when the cases spiked again, he stopped tagging occupied vessels.
Wickham said the process is too far along for any town or city to leave the agency because there is a risk of litigation from the San Francisco Bay Area Conservation and Development Commission, the agency pressuring the RBRA to abate the boats to preserve the eelgrass beds from pollutants caused by vessels and liveaboards.
He added that Powelson has effectively launched a smear campaign. Wickham said the agency has worked to find ways to help relocate people living on the water.
“We are dealing with human lives and a culture that has been there for over a century,” Wickham said. “We are trying to make it so we have a program that works for everybody in the future.”
Wickham said the agency launched its “safe and seaworthy” program as part of the plan, giving people who have been anchored in the bay before August 2019 a year to repair their vessels. The deadline to file is Oct. 15.
The agency distributed 90 applications. Eight have been completed and returned.
On Sept. 11, about a dozen boat residents and activists called into the RBRA meeting to denounce what they see as the agency’s vilification of the anchor-outs and the lack of real commitment to address housing and employment inequities in Marin County.
Some commenters, however, supported the efforts by Havel and the RBRA. Robert Atkinson, a Marin resident, said Havel is a “very honest gentleman, very sensitive to the needs of the community.”
“He’s got a tough job in front of him to protect the environment and be respectful of folks’ ability to live and survive,” Atkinson said.
Barbara Salzman of the
Marin Audubon Society said Havel is an honest and reputable person. She added that it’s important to protect the bay from trash, raw sewage and petroleum that the vessels add to the bay.
Eva Chrysanthe, a former Marin resident who lives in Berkeley, said she agrees the anchorage issues should be addressed. But she argued that the 4 million gallons of raw sewage that spilled into Richardson Bay from 2008 to 2019 from treatment plants in southern Marin have been more damaging to the ecology.
Wickham acknowledged the spills.
“Mill Valley’s plant has had spillage, Sausalito’s plant has had spillage, there has been sewer spillage into the bay and the government agencies have been fined by local wildlife groups,” Wickham said in a phone interview. “Sure they have a big bearing on the ecology, but they’ve been fined, monitored for it and stepped up. That is the same thing we’re doing to the mariners, is making sure they follow regulations.”
Chrysanthe said the comparison is flawed and the fines against the sewage plants were piddling.
“It is pretty obvious that there’s undue punishment on the poor,” she said.
Belvedere Councilwoman Claire McAuliffe, who sits on the RBRA board, said another hazard the anchor-out community poses is when boats run adrift during storms and crash into private docks along the shore.
“The boats on the beaches during storms as well,” McAuliffe said. “So I’m very glad that we have Curtis to go along with the intentions of the transition plan. And I stand behind them and Belvedere is ready to be of any help that we can.”
Sausalito dropped out of the agency in 2017. Officials said the city was paying too much for lax enforcement.