FENCING FRICTION
City plan to redirect pedestrians divides neighbors
The city of Novato’s plan to fence off a path near a trail along San Pablo Bay has ignited a neighborhood debate in Hamilton over privacy protections and the right to public access.
Under the plan, the city would install 4-foot-tall wire fencing at several locations along a maintenance road on the Hamilton levee. The 1.4-mile levee runs parallel to several homes as well as the former air hangars.
Christopher Blunk, the public works director for the city, said it has received several complaints from residents over the past year about more people walking on the maintenance road rather than the San Francisco Bay Trail on the bayward
side of the levee.
The city’s fencing proposal intends to strike a balance between a divided neighborhood where some residents want to defend their privacy and others say the levee road is a public resource and should remain uninhibited.
“We proposed what we hope was a compromise solution to put up some fencing at some isolated areas, some strategic areas to really try to guide pedestrians to the access points and guide the public to use the Bay Trail,” Blunk said.
The city intends to complete the project by the end of June.
The city’s plan, which was outlined to residents recently during an online neighborhood forum, will install the fencing at six locations along the levee.
"We have seen it all, from renegade motorcyclists to roving gangs of inebriated teenagers to noisy pedestrians carrying on cellular phone conversations at all hours of the night ."
— Thomas Richter, Hamilton resident
The fences will run perpendicular to the maintenance road and end at the splash wall that separates the road and the Bay Trail. The six sites were seen as the easiest areas for the public to access, Blunk said.
The fencing won’t prevent people from accessing the road if they really want to, but the city hopes it will direct most people back to the Bay Trail, Blunk said. The plan will also address the city’s concerns about potential erosion on the levee, he said.
The city had erected metal police barriers last year as a temporary solution, but those had to be removed to be used for police response to protests last year, Blunk said. The fencing is meant to be a more aesthetically pleasing replacement.
“We don’t want it to look like a crime scene,” Blunk said. “It’s a beautiful place so we want it to look nice.”
The city hopes to alleviate concerns from residents such as Thomas Richter, who lives in Hamilton’s Southgate neighborhood. In an email to the city, Richter wrote that he had hoped expansion of the levee and the addition of the Bay Trail would have addressed privacy concerns, but was disappointed to find the nuisances continued.
“We have seen it all, from renegade motorcyclists to roving gangs of inebriated teenagers to noisy pedestrians carrying on cellular phone conversations at all hours of the night,” Richter wrote. “There are also security concerns. I personally know of at least one instance where a residence was burglarized via the Levee Access road.”
Marucia Britto, a 21year Hamilton resident whose home is adjacent to the levee, was among the 50 or so residents who attended the forum. Britto said the city’s plan is a knee-jerk reaction that ignores the fact that no city ordinance or resolution exists that prohibits people from using the levee road. Residents who bought homes in Hamilton were also made aware in the documentation that the public would recreate on top of the levee.
Additionally, Britto said all Hamilton residents — not just those who live alongside the levee — pay taxes that go toward maintaining the levee, including the maintenance road, as part of the Hamilton Community Facilities District.
“This is an ill-conceived project,” Britto said Friday. “It started with some neighbors complaining about the privacy of their backyard. The city is not in the business of ensuring privacy in people’s backyards.”
The fencing project is expected to cost about $5,000, which Blunk said will come from his department’s operating budget. The project is considered basic maintenance and therefore does not require City Council approval, he said. A website for the project is expected to launch next week.
More information about the Hamilton levee is at bit.ly/39CAtHW