Enforceable laws should govern San Geronimo property

Stripping away all pretense of due process, the Trust for Public Land is giving Marin voters its version of the movie The Full Monty. What TPL is attempting to compel at the San Geronimo Golf Course is nothing less than a naked, full frontal assault on the integrity of the rule of law, daring organic grassroots villagers to challenge its deep-pocketed litigious prowess. Unlike the movie, however, TPL’s legal gambit is hardly clever or funny.

The Marin countywide plan and the San Geronimo Valley community plan, and related development codes, are legal moving documents. They are the law. They are enforceable.

Together they unequivocally affirm the property is a valued visual and recreational resource and that golf should be the primary use of the land. Both plans are direct products of land use decisions by ballot boxes in action, whereby democratically elected officials derived authority to manifest the will of the people in plans repeatedly adopted for over a half-century.

None of the county’s two dozen community plans are quaint curiosities or mere aspirational guidelines. Those plans exist for a primary purpose — local control of land use decisions — and they are not lawful subjects to be ignored, dismissed or circumvented at will by property owners.

Until TPL bought the golf course, all previous owners strictly honored the legalities and intent of the community plan. None tried to game the legal or political system, or expand development on the course property, by taking advantage of a single pivotal “should” word in the community plan. None held court with special interest stakeholders to subvert the development code.

TPL is a large, multi-division corporation based in San Francisco, albeit veneered as a “nonprofit.” TPL’s non-tax deductible political arm expends $2 million annually on lobbying and campaigns to push its agenda. TPL recently organized a recipient committee, which operates, in part, through another public relations front organization to pose as a local political support group of citizens in the valley. The committee is domiciled in Alameda County, staffed by a treasurer in Oakland, lodges its principal officer — a TPL acting director — in Sacramento, and engages a political campaign consultant 90 miles away in the state capitol.

Until TPL short-circuited the legal process, the shire in San Geronimo Valley was peaceful and harmonious. Overarching land use decisions had been settled. There was no need or talk of adding nature walks, bike or pedestrian paths, playgrounds, amphitheater, orchards, public housing, a visitor center and restaurant, or community farming. There were no shrill, coordinated swarming jackals of special interests. The concept of converting the course to a park or more open space wasn’t even on the county park department’s wish list, the valley already firmly embraced by thousands of acres of nature access, parks and preserves.

From its inception, TPL has had a corporate culture of secret back room political deals.

TPL operatives are working behind the scenes with county supervisors and officials to acquire and destroy the golf course by stealth. By the time they — the public — knew, it was all over. County and community damned, with TPL moving swiftly and willfully to dismiss their best laid plans.

By TPL’s autocratic decree of “no golf,” the course would suffer an agonizing death by desiccation.

No organization, even TPL, is above the law. Your yes vote on Measure D will bring integrity and enforcement to the rule of law. Your yes vote on Measure D will help restore a golf course with mixed use, affirm local control — and bring sanity to egregious legal and political misadventures in the county.

Until TPL bought the golf course, all previous owners strictly honored the legalities and intent of the community plan.