Dick Spotswood: Traffic, SMART, building and tax hikes in line for 2016

Let’s look forward and predict the top Marin-based stories that’ll dominate 2016 headlines.

• Traffic — In the early 1990s, I spoke with past Mill Valley councilman and Caltrans engineer Jerry Hauke. My complaint was traffic choking Highway 101. Hauke knew what he was talking about when he said, “In a decade, you’ll look back at today as the good old days.”

Freeway traffic has worsened, but what no one, including Hauke, foresaw was that traffic on the east-west laterals including Third and Fourth streets in San Rafael; Novato’s DeLong Avenue; Corte Madera’s Tamalpais Drive; Blithedale Avenue in Mill Valley; Sir Francis Drake Boulevard anywhere in the Ross Valley; Tiburon Boulevard and Tam Valley’s Shoreline Highway would all be nightmares.

The public has had it.

There will be three contested county supervisor elections in 2016. Unless concrete plans for substantial auto traffic relief are presented, it will be tough-going for any incumbent or challenger without credible solutions.

The era is over when candidates can pretend that with a few hundred million more dollars spent on bike lanes and pedestrian paths everyone will walk or bike to work, shop and play.

• SMART — Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit will begin operation as promised in December. SMART’s general manager and construction supervisor Farhad Mansourian is the last of the can-do public works engineers. Count on a timely ribbon-cutting. While SMART will not reach Larkspur on its opening day, construction on the San Rafael-Larkspur commuter rail extension should be well underway by December.

The big 2017 story will be how many regularly ride the train.

Some predict it will run virtually empty. Others worry the North Santa Rosa-to-Central Marin line won’t have sufficient capacity for all who want to ride.

•Real estate development — The 2016 flashpoint will be proposals to develop the soon-to-close Baptist seminary in Strawberry. The overly ambitious plan is to replace the quiet seminary with an expanded campus for exclusive Branson School along with 304 mostly high-end homes.

While Branson’s proposal includes an expanded 1,000-student campus, few Strawberry residents take those numbers seriously. They know it’s likely a strawman set high so that at a propitious moment school proponents will “voluntarily” cut back their inflated initial concept, saying they’ve compromised.

The real compromise will be for Branson to chuck the idea of a Southern Marin campus. Eventually, more appropriate sites will emerge. It won’t be surprising to see a suggestion that the under-utilized St. Vincent’s School campus east of Marinwood is a far better location.

• Tax hikes — In 2004, Marin voters exhibited faith in College of Marin’s leadership by voting to support a $249.5 million bond that promised to bring the junior college into the 21st century. Now that proceeds are spent, college president David Wain Coon says the quarter-trillion wasn’t enough. He wants another $200 million.

That’s going to be a hard sell.

The question is why wasn’t that need known when promises were made in 2004? With declining enrollment and a vastly underutilized Indian Valley campus in Novato, college officials may be surprised to find a skeptical electorate.

Old ongoing stories will continue to bubble up. That list of vexing topics includes unsustainable public employee pension plans, the regional sports complex proposed for Hamilton, Caltrans and Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s joint failure to promptly reopen the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge’s third traffic lane, surges of homeless in downtown San Rafael, senior housing proposed for George Lucas’ ranch, climate change’s effect on the coast and low-lying bayfront neighborhoods, Ross Valley’s failed flood control efforts and the tale of Marin History Museum’s collapse.

Columnist Dick Spotswood of Mill Valley writes about local politics
on Wednesdays and Sundays in the Marin IJ. Email him at spotswood@comcast.net.