St. Vincent’s and Silveira Ranch
When viewed from Highway 101, the bucolic St. Vincent’s and Silveira ranchlands remind people of the way California once looked. The open vistas of a working dairy, grazing cows and a pastoral landscape extending to San Pablo Bay was once a common sight in the North Bay. One by one, over the years, these vistas have been replaced with housing and commercial development. The approximately 1,110 acre St. Vincent’s/Silveira properties serve as an important community separator between northern San Rafael and Novato.
The 1994 Marin Countywide plan presumed that the City of San Rafael would annex these two properties and they would be developed as a new neighborhood within the City. Some San Rafael elected officials backed an aggressive plan for large scale development of the area with up to 1,800 housing units and several hundred thousand square feet of commercial space. There was a tug-of-war of sorts between the County of Marin and the City of San Rafael regarding which government agency would have jurisdiction over the site.
When I first ran for office, the City of San Rafael was processing a development application from Shapell Industries that proposed 856 homes and assorted commercial buildings on only the St. Vincent’s portion of the properties. Shortly after I joined the Board of Supervisors, the San Rafael City Council voted to drop the Silveira/St. Vincent’s properties from the city’s sphere of influence, transferring full control of the land use planning to the County of Marin.
I have long been committed to curtailing, as much as possible, large scale development of these lands and I believe the voters supported this position when they elected me to the Board eight years ago. I believe Marin County residents do not want to see the type of growth, which the business and construction industries support and which is evident in so many other areas of California where one city or town sprawls into the next.
As the Countywide Plan was in the beginning stages of a major revision, County planners, Supervisors and the public were in a position to take a fresh look at the future use of these properties. A comprehensive analysis by the County found that there were a number of extremely important resource areas on the St. Vincent’s/Silveira lands, including tidelands; diked baylands; Miller creek and its riparian corridor; large areas within the 100-year floodplain; and the hills leading up to Pacheco Ridge at the northern edge of the site.
As part of the new Countywide Plan approved in 2007, a fourth planning corridor was created. This new “Baylands Corridor” was established to protect important baylands and large adjacent undeveloped uplands (including St. Vincent’s and Silveira) along the bay shoreline. In the new Countywide Plan these properties are assigned the land use designation: “Agricultural and Environmental Resource Area”. Potential uses include agriculture and related uses, limited residential development, education and tourism, places of worship, institutional uses, and small-scale hospitality uses.
The Board of Supervisors set the planning guidelines for these properties to include up to 221 dwelling units for the combined St. Vincent’s and Silveira sites. This equates to 121 market-rate dwelling units plus up to 100 additional units for low income households. Dwelling units would be allocated proportionally to the respective St. Vincent’s and Silveira areas, based on the total acreage of each property. Any new development would be located to protect resource areas and be concentrated in locations that minimize interference with the view corridor from Highway 101 to the bay.
To date, no formal development plans have been submitted to the County for either of these properties.
