He Saved West Marin from a Highway and Suburban Sprawl.

Former Marin supervisor Peter Arrigoni dies at 87

Peter Arrigoni, who died this month at age 87, was named to the College of Marin Athletic Hall of Fame in 2011. (Frankie Frost - IJ archive)

By BRAD BREITHAUPT |
PUBLISHED: December 19, 2018 at 2:38 pm | UPDATED: December 20, 2018 at 5:08 am


Former Marin County supervisor Peter Arrigoni, who championed the fight against plans to extend Highway 17 through the Ross Valley to Point Reyes National Seashore — saving West Marin from suburban sprawl — died Tuesday morning after a long illness. He was 87.

The longtime Fairfax resident, former town mayor and political force in Marin County politics died at his home with his wife of 62 years, Pat, at his side.


Mr. Arrigoni was born on July 10, 1931 in San Francisco. His father, Peter S. Arrigoni, was the founder of and longtime partner in New Joe’s restaurant on Broadway Street in San Francisco.

His family had lived in Fairfax for more than 100 years.

Mr. Arrigoni was a graduate of St. Ignatius High School in San Francisco, where he was an all-city athlete. He was an all-conference halfback on College of Marin’s football team before graduating in 1951.

He served for two years in the Coast Guard, reaching the rank of second class petty officer while serving in the Pacific during the Korean War.

After the service, he continued his studies at the University of Arizona, where he was an honor roll student and played football; he was named as an honorable mention member of the all-conference gridiron team. He was also on the college’s baseball team, which played in the College World Series.

He graduated in 1957 with a degree in business and economics.

He was twice drafted by the San Francisco 49ers, but a baseball injury put an end to his hopes to play in the NFL.

He started out as a stockbroker, working on Montgomery Street in San Francisco. He got involved in local activities, coaching in the local Little League and joining the Fairfax Park and Recreation Commission and serving on the then-Fairfax School District’s school site selection committee.

He was elected to the Fairfax council in 1964 and served as mayor in 1966.

Two years later, he decided to run for county supervisor, building his campaign on fighting plans to build a “parkway” stretching from the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to the national seashore. He unseated incumbent Ernest Kettenhofen and held the seat until 1976.

Mr. Arrigoni’s campaign and victory set the stage for the county’s adoption of historic planning policies that have for decades protected West Marin’s open ranchlands from suburban sprawl.

“If we are not wise in our actions now, Marin County will suffer the same dreary fate of so much of the Bay Area and Southern California: urban sprawl at its worst,” Mr. Arrigoni wrote in 1968.

“Without Pete, we would have a four-way ‘parkway’ from San Anselmo to Olema,” said former IJ editor and reporter Nels Johnson, who covered Mr. Arrigoni and credited him for his “pioneering” leadership in re-shaping the county’s governmental structure. “Even Gary (the late supervisor Gary Giacomini) said if hadn’t been for Pete, there would have been nothing left to save.”  See full article HERE

Marin County law forces coastal farmers to work for life.

The Threat to and Future of Ranching in West Marin"

Marin Coalition Presents: Wednesday February 1, 2017

“The Threat to and Future of Ranching in West Marin"

Speakers: Chance Cutrano, Resource Renewal Institute
John Hart, Environmental Historian and Author

Just a year after Drake’s Bay oyster farm was forced to shut down at Point Reyes National Seashore, a group of environmentalists have filed a lawsuit with a bigger and potentially more explosive target: the thousands of dairy and beef cattle in the park. Many of the cattle ranches have been operated by the same families since the 1860s. The suit against the National Park Service (NPS) has been filed by  the Resource Renewal Institute of Mill Valley along with the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project, based in Idaho. It claims the cattle are causing erosion, polluting waterways, harming endangered salmon and blocking public access.  Currently, the NPS is moving forward with a plan to renew for 20 years the ranchers’ leases.  The environmentalists claim the NPS is doing so without conducting adequate environmental studies. The ranchers say their operations are an integral part of our coastal history.  They note that when developers were threatening to build subdivisions on the Point Reyes Peninsula in the 1950s, local ranching families formed an alliance with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups to convince Congress and President John F. Kennedy to establish the park in 1962. Come to hear both sides of the issue from two well-versed speakers.

Chance Cutrano directs land policy initiatives, media projects, and emerging ideas at the Resource Renewal Institute (RRI), a nonprofit located in Mill Valley. His current work focuses on the management of the Point Reyes National Seashore and agro-ecology programs in the Central Valley. He studied philosophy and political science at Saint Xavier University where he analyzed bison and elk management policy in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Prior to RRI, Chance was researching food, water, and energy management policy in Vietnam, Morocco, and Bolivia. He lives in Marin, studies Sustainable Management at Presidio Graduate School, and is an ardent hiker and photographer.

John Hart is an environmental historian, who began writing on the Marin scene in 1970, at a time when the foundations for present policies—and controversies—were being laid. Four of the sixteen books he has written since relate to local landscapes. Relevant today are “An Island in Time: 50 Years of Point Reyes National Seashore” and “Farming on the Edge: Saving Family Farms in Marin County, California “. John has won the Commonwealth Club’s Medal in California, the Bay Institute’s Carla Bard Bay Education Award, the American Alpine Club’s David R. Brower Award for Outstanding Service in the Field of Conservation.  John has a BA in German and Comparative Literature from Princeton University.

New threat to Marin Farmers: Cow Fart Regulations

California's New Cow Fart Regulations Totally Stink

New law aims to reduce bovine flatulance, but will the cows obey?


Eric Boehm|Nov. 30, 2016 11:48 am


Caro / Frank Sorge/NewscomLivestock are responsible for roughly 15 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, but if you think getting people to stop driving their cars or using electricity is a difficult task, good luck preventing cows from farting.


California is going to try.


"This bill curbs these dangerous pollutants and thereby protects public health and slows climate change," said Gov. Jerry Brown said in a statement when he signed the bill in September, against the wishes of the state's farmers.

The law won't stop cows from farting, of course, because cows are notoriously disrespectful of human-passed laws. Instead, it will make life more difficult for dairy farmers in California.

Dairy farms will be required to reduce methane emissions to 40 percent below their 2013 levels by 2030. The state will spend $50 million help offset the cost of so-called "dairy digesters," which are intended to capture methane spewed from cows and convert it into electricity. After that, the state's Air Resources Board will have the authority to set whatever regulations they deem necessary to reach the stated goal.

Cow farts—or "bovine entric fermentation" if you want to sound smart—pump a lot of methane into the environment. A single cow can produce up to 130 gallons of methane in a single day (even that's not as bad as what dinosaur fartscould do), and methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Even if California were to find a way to stop cows from farting—or, more likely, if it were to regulate all its dairy farms out of existence—there would be a miniscule impact on global methane levels. California isn't even the leading producer of agricultural methane in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

On a global scale, the tiny microbes that grow on the roots of rice plants produce 30 percent of all agricultural methaneon Earth.

California's not the first to target cows in an effort to rein-in global warming. Some ethical vegetarian groups have allied with global warming activists to call for reducing the number of cows in Africa.

The attack on dairy cows is part of a broader effort to reduce California's greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Doing that means giving a lot more power ot the state's Air Resources Board, which now finds itself in the business of regulating what comes out of bovine buttocks. According to an Associated Press report this week, the board is hoping California's proposal will be a model for other states to follow.

Point Reyes cattle ranches targeted in environmentalists’ lawsuit

A cattle crossing sign stands along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard at Point Reyes National Seashore. Environmentalists have sued the National Park Service, challenging the agency’s plan to give ranchers 20-year leases without comprehensive environmental studies. Gary Reyes — Bay Area News Group

By Paul Rogers, Bay Area News Group

POSTED: 02/11/16, 3:01 AM PST | UPDATED: 2 DAYS AGO

53 COMMENTS

Cattle graze on the grounds of Point Reyes National Seashore. Groups filing a suit object that park officials are moving to renew leases to the ranchers without conducting adequate environmental studies,.Gary Reyes — Bay Area News Group

A year after an oyster farm was forced to shut down at Point Reyes National Seashore, sparking a bitter controversy over the role of farming in national parks, a coalition of environmentalists on Wednesday filed a lawsuit over a bigger and more explosive target: thousands of dairy and beef cattle in the park.

Many of the cattle ranches in the iconic park have been operated by the same families since the 1860s. And park service officials say they have no plans to remove them.

The suit against the National Park Service, filed by three groups in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, claims that the cattle are causing erosion, polluting waterways with manure, harming endangered salmon and other species and blocking public access.

The groups say park service officials are violating federal law because they are moving forward with a plan to renew 20-year leases to the ranchers without conducting adequate environmental studies on how the thousands of cows are affecting the seashore’s scenic resources, including its tule elk. Nor have officials updated their 36-year-old park management plan to consider other options, like reducing the number of ranches in the park or the size of the cattle herds, the lawsuit contends.

“There are pastures out there that don’t have any green thing on them, just mud and manure,” said Huey Johnson of Mill Valley, who served as state resources secretary under Gov. Jerry Brown from 1978 to 1982. “The cows have eaten up a lot of the wildflowers. We the public bought those lands.”

Johnson is president of the Resource Renewal Institute, a Mill Valley group that filed the lawsuit with the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project, based in Idaho.

Johnson said the number of cattle in Point Reyes National Seashore, now about 6,000, should be reduced by at least half. If the lawsuit is successful, he added, the coalition plans to try to reduce or remove livestock from some of the roughly 30 other national parks that allow grazing, a list that includes Death Valley, Pinnacles in San Benito County and Mojave National Preserve.

“You’ve got welfare ranching going on public lands all over the West,” he said.

PART OF HISTORY

Ranchers at the national seashore say their operations are a beloved part of Northern California’s coastal history. They note that when developers were threatening to build subdivisions on the Point Reyes Peninsula in the 1950s, ranchers formed an alliance with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups to convince Congress and President John F. Kennedy to establish the park in 1962.

“When Congress made a deal to buy the park, the ranchers said we will commit to going into the park as long as you guys write into law that we can stay here,” said Ted McIsaac, who grazes black Angus cattle on 2,800 acres inside the national seashore. “It’s 50 years later, and the generation today has no idea how this all got started. That’s been lost over time.” See the full Story in the Marin IJ HERE

Dick Spotswood make excellent points about this HERE

California Coastal Commission seals the Fate of Land Use in West Marin on May 17, 2014

Coastal Commission Meeting with new Land Use Plan for West Marin.  Here is  the nearly 6 hours of the Coastal Commission meeting held on May 15, 2014 at the Inverness Yacht Club.  I did not attend nor did I watch the full video, yet.  Marin County, Community Development Agency, led by Brian Crawford, presented a plan for Land Use Planning changes to be consistent with the objectives of Plan Bay Area.

Brian Crawford, Marin County Community Development Agency
presented housing plans for West Marin.

The Marin IJ only reported on the fracking protest that I don't think was even covered inside the meeting.  The real crux of the issue, was Marin County radically altering property rights in the Ag. areas.

I listened briefly yesterday when one of the commissioners from Southern California was debating if homes could be occupied by non agricultural workers. Another commissioner wanted homes allowed to be built only if occupants were blood relatives.  Another request that "gentrified" agriculture like wine be disallowed and that "agritainment" like farm tours are banned.

 

Are you listening to the public, Steve Kinsey?
Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey, is Chairman of the
California Coastal Commission and President of MTC
which along with ABAG is responsible
for Plan Bay Area that will radically urbanize Marin
and seize development rights everywhere.

Why should a politician from San Diego, have voting rights to decide the use of farmland in West Marin?  Shouldn't WE be deciding this?

The CCC is an agency whose mission now seems to encompass a mission far greater than coastal access and is embarking on social engineering .   They are an example of an administrative JPA who threatens the very concept of local democracy.

This Coastal Commission Plan is bullshit

Farmageddon-Movie Trailer. Organic Farming under Attack

Farmageddon - Movie Trailer from Kristin Canty on Vimeo.

How Environmentalists are Killing Rural Communities (important lessons for West Marin)

A presentation by Time Reporter, Elizabeth Nickson on the Rural Landowners vs. Eco-Fascists

00:13 OPENING SONG - Celeste Paradise
03:06 INTRODUCTION - Mimi Steel
05:59 PRESENTATION - Elizabeth Nickson
54:21 CASE STUDY - Mimi Steel