What are your ideas for Marin's future?

Marin County should be an organized, deliberate mecca for people who are interested in the Slow Food, Farm to Table, Organic Food movement of the past twenty years. We sit in the middle of the healthy eating and drinking capital of the globe, the quadrangle of Berkeley/North Bay/Marin/San Francisco. Only parts of Europe are comparable. People should be coming here from every part of the world to learn. There should be some kind of Institute of higher learning that would form and inform the community. Perhaps a partner would be an academic department at Berkeley to help set the tone, but once the tone is set, we need to attract businesses to support the concept. The farm communities of West Marin and Sonoma comprise the perfect backdrop for commercial interests to enter and thrive. If Eataly can succeed in Manhattan, why not here?

More support to encourage County residents to be able to continue living in Marin County and working for Marin County. County provided / subsidized childcare for working parents. Subsidized / below market housing and favorable mortgage loan opportunities for County employees. County-run cafeterias or subsidized food options available to County employees at ALL onsite work locations. Other programs that help make it feasible for the people that work for Marin County to actually afford living here.

What? • Add a signed, ADA-accessible bus stop at the Margaret Todd Senior Center (MTSC) on Hill Road in Novato. • Divert selected weekday Route 49 bus trips via Hill Road. • Focus service on approximately 9 am – 3 pm • Maintain the existing Route 49 route during peak commute periods. Why? • Marin County is one of the fastest aging counties. • Novato is the 2nd largest city in the county and 24% of its residents are 65+. • Access to senior-serving programs should not depend only on private vehicles, family or friends, or ride-share transportation. • A bus stop at MTSC should complement - not replace – Marin Access. Why Route 49? It's an established all-day route, serves downtown, & connects to other routes. How? Plan – Confirm the location, survey the community, and perform detailed analysis of the schedule and runtime. Operate – Begin a limited pilot and conduct targeted outreach within the community. Evaluate – Assess results at 6- and 12-months then determine next steps.

Maintain what Marin has always had - an open countryside atmosphere where living accommodations are not stacked one on top of another as if in downtown San Francisco..

Marin needs to offer usable and affordable transportation alternatives. I am fortunate to live and work in Marin. Ten miles door to door takes me an hour most mornings, even when carpooling. The Smart train is not easily accessible at either end. Buses take just as long as driving. What about an employee shuttle for County of Marin workers (taking into account that there are many County workers who do not work at the Civic Center)? Walking in Marin is also dangerous. Aside from the fact that way too many neighborhoods do not have sidewalks, traffic speeds are not enforced, pedestrian right of way is ignored, and crosswalks are not well-marked.

Marin County has undergone significant change over the past decade, including substantial growth in its youth population. Participation in recreational and competitive sports continues to rise, yet the county’s supply of dedicated sports fields has not kept pace. Despite numerous parks, Marin has very few true sports facilities. McInnis Park, one of the only dedicated sports complexes contains two heavily used soccer fields and two softball fields, all of which require renovation. Upgrading one field to a multi‑use turf field facility would help alleviate capacity constraints. Keep in mind, they close down for the winter. With school fields in constant, year‑round use, the county urgently needs additional, modern athletic fields to support expanding programs. We must not forget our youth, they are our future, and investing in adequate sports infrastructure is essential to their growth and well‑being.

Relaxed zoning laws and red tape around housing, more affordable homes, more measures that can redistribute wealth towards services that support our local community. No more multi million dollar homes on the market, the folks that can afford this kind of living are buying their second or third house as a vacation spot, while most residents that work and struggle to live out here will never be able to even consider owning their own home here. Better health care, and access to better health care. A functional post office, a community swimming pool. let's walk the walk, not just talk the talk Marin county! The level of affluence and inability to disperse these resources and find ways to actually make this an equitable county to live in is unacceptable! Let's be a leader and model for other counties!!

It would be wonderful to have a dedicated room for wedding ceremonies. The current options, such as the hallway and garden area, do not provide the privacy and special atmosphere couples deserve on their wedding day. Having a designated wedding room, similar to those offered by other Bay Area counties, would create a more intimate, comfortable, and memorable experience for couples and their families.

There are currently at least 11 areas in the county that Marin LAFCo has designated as unincorporated islands. These islands not only cause service delivery confusion, but they inevitably end up costing the corresponding municipalities that end up providing services to each area invaluable time, resources, and money annually that do not get recouped. The vision from our perspective would be a 10-15 year joint County-LAFCo fiscal and infrastructure remediation program designed to promote systematically annexing urban unincorporated islands into municipalities and, where necessary, consolidate overlapping single-community/neighborhood CSDs/CSAs into streamlined municipal structures. This approach would help to address the chronic structural deficit municipalities face when considering annexations (due to deferred road and drainage maintenance in unincorporated pockets) by pairing County infrastructure buyouts and property tax exchange templates with LAFCo's island annexation provisions.

Roundabout at San Anselmo Hub Allow traffic to flow more easily

Require special districts to have voter approval every x years for continued existence. Special districts have no end point, even when consolidation would save the government a lot of money. And there's little momentum among government officials to do these reviews themselves, since they usually know the people who will feel the pain of necessary consolidation. Let the voters decide if we still need a particular special district. Marin is a relatively small county with too many fiefdoms. Too much consolidation is bad, but we have the opposite problem, and it's costing us money we could probably use more efficiently elsewhere.

Our cities, counties and special districts spend millions of dollars on studies but few of these studies are easily accessible by the public unless they happen to know they already exist and where and how to ask for them. I would like to see some budget devoted to organizing and making these documents easily accessible to the public. I should be able to go to a search for all ESM studies performed between date and date, or "all water district studies on bike access", etc. It's criminal that the public has invested all of these $$ in specialists, and it's so difficult for the public to know what has actually occurred unless they slog through minutes from meetings. I think the Marin County Library is the logical orginaztion to take on this project. It's not just our history, it allows meta-analysis and longitudinal studies and even understand how effective doing these kinds of studies actually are, i.e. how often are they merely wasted $$ on political cover commisioned to favored firms.

My idea has already been shared but it's housing. I live in a junior one bedroom and will never be able to buy a house with my husband. It's a sad feeling being from such a beautiful place and have to worry so much about rent. I love my job and Marin County and am turning to multi-generational living to be able to stay here in the future. Look into zoning reforms, is there land not being utilized, help with stigma about what "affordable housing" means...whatever tax bracket we're in, we all deserve a safe place to liveand call home.

Better benefits for Marin county employees. ie retirement contribution, better dental, more healthcare coverage for employees with families.

Climate Change Action focused on both infrastructure investment as well as financial help to individuals (for example, grants and permits to buy and install balcony solar panels, help to buy electric vehicles, help to purchase and install roof solar panels.) Requirements for developers of large housing units to include 40-60% clean energy infrastructure. Incentives for businesses to reduce dirty energy consumption by 30-50%. Light paving on roads to reduce heat. Financial help/incentives for homeowners to install white roofs to cut down on heat. Sidewalks that capture kinetic energy. Let's make Marin a model county for clean energy, heat reduction and climate activism!

Stop creating unnecessary jobs and pay employees more... Marin County is one of richest counties, yet many workers can't even live in Marin County.

Ten years from now, I don’t want Marin to be a community where people can afford to work but cannot afford to live. I want us to be a place where young families, teachers, essential workers, and people across the income spectrum can put down roots, raise their children, and feel they belong—a community that embraces innovation, leads in environmental sustainability and climate resilience, and creates opportunities for future generations to thrive.

Work to widen roads and add bike lanes wherever possible in West Marin, and places like Paradise Drive, Camino Alto, and other popular routes that tourists and local cyclists frequently use. The goal being to improve safety for motorists and cyclists, improve quality of life for North Bay residents, and attract tourists with thoughtfully designed multi-use routes.

There is increased demand for Public Transit to avoid long commutes that usually take people through Marin, even though they are not working in Marin, from other counties. However, SMART only goes to Sonoma. We have tons of folks coming down the 37 causing horrible traffic but there is no alternate for those people other than driving. Same goes for people who cross the Richmond-San Rafael bridge (which by the way, needs to be replaced. But I know that is not something the County can do on its own, however, I do hope officials advocate for this. It is really a safety concern. One major earthquake and that thing is coming down). There is only one bus that crosses the bridge to El Cerrito BART and that is not enough. Can we get some other regional routes, in cooperation with other transit systems, to maybe take people to hubs to try to really alleviate traffic? The HOV time change that CalTRANS came up with really didn't do anything but make it worse.

NO SUPER HIGHRISES IN MARIN - LIMIT BUILDING HEIGHTS