As the county works to create more housing, officials are moving forward with a plan to establish a temporary campground in Bolinas.
An emergency campground for recreational vehicles on a ranch in Marin County received support Tuesday from the county Board of Supervisors, which approved a $622,000 investment to help move residents of unpermitted structures off of another location at the ranch.
About 60 people have been living in a variety of dwellings on Tacherra Ranch, located at 160 Mesa Road in Bolinas, for several years.
Conditions at the site have deteriorated, with residents telling the board Tuesday that they were lacking running water and operable toilets, and that temporary facilities were often unclean.
The county is seeking to build adequate housing for the residents elsewhere, but in the meantime, the temporary RV campground will be established at 130 Mesa Road on a 20-acre section of the ranch owned by the county through the Bolinas Community Land Trust.
The county is trying to make the campground functional before the winter season brings increased wet weather.
“If this campground option is not realized, we will see vital numbers of our community displaced, our schools suffer, the local economy will suffer. This is important for all of us,” Bolinas Community Land Trust executive director Annie O’Connors said during the public comment period.
Several residents who live on the ranch spoke at the meeting, and some spoke in Spanish through an interpreter.
“We are mostly Latinos and Latinas, not all of us speak English, so we do not read the local papers, and we don’t yet feel like we belong in meetings like this one but still we are here because this is our message for you: We have lived in Bolinas and the Tacherra Ranch for 20, or 16, or 18 years. We are your neighbors. Our children were born here, go to school here, we work here, and some have now had children of their own here,” they said.
“Jim and Susan Tacherra gave us a place to live when nobody else would, but now it is no longer a good situation for any of us. Many of us now live in conditions that are worse than the homes we left and it is not normal for us to live this way. We are not ‘accustomed’ to it, as some people have said, and this hurts our dignity,” they said.
The temporary RV campground will be outfitted with 27 spaces for trailers and an on-site wastewater system.
The county still needs about $1.2 million to have the project fully funded, which is estimated to cost $2.6 million.
