Sources have identified two of the dead to ABC7 Eyewitness News as former San Francisco Police Department officers. According to sources who spoke to ABC7 reporter Dan Noyes, retired SFPD Sgt. Kevin Mannix is the suspected shooter, and his wife, retired SFPD Deputy Chief Ann Mannix, was shot and killed along with the couple's 25-year-old daughter.

Frank Schulenburg, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Source

The call came in as a multiple shooting, according to ABC7 Bay Area. Firefighters were dispatched to Strawberry shortly after 5 p.m., and Marin County sheriff's deputies also responded to the scene. Deputies secured the surrounding area before entering the residence, where they found the three dead.

Two careers in San Francisco law enforcement

Mannix served 27 years with the San Francisco Police Department, working at Taraval Station before retiring as a sergeant in June 2018. His wife rose through the department's ranks to deputy chief overseeing special operations and retired in 2021. She was the first woman to join the SFPD's SWAT team and later the first woman to lead it.

A community of about 5,400

Strawberry is a 1.3-square-mile unincorporated community of about 5,400 people, according to Marin Magazine. Its students attend Strawberry Point Elementary, Mill Valley Middle School and Tamalpais High School. Strawberry Circle is a residential street in the community, off Tiburon Boulevard, in a neighborhood of hillside homes along Richardson Bay.

Frank Schulenburg, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Source

Investigation active

The sheriff's office has released no official identifications, no timeline and no motive, and the investigation is ongoing. Investigators began examining the scene to determine the sequence of events and the circumstances of each death. Sheriff's deputies remained on Strawberry Circle into Sunday night as detectives worked to establish what happened inside the residence; further details about the victims and the circumstances surrounding the shooting have not yet been released.

If adopted, the proposal would bar federal immigration agencies from using county-owned or controlled property as staging areas, processing locations or bases of operations for immigration enforcement, except where required by law. It would require federal immigration officials seeking access to nonpublic county facilities to present a judicial warrant or other legally sufficient authority. It would also reinforce existing restrictions on sharing confidential county-held information for federal immigration enforcement, consistent with state and federal law.

Marin Magazine · Source

"People need to be able to turn to their local government for services and support," said County Executive Derek Johnson. "We have a responsibility to protect that trust and be clear about what the County can and cannot do." The county said the proposal comes amid increased federal immigration enforcement raising concerns about constitutional protections, due process and the impact on immigrant families.

The proposal builds on spending the board has already approved. In 2026, the Board of Supervisors allocated an additional $1 million for immigration legal services, emergency assistance and the Marin Rapid Response Network, bringing its two-year investment to $1.5 million, the county said. The Public Defender's Office also added an immigration attorney to expand its defense capacity.

The county has also been active in court. It is a plaintiff in San Francisco versus Trump, a federal lawsuit challenging the administration's efforts to withhold or condition federal funding based on local policies that limit participation in federal civil immigration enforcement. In June 2026, the board authorized the county to join an amicus brief supporting Santa Clara County and the State of California's legal challenge to a proposed federal immigration detention facility near Gilroy.

Visit Marin · Source

Community meeting Oct. 19

Ahead of the board vote, Canal Alliance will host a free community meeting Oct. 19 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. on the county's proposed Non-Collaboration (Sanctuary) Ordinance. The San Rafael nonprofit, which serves the county's immigrant community, said the session will cover the proposal's potential impacts and invite participants to share perspectives to inform the county's decision. The meeting will be offered in English and Spanish, with a remote option.

The board takes up the proposal at its regular meeting Tuesday, Oct. 20, at 9 a.m. in Board Chambers, Room 330, at the Marin County Civic Center, 3501 Civic Center Drive, San Rafael. The public can attend in person or participate remotely by Zoom or phone. The county said meeting materials, participation instructions and information about providing public comment are available on the Board of Supervisors meetings webpage, and that immigration legal assistance and other support resources are listed on the county's Immigrant Rights and Resources webpage.

The ordinance, drafted as Chapter 8.34 of the municipal code, regulates only what happens on the ground. Flight paths, altitude and overflight stay with the Federal Aviation Administration. The ordinance says so in its own text: Section 8.34.010 states that the chapter "does not regulate drone flights," and a later section defers to federal law wherever the two meet.

Wing · Source

What the city would control is the doorstep. A commercial drone facility, defined as a site set up to send or receive 20 or more drone deliveries a month, would be allowed only in the city's mixed-use zones and only with a conditional use permit from the Planning Commission. Medical deliveries would not count toward the 20. Deliveries to a home would require the resident's prior consent. Delivery activity would be barred from public access areas unless the city authorizes it, and nothing could block emergency access routes. The ordinance also adds nuisance rules covering privacy, noise, lights and trash.

Delivery hours would track the city's existing noise code, which sets quiet time at 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Drones could deliver the rest of the day. That borrowing from the noise code was the entire fight on Sept. 14. Councilmembers Pat Carapiet and Jane Cooper cast the two no votes, not because they opposed regulating drones but because they wanted a shorter delivery window. Cooper proposed 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Carapiet backed shorter hours to head off complaints.

Mayor Sally Wilkinson, who helped staff draft the ordinance, made the case for moving anyway: "We want something on the books before this comes to life." Councilmember Peter Mark argued that cutting drone hours tighter than the noise ordinance would send the community a message about drones, calling that message fear mongering. The majority held the hours as written and directed staff to make minor wording changes before the second reading.

Belvedere Lagoon · Source

City Manager Robert Zadnik told the council the geography is the argument. "Belvedere is compact with narrow streets, steep hills and constrained emergency access routes," he said. Staff put the same case in writing in July, when routine drone delivery was described as bringing package retrieval, support vehicles, repeated noise, trespass and litter to streets with few emergency alternatives.

The ordinance took two tries. At a July 13 meeting, staff asked the council to waive the first reading and adopt the rules in one sitting. Cooper called the language vague enough for delivery companies to exploit, and Carapiet asked how it would be enforced. The city attorney answered that the vagueness was deliberate, and the council sent the draft back to be simplified.

Rules for a drone that has not arrived

No delivery drone has carried a package to a Belvedere doorstep, and no company has said one will. Wing, the drone delivery company, said in March that it would bring delivery to the Bay Area "in the coming months" and named the region again in June on a Walmart list of markets for 2027, without naming a city either time. Belvedere is a city of 2,126 people on two islands in Richardson Bay, and the ordinance would make it the first community in the county to write drone delivery rules before an operator arrives.

The council meets Monday at 5:30 p.m. at Belvedere City Hall, 450 San Rafael Avenue, the city's regular second-Monday meeting slot. If the second reading passes, the ordinance becomes the county's first standing framework for commercial drone delivery, built around a distinction the courts have already drawn: the sky belongs to Washington, and the doorstep belongs to the city.

The Petaluma site will serve as Diamond Quanta's primary California operations and process development center, while its Mountain View location remains the company headquarters, the company said. Facility preparation and initial equipment installation are underway as the company advances from technical validation toward customer qualification and manufacturing readiness. The company says initial work at the site will concentrate on process development, metrology, equipment integration and customer qualification while the manufacturing architecture is prepared for pilot operation.

Pi.1415926535 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Source

Diamond Forge 1 is being developed around the company's Adamantine Platform and is designed to combine diamond synthesis, surface preparation, process integration and metrology in a single workflow. The company says the architecture will support customer qualification programs and provide a foundation for future expansion to larger-scale manufacturing.

First Petaluma parts headed to CES 2027

Diamond Quanta plans to showcase the first parts produced through its Petaluma operation at CES 2027 in Las Vegas, scheduled for Jan. 6 to 9, 2027, at Eureka Park, Booth 61850. The expansion follows the company's recent selection by HAX, the hard-tech venture program run by SOSV, the company said.

"Diamond Quanta's expansion in Petaluma reflects the strength of California's semiconductor and advanced manufacturing ecosystem," said Emily Desai, chief deputy director of the Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development, known as GO-Biz.

Craig Howell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0) · Source

"Securing the Petaluma facility matters because commercialization requires more than good materials science," said Adam Khan, the company's founder and chief executive, adding that the company needs the infrastructure to repeatedly manufacture, measure and qualify the technology with customers. "Diamond Valley is where we are building that capability."

A nod to Telecom Valley

The Diamond Valley name references Petaluma and the North Bay's Telecom Valley history, when communications and networking companies helped establish a significant regional technology and manufacturing cluster, the company said. Petaluma City Manager Peggy Flynn called the investment an example of the economic opportunities the city is working to create, pointing to quality jobs, new industries and businesses that choose Petaluma as a place to launch and thrive.

For Petaluma, the announcement lands as the city continues to court advanced manufacturing. The Diamond Valley buildout is subject to applicable permits and regulatory approvals, the company said, and initial work is focused on preparing clean process environments, installing equipment and establishing the infrastructure for future process operations.

The anchorage off Sausalito once held some 240 vessels, a floating community that grew for years beyond any agency's management. As of June, 25 remained, according to the Richardson Bay Regional Agency, which has spent the years since a 2022 agreement with the Bay Conservation and Development Commission working the number down through a combination of enforcement and housing.

Frank Schulenburg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Source

The housing side is the program's deliberate answer to the obvious question. The agency's housing program has moved people living on anchor-outs into housing with vouchers and case management, easing the transition ashore rather than simply towing boats away. The eelgrass beds the anchorage damaged, some of the bay's most productive habitat, are the ecological reason the deadline exists at all.

The 2022 agreement between the regional agency and BCDC set the management framework: no new anchor-outs, removal of vessels anchored illegally, and environmental protections for the bay. October 15, 2026 is the date the agreement set for the illegally anchored fleet to be gone.

What the deadline does and does not end

The deadline ends the era of the unmanaged anchorage. It does not end the housing crisis that filled it. The anchor-out community was, for many of its residents, the last affordable housing on the Marin waterfront, and the voucher program's capacity to absorb everyone who remains will be the measure of whether the cleanup is remembered as a housing success or an enforcement action.

Daderot / Wikimedia Commons (CC0) · Source

For Sausalito, which has lived with the anchorage as scenery, controversy and municipal headache for decades, the deadline closes a chapter that defined the city's relationship with its own bay. For the region, Richardson Bay is the proof of concept that the bay's shoreline problems, housing, habitat and enforcement tangled together, can be worked down to a number.

Twenty-five boats, two weeks. Then the bay gets to be a bay again.

The 2022 agreement that set all of this in motion was itself a compromise between two imperatives that rarely compromise: the bay as habitat and the bay as home. BCDC's interest was the eelgrass and the waterway; the regional agency's was the people living on it. The housing program was the bridge between them, and its results, measured in vouchers used and people housed, are the reason the vessel count fell from 240 to 25 without the confrontation many predicted.

Frank Schulenburg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Source

The case for is the math. Santa Rosa has cut $25 million and 82 positions in three years. San Rafael projects deficits through 2030 and cannot fund its street maintenance. American Canyon is still building the city its residents already live in. Napa County watched two fire sieges in three years and knows the third is a matter of when. These are not wish lists. They are the bills for civilization, presented to the voters because Sacramento left them on the table.

Douglas W. Jones / Wikimedia Commons (CC0) · Source

The case for caution is the history. General taxes can be spent on anything, which is their virtue and their vice. Voters who approve them are extending trust, and trust in municipal finance is spent as surely as money. That is why the oversight provisions matter as much as the rates: San Rafael's audits and Voter Approved Tax Oversight Committee, Santa Rosa's public reporting, the annual disclosures every one of these measures promises.

Our condition is this: vote yes, then watch the money. Read the audits. Attend the oversight meetings. Ask what the $46 million bought and whether the $6 million went where the ballot language said. A tax measure is a contract, and contracts have two parties.

Skeptics will note, correctly, that general taxes can be spent on anything, and that today's essential-services framing can become tomorrow's pension backfill. That is not an argument against these measures; it is an argument for the oversight provisions written into them, and for voters who treat election night as the beginning of the accountability, not the end.

Fizbin / Wikimedia Commons (public domain) · Source

The North Bay has never lacked for opinions about its government. This November it gets to fund the government it wants, or keep the one it has been cutting. We recommend funding it, and then holding it to the receipt.

One more note, for the voters tempted to sit this one out. Local tax measures are decided by the people who show up, and November's ballot will be long enough that the down-ballot questions get skipped. These four measures will shape the North Bay's cities for a decade. They are worth the extra ten minutes.

Santa Rosa's Measure L would double the city sales tax to a full cent, raising an estimated $46 million a year, after three years in which the city cut $25 million and 82 positions. San Rafael's Essential Services Protection Measure would quintuple the property transfer tax to 1%, raising about $6 million a year. American Canyon's Measure P asks for a one-percent sales tax worth an estimated $3.7 million. And Napa County's citizens' wildfire initiative proposes a half-cent sales tax for 18 years, roughly $23 million annually, to protect the homes that already exist.

Wulfnoth / Wikimedia Commons (public domain) · Source

None of these measures builds a single unit of housing. All of them determine whether the North Bay's cities can afford to be cities that housing gets built in: staffed planning departments, maintained streets, functioning 911 systems, and in Napa's case, a landscape that does not burn the housing stock down.

The regional backdrop is Plan Bay Area 2050+, adopted in March, which says the nine-county region must accommodate more than 900,000 new households by 2050. The North Bay's share of that number will be assigned to cities whose councils are simultaneously telling voters they cannot afford their current services. The contradiction is the story of California housing in one frame: the state demands the homes, the cities cannot pay for the civilization around them.

The tax-base trap

The four measures also reveal the North Bay's tax-base trap. Santa Rosa can ask for $46 million because it is a retail center. San Rafael's transfer tax harvests property sales in one of the region's hottest markets. American Canyon's $3.7 million reflects a smaller, newer city. Napa's wildfire tax would spread the cost across every purchase in the county, visitors included.

Fizbin / Wikimedia Commons (public domain) · Source

Each is rational. Together they describe a region funding its future one local tax at a time, because the state and federal governments have left the bill on the table. November 3 will show whether North Bay voters agree to pick it up.

There is a final irony worth naming. The housing the region needs most, affordable to the workers who staff its hospitals, schools and restaurants, is the housing the market builds least. Tax measures can keep cities solvent enough to plan for it, but they cannot, by themselves, make the math of affordable construction work. That will take the harder fights: zoning, fees, and the political willingness to say yes to density. November's money is the precondition, not the solution.

UncleVinny / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0) · Source

The council placed the measure on the November 3 ballot at its July 20 meeting, where it appeared as agenda item 3.a with a staff recommendation to adopt the calling resolution.

Matthew Gies / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0) · Source

The measure, titled the San Rafael Essential Services Protection Measure, includes annual audits, public spending disclosure, and oversight by the city's Voter Approved Tax Oversight Committee. As a general tax, it requires a simple majority to pass.

Transfer taxes are paid when property changes hands, which makes them the most cyclical revenue in a city's budget: they surge in hot markets and vanish in cold ones. The staff report notes that San Rafael's current 0.2% rate is among the lowest in the region, and that the proposed 1.0% would place the city in the midrange, well below the charter cities charging 1.5% to 3.0% or more.

The $6 million estimate matters because of what it would backfill. Like its North Bay neighbors, San Rafael faces the familiar municipal squeeze: rising pension and labor costs, deferred street and facility maintenance, and a state budget picture that has made Sacramento backfills unreliable. The council's staff report presents the measure as revenue enhancement, not tied to any single program.

Mx. Granger / Wikimedia Commons (CC0) · Source

The politics of taxing sales, not owners

Transfer taxes have a political advantage over parcel or sales taxes: they are paid by sellers at the moment of a transaction, which means most voters will never pay one. The political risk runs the other direction: real-estate interests argue that higher transfer taxes get capitalized into prices and chill transactions, particularly for commercial property and multi-unit housing.

The measure lands on a crowded November ballot. Santa Rosa is asking voters to double its sales tax to a full cent, American Canyon is asking for a one-percent general sales tax, and the five-county Connect Bay Area transit measure, which excludes the North Bay, will dominate regional attention. San Rafael's ask is smaller than its neighbors', and it is aimed at a narrower base: people selling property in San Rafael.

If it passes, the new rate takes effect on transfers after the first of the year. If it fails, the council returns to the same budget math that put it on the ballot, with one fewer option on the table.

Fizbin / Wikimedia Commons (public domain) · Source

The estimated $500 million project to widen Highway 37 between Sears Point and Mare Island entered construction this year, adding high-occupancy vehicle lanes that will operate as tolled express lanes, alongside habitat restoration around the corridor. The governor signed legislation paving the way for the upgrades, which state and regional agencies have framed as the interim answer to a corridor that already closes when the bay pushes over its shoulders.

Kiddo27 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Source

The interim project is real progress on a road that carries commuters between Marin, Sonoma, Solano and Napa counties across some of the lowest-lying highway miles in California. The widening adds capacity, the express lanes add a managed option for carpools and paying drivers, and the restoration work returns marshland the original highway helped degrade.

But every document behind the project says the same thing: the corridor's long-term future is an elevated highway above a rising bay, and that project has no funding. The Bay Conservation and Development Commission's briefing materials and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's feasibility work describe a phased strategy in which the interim widening stabilizes the corridor for the coming decades while the region figures out how to pay for a resilient, elevated replacement.

A corridor, not just a commute

Highway 37 is the North Bay's east-west spine: the route from Marin and Sonoma to Interstate 80, to Sacramento, to the Central Valley's jobs. When it floods, the detour adds an hour. When it congests, which is daily, it bleeds into every parallel route.

Sarah Stierch / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0) · Source

The tolled express lanes are the project's financial logic as well as its traffic logic. Toll revenue from the lanes helps finance the corridor, a model the region has already applied on other congested freeways. For drivers, the question is the familiar one: whether the free lanes move better once the paying lanes siphon off the carpools and the time-pressed.

The habitat side of the project may prove as durable as the asphalt. Restoring tidal marsh along the corridor does double duty: it rebuilds the estuary the bay needs, and marshland is itself flood infrastructure, absorbing the storm surge that now reaches the roadway.

The honest framing, the one the agencies use when they are not selling, is that the North Bay is building a bridge to a bridge: an interim highway to carry the next twenty years of commuters while the region assembles the billions for the elevated corridor the bay will eventually require. The first span is under construction. The second exists only on paper.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (public domain) · Source

The margin mattered differently than it would have six years earlier. Because Measure B reached the ballot by citizen petition, with more than 71,000 signatures gathered under a state pathway created for exactly this renewal, it needed only a simple majority. It cleared 70 percent, a decisive reversal of the 2020 defeat, when a similar extension won a majority of votes but fell short of the two-thirds threshold then required. The extension keeps the existing quarter-cent rate in place and stretches it to 2059, converting SMART from an agency that lived measure to measure into one with a generation of funding certainty.

Pi.1415926535 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Source

The money is the means, not the mission. SMART's board now faces the 30-year version of the question the agency has dodged for a decade: what is this railroad for? The commuter case, Larkspur ferry connections to San Francisco, Sonoma County job centers, has always been thinner than the sales pitch. Ridership has grown, but the line's promise was always bigger than its trains.

The full text of the measure dedicates the revenue to the rail system and its operations, and the agency's planning documents point the money at the familiar list: frequency, reliability, station-area development, and the long-discussed extensions north toward Cloverdale and east toward the ferry.

A runway, not a verdict

Thirty years of funding does not settle whether the North Bay's transit future runs on rails. It settles that the rails will be there while the region decides. The parallel story, the Bay Area's five-county transit tax measure on this November's ballot, notably excludes Marin and Sonoma, which means SMART's tax base and the region's transit ambitions are now on separate tracks, literally and fiscally.

Pi.1415926535 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Source

For the two counties that voted yes, the practical question is nearer term: how soon the money turns into more trains. The tax extension takes full effect in 2029, when the current tax would have expired. Between now and then, the agency has to produce a capital plan worthy of a 70-percent mandate.

Measure B's passage was the easiest part. Spending $51 million a year, in public, for thirty years, is the job the voters just assigned.

The agency's first test will be the capital plan it brings back to the two counties: which segments get double-tracked, which stations get rebuilt, how frequency improves on the spine between Larkspur and Santa Rosa. A 70-percent mandate buys patience, but it also buys expectations, and the North Bay has thirty years to find out whether this railroad was worth the third ask.

Sergey Yarmolyuk / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0) · Source

The council placed Measure L on the ballot to replace the existing half-cent Measure Q tax with a one-cent rate. The city estimates the new rate would generate roughly $46 million annually, a figure that reflects both the higher rate and the broader base of a general sales tax in the North Bay's largest city.

Wikimedia Commons (public domain) · Source

The context is three years of retrenchment. The city reports approximately $25 million in ongoing budget cuts and 82 eliminated positions across three fiscal years, the kind of slow bleed that shows up in longer 911 response times, deferred park maintenance, and thinner staffing across departments. Measure L is framed as the way to stop the bleeding rather than to fund anything new.

Santa Rosa's ask is the largest of the North Bay's November revenue measures. San Rafael is asking voters to raise the property transfer tax, American Canyon a one-percent sales tax worth an estimated $3.7 million. Santa Rosa's $46 million reflects a bigger city with a bigger structural gap, and a sales tax base swollen by the city's role as the North Bay's retail center.

The sales-tax gamble

Sales taxes are the workhorse of California municipal finance, and also its most regressive major revenue source: lower-income residents pay a larger share of their income. Santa Rosa's measure, like San Rafael's transfer-tax proposal, is a general tax, which means it needs only a simple majority and can be spent on any city purpose.

Gillfoto / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Source

The political case writes itself: 82 positions gone, $25 million cut, and a ballot measure that restores the city's ability to answer the phone. The political risk is the rate. A full cent on top of the county and state base pushes Santa Rosa's total sales-tax rate into territory where shoppers notice, and where the city's retailers compete with lower-tax neighbors for every marginal dollar.

If Measure L passes, Santa Rosa gets its $46 million and the argument over how to spend it. If it fails, the city that has cut $25 million in three years will have to find the next round of cuts somewhere the last three rounds have not already been.

Wikimedia Commons (public domain) · Source

The plan, adopted March 25, 2026 alongside its environmental impact report, lays out how the nine-county region can accommodate more than 900,000 new households and more than 1.3 million new jobs by 2050. It directs more than $1.4 trillion in investments toward transportation, housing, economic development and environmental resilience, organized around 35 strategies.

Frank Schulenburg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Source

For the North Bay, the numbers that matter most are the housing ones. The plan advances regional affordability by preserving existing affordable housing and supporting production of new homes at all income levels, while directing investment toward frequent transit corridors. It also sets a statutory target of a 19 percent per-capita reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from light-duty vehicles by 2035, compared with 2005 levels, subject to review by the California Air Resources Board.

The adoption capped a nearly three-year process that drew in more than 17,600 residents through over 117 public and stakeholder events, producing more than 15,600 public comments. The draft plan went out for comment in October 2025 with an in-person hearing in Novato, the North Bay's seat at the table during the review.

What changes on the ground

A companion effort, Transit 2050+, aims to coordinate improvements across the region's dozens of transit systems, with an emphasis on making service faster, more reliable and better connected. For Marin and Sonoma, that conversation runs directly through SMART, which just secured its own 30-year funding extension, and through the Golden Gate Bridge district's bus and ferry network.

Frank Schulenburg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Source

Climate resilience gets elevated billing in this update. The plan's strategies address sea-level rise along the bay shoreline, Highway 37's long-term future, and wildfire risk in the wildland-urban interface, all live issues in the North Bay. A detailed implementation plan identifies more than 60 discrete actions for MTC and ABAG to advance over the next five years with partner organizations.

The plan's critics have long argued that regional blueprints ask the most of the counties with the least transit. The final document answers, in part, by centering equity: investments are directed toward Equity Priority Communities, and strategies target displacement protection for lower-income renters alongside production goals.

Today, our communities face rising costs, widening inequality and persistent housing shortages. This is not the future we want for the generations of Bay Area residents to come. Plan Bay Area 2050+ charts a course for how we can bring about our shared vision for a Bay Area where everyone has access to opportunity and a better quality of life.Belia Ramos, ABAG Executive Board president and Napa County supervisor

What the plan cannot do is build anything itself. It is a framework that guides transportation dollars and sets the regional housing targets cities must plan for. The fights over where those 900,000 households go, and which North Bay corridors get frequent transit, will be fought city by city, council by council, for the next decade.

Eric Fischer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0) · Source

The Napa initiative would fund fuel reduction, home hardening, evacuation route improvements and firefighter staffing across the county's unincorporated areas and cities. Eighteen years of $23 million is over $400 million, a generational commitment to the lesson of the 2017 and 2020 fires: the county that does not pay for prevention pays far more for recovery.

National Park Service (public domain) · Source

Cross the county line into Marin and the model changes shape. Marin's approach runs through the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, a joint powers agency funded by a parcel tax, which pairs a countywide wildfire risk scoring tool with grants of up to $2,500 per parcel for home-hardening work after inspection. The money follows the structure: harden the home, clear the defensible space, score the risk, repeat.

In Sonoma County, the answer is structural rather than fiscal. The county's fire districts are consolidating, with the Rancho Adobe annexation into Sonoma County Fire District moving through LAFCO, on the theory that larger districts deliver more protection per dollar: fuller staffing, paramedic engines, and the ability to move resources across a wider map when the wind comes up.

The Solano exception

Solano County, the North Bay's eastern edge, has no countywide wildfire tax on the table and no equivalent joint powers authority. Its fire protection remains a patchwork of city departments and districts, and its wildfire politics have been dominated instead by the fights over development in the eastern county. The question of who pays for wildfire protection there is still, mostly, unasked.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (public domain) · Source

The four models reflect four tax bases and four fire histories. Napa's sales tax spreads the cost across everyone who buys anything in the county, visitors included. Marin's parcel tax charges property owners directly. Sonoma's consolidation extracts efficiency from the existing dollars. Each is an argument about fairness disguised as an argument about fire.

What they share is the admission underneath: the state is not going to pay for this. CAL FIRE's responsibility areas cover the wildlands, but the wildland-urban interface, where the North Bay's homes actually burn, is a local bill. These four counties are just writing it four different ways.

California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (public domain) · Source

Senate Bill 63, signed by the governor, authorizes voters in five counties, San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara, to consider the Connect Bay Area measure, a tax to fund what the Metropolitan Transportation Commission calls rider-focused improvements across the region's transit network. The expenditure plan, adopted by MTC as Resolution 4767, directs the money to service, reliability and coordination among the region's operators.

Brocken Inaglory / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Source

Marin, Sonoma, Napa and Solano counties are outside the taxing district. The boundary follows the politics of the authorizing legislation, not the map of how people actually move: North Bay commuters ride Golden Gate Transit buses and ferries into San Francisco, transfer to BART and Muni, and sit in the same traffic the measure's projects are meant to relieve.

The exclusion cuts both ways. North Bay residents will not pay the tax, which is the argument its authors would make for the boundary. But they also get no vote on the governance of a regional system they use daily, and no dedicated claim on its revenues, at a moment when every Bay Area transit operator is warning about structural deficits.

Two transit futures, one region

The irony is sharpest in Marin and Sonoma, which in June voted by more than 70 percent to extend SMART's own sales tax for 30 years. Those counties just demonstrated a willingness to tax themselves for transit that the five-county measure's authors could only envy, and were left out of the regional vehicle anyway.

Pi.1415926535 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Source

For Napa and Solano, the distance is greater and the stakes are quieter: Vine Transit and SolTrans riders depend on regional connections that the measure could improve, without a seat at the table where the spending is decided.

If the measure passes, the North Bay will watch a neighboring five-county district build the region's transit future with money its own residents helped justify by riding the system. If it fails, the region's operators face the same fiscal cliff, and the North Bay's exclusion will look less like a dodge and more like a preview.

Either way, the boundary raises a governance question that will outlast the campaign. The Bay Area's transit network is regional in every way that matters: the riders cross county lines, the deficits cross county lines, and the climate math crosses county lines. A funding map that stops at the county line is a bet that the region can be governed in pieces. November will test whether the voters in the five counties agree, and the four left out will be watching.

Pi.1415926535 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Source

A point of unemployment is not a rounding error. It is thousands of people, and in Solano's case it reflects the county's structural position: more exposed to logistics and warehousing cycles, more dependent on commuters whose jobs are elsewhere, and still waiting on the transformational projects, the shipyard, the new city, that were supposed to rewrite its economy.

ray_explores / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0) · Source

The western three counties' cluster near 4.4% looks healthy until you ask what the jobs are. Napa's economy runs on hospitality and wine, sectors that employ many and pay unevenly. Marin's runs on professional services and health care, with a long tail of service work supporting high-income households. Sonoma mixes agriculture, tourism, health care and a growing professional base. Low unemployment in all three coexists with the housing crisis that dominates the region's politics: people are working, and still cannot afford to live where they work.

The Solano gap

Solano's 5.5% deserves its own reporting, not just a footnote in the regional table. The county lost the Saronic shipyard to Texas in July, watched its supervisors kill the fast-track bill 3-2, and continues to wait on the East Solano Plan's environmental review. Each of those was pitched, in part, as a jobs story. The August number is what the jobs story looks like while the projects are still PowerPoints.

The monthly labor report is a snapshot, not a verdict. But snapshots accumulate. The North Bay that taxes itself for transit, debates wildfire funding, and plans for 900,000 new regional households is also the North Bay where one county's workers are a full point more likely to be out of work. The region's plans assume a prosperity that Solano is still waiting to join.

Brocken Inaglory / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Source

The Employment Development Department's monthly release is the official scorecard, and the August edition landed in the middle of budget season for every city in the region. For Santa Rosa, weighing a $46 million sales-tax ask, and San Rafael, weighing its transfer-tax measure, the numbers cut both ways: low unemployment supports the case that the economy can absorb new taxes, while Solano's elevated rate is a reminder that the recovery has not reached every county equally.

Pi.1415926535 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Source

Measure P asks American Canyon voters to approve a one-percent general sales tax, which the city estimates would generate about $3.7 million a year. The council placed it on the ballot by resolution, and the city's budget overview frames the ask plainly: general revenue for general needs, from police to parks to streets.

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American Canyon is the rare North Bay city still growing into its footprint. Incorporated in 1992, it has spent three decades building a city government to match its population, and its revenue base has always lagged its service demands. The $3.7 million figure is modest beside Santa Rosa's ask, but American Canyon's budget is modest beside Santa Rosa's, and the ratio is what matters.

As a general tax, Measure P needs a simple majority. The city's informational materials stress that the revenue stays local, the standard and accurate pitch for every California municipal tax measure: Sacramento cannot touch it.

What does $3.7 million buy in a city American Canyon's size? In municipal terms, a great deal: it is the difference between a police department that can fill its vacancies and one that cannot, between a parks maintenance schedule that holds and one that slips, between streets resurfaced on time and streets left to crumble into the far more expensive reconstruction category. Small-city budgets have no slack; every dollar is a service.

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The council's resolution placing the measure on the ballot followed the same playbook cities across California have used since the pandemic: a general tax, a simple-majority threshold, and a promise of local control. American Canyon's version is distinguished mostly by its modesty. Where Santa Rosa asks for $46 million to reverse years of cuts, American Canyon asks for less than a tenth of that to keep its young city government whole.

The November pattern

American Canyon's measure is best read as part of the North Bay's 2026 municipal revenue wave, not as an isolated ask. Across four counties, cities are going to voters for sales taxes, transfer taxes and wildfire taxes in the same cycle, all making the same underlying argument: the post-pandemic fiscal math does not close without new revenue.

The small-city version of that argument has a particular honesty. American Canyon is not asking voters to fund a vision. It is asking them to fund a city.

Earthquakesurprise / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0) · Source

The deal to end commercial ranching in the Point Reyes National Seashore, reported by the Point Reyes Light as it neared completion, closed one of the longest-running land-use fights in California. Ranching families had worked the peninsula for generations under the seashore's unusual founding bargain, which preserved agriculture inside a national park. The settlement unwound that bargain.

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What followed, through 2026, is transition. The Nature Conservancy issued an update on the transition in March, outlining the conservation planning now underway for the former ranch lands. The work ahead includes grassland and coastal scrub restoration, watershed repair, and decisions about where managed grazing might still play a role as a land-management tool rather than a commercial enterprise.

The questions that remain are the human ones. Ranch workers and their families face relocation from housing tied to the operations. The park's tule elk herds, long managed in tension with ranching, enter a new management era. And public access to lands that were working ranches for over a century will be renegotiated trail by trail.

A regional stake in the outcome

For Marin County, the seashore is both a neighbor and an economic engine. West Marin's towns, from Point Reyes Station to Inverness, built visitor economies around the park's million-plus annual visitors. How quickly former ranch lands open to the public, and in what condition, matters to the people who live off that traffic.

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The restoration itself is a multi-decade project. Removing ranch infrastructure, managing invasive species that thrived under grazing regimes, and reestablishing native plant communities cannot be rushed, and the agencies involved have been careful not to promise a timeline the land cannot keep.

The settlement also reverberates beyond the seashore's boundaries. It is among the largest agricultural exits from a national park unit in recent American history, and land managers across the West are watching how the Park Service handles the handoff from working landscape to restored one.

This paper will follow the transition through the seasons: the restoration contracts, the access decisions, and the fate of the workers whose families shaped the peninsula. The deal was the headline. The land is the story.

For now, the peninsula is in between: no longer a ranching landscape, not yet whatever comes next. The fog still moves through the same valleys. The elk still graze the same hills. Only the terms have changed, and the land has not yet been told.

Frank Schulenburg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Source

The boards of both districts signed resolutions recommending the consolidation, on August 19 and 20 respectively, calling it a historic action. The Rancho Adobe announcement describes the move as the first in the series of steps LAFCO requires to merge the agencies, with a public protest period to follow once the commission accepts the proposal. By March 2026, the reorganization was before LAFCO as a draft resolution.

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The LAFCO record lays out the proposed terms. The reorganization would dissolve Rancho Adobe's independent district and fold its territory, stations and responsibilities into the county fire district. Former Rancho Adobe parcel-tax rates would continue in the annexed territory, and the district's assets and liabilities would transfer to Sonoma County Fire District, which would assume service responsibility.

For residents of the annexed area, the practical effect would be continuity with a different name on the engine: the same stations, the same parcel-tax rates, but a larger organization behind them. The district's announcement promises paramedic-level care on every engine company, more staffed engines, and no tax increase for taxpayers in either district. For the county, it is another step in a consolidation wave driven by the arithmetic of modern fire service: small districts struggle to staff around the clock, fund apparatus replacement, and meet the training and pension costs of a professional department.

The consolidation logic has only strengthened since the 2017 and 2019 fire sieges rewrote Sonoma County's understanding of what fire protection costs. Larger districts can move engines across a wider geography, sustain specialized programs like wildland response and EMS transport, and bargain more effectively for everything from insurance to equipment.

National Park Service (public domain) · Source

The map keeps changing

Sonoma County entered the decade with a patchwork of fire districts that reflected 20th-century settlement patterns, not 21st-century fire behavior. Each annexation simplifies the map a little more, and each one follows the same LAFCO-tested template: voter-approved parcel taxes survive the transition, so the revenue follows the responsibility.

The open question is how far the wave goes. Every remaining independent district in the county now operates in the shadow of the same math, and the Rancho Adobe reorganization gives their boards a live precedent to study: the application, the draft resolution, the terms of the transfer, all public record.

Consolidation does not put out fires. But in a county where the fire seasons keep getting longer, it puts more engines behind every alarm, and that is the whole argument.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (public domain) · Source

The year opened with the shipyard. Saronic, the defense shipbuilder, was weighing sites for a reported $3.2 billion shipyard, and Solano County, allied with the California Forever backers of the East Solano Plan, made its pitch: a greenfield waterfront site, a friendly county, and state legislation to fast-track the approvals. In July, Saronic chose Texas.

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The legislative vehicle died with the deal's momentum. The Solano County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 against advancing the fast-track legislation for the shipyard project, sinking the bill for the year, in a vote that split the board and the county's business community.

The statement from Senator Christopher Cabaldon's office framed the Texas decision as California's loss: thousands of jobs, billions in investment, gone to a state that moved faster. The subtext was aimed at Sacramento as much as Solano: the permitting state lost to the permitting state that permits.

The city that is not a city yet

Behind the shipyard fight stands the larger and stranger project: the East Solano Plan, the California Forever-backed proposal to build a new city from scratch on farmland in the eastern county. The plan's backers withdrew their 2024 ballot initiative and promised a full environmental review and a development agreement with the county instead, with a possible return to voters in 2026.

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That review is the whole game now. A project of this scale, tens of thousands of homes on agricultural land, lives or dies in the environmental impact report: water supply, traffic, farmland conversion, and the fiscal terms of the development agreement. The plan's opponents, organized and funded, are waiting for the draft to give them something to sue over. Its supporters are waiting for the draft to give them something to campaign on.

Solano's 2026 is a case study in the difference between announcements and outcomes. The shipyard announcement made national news; the outcome is a Texas shipyard. The new-city announcement made international news; the outcome is a draft EIR that has not been released. The county reached for transformation and got process.

None of this means the bets were wrong. Solano is the North Bay's affordable county, its logistics county, its room-to-grow county, and the economic logic that attracted Saronic and California Forever has not changed. But 2026 proved that logic is not enough. In California, the future has to survive environmental review, and the review has barely begun.

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Pacific Gas and Electric filed its application to surrender the license for the Potter Valley Project, the century-old hydroelectric system that diverts Eel River water into the Russian River watershed, on July 25, 2025. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission accepted the application that October and issued its Scoping Document 1 on May 22, 2026, opening the environmental review of decommissioning. The scoping comment period closed September 18, following public sessions including meetings in Eureka.

Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Source

Decommissioning means dam removal. For the Russian River watershed, which has relied on the imported Eel River water for generations, the question has always been what replaces the diversion when the concrete comes out.

Part of the answer was signed in July 2025, when PG&E, Sonoma Water and other parties reached a water diversion agreement for a new Eel River to Russian River facility. The agreement is designed to keep water moving to the Russian River system after the project is surrendered, decoupling Sonoma County's supply from the fate of the old dams.

What Sonoma County stands to gain, and risk

Sonoma Water delivers Russian River water to hundreds of thousands of residents in Sonoma and Marin counties. A future without the historic diversion, but with a new purpose-built facility governed by the 2025 agreement, trades a fragile century-old arrangement for infrastructure designed around today's fishery and water-supply needs.

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The environmental stakes are concentrated on the Eel River side, where dam removal would reopen salmon and steelhead habitat blocked for more than a hundred years. The State Water Resources Control Board's scoping report, released this year, frames the water-quality certification issues the removal must resolve.

The federal timeline still stretches years out: surrender proceedings of this scale move through draft and final environmental documents, settlement talks, and commission orders before any concrete is breached. But the direction is set. PG&E wants out of the hydroelectric business on the Eel, the regulators are processing the exit, and Sonoma County's water planners have spent the last year making sure the Russian River does not pay the price.

For North Bay readers, the dam removal is easy to file under someone else's problem. It is not. The water in Sonoma County taps, and in much of Marin's, has Eel River water in its history. The next decade decides what replaces it.

Sarah Stierch / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0) · Source