After Years of Work, San Anselmo's Draft 2045 General Plan Goes Public

Thursday's General Plan Advisory Committee meeting marks a milestone years in the making: the Public Draft 2045 General Plan and Draft Environmental Impact Report are being released for public review. The agenda calls for a presentation on the draft documents, a summary of comments already received, and the adoption process and schedule still ahead.

The session is also effectively a send-off for the committee itself, with a segment titled "Putting the General Plan to Work" walking through how Town staff will use the plan once adopted, what role other boards and commissions will play in implementing it, and how annual work plans will be measured against it going forward.

The plan's path here has been long: back in June, a no-quorum GPAC session still managed to work through a redlined version of proposed amendments dated April 22 and a DEIB assessment memorandum from the Justice Collective. Thursday's meeting closes with formal recognition of GPAC's members as the committee's multi-year work on the plan concludes, handing the document off to the Town's formal adoption process.

As FLOCK Camera Contract Nears Its End, Racial Equity Panel Gets First Word

An agenda posted this week shows the Racial Equity Committee will do more than routine business at its September 15 meeting: members will discuss and make a recommendation to the Town Council on what to do about the upcoming expiration of the Community and Municipal Partnership Agreement with FLOCK Safety, the company behind San Anselmo's license-plate reading cameras.

Putting the Racial Equity Committee first in line signals that surveillance and privacy concerns a recurring flashpoint for FLOCK-style camera systems in communities nationwide will be part of the town's calculus before the Council decides whether to renew, revise, or walk away from the contract.

Climate Panel Says Goodbye to a Member, Turns to Electrifying the Town's Trucks

The Climate Action Commission's August 31 meeting opened with a farewell to outgoing member Nuria Montalvo and then got down to one of the Town's more concrete climate levers: sitting down with the Department of Public Works to talk through electrifying San Anselmo's vehicle fleet, from trucks to smaller equipment.

It's a topic the Commission has been circling for months at its July 27 meeting, member Jerry Healy gave a fleet electrification progress update alongside a General Plan briefing from Heidi Scoble and a Climate Action Fund policy discussion. This time the conversation moved from updates to an actual working session with the department that would run the vehicles.

The rest of the meeting was housekeeping with an eye on the future: an update on the Town's Climate Action Plan, a subcommittee report on climate-related funding projects, a readout from Commissioner Lucy V. Matthews on a climate conference she attended in London, and a discussion still unresolved of how often the Commission should be meeting going forward.