Marin is a different place. I can’t say for certain that it was always this way, since I’m a transplant, having spent my formative years in the place that would become Silicon Valley back when my neighborhood had no sidewalks and a volunteer fire department. But there can be no dispute these days that Marin marches to a different band, and the sound has more to do with New Age and World Beat than the Grateful Dead or Santana, despite those bands’ association with the county this side of the Golden Gate.
The San Rafael Chamber of Commerce used to keep a database of companies that had fled Marin for climes that were more business-friendly, or at least less expensive. At the time, Marin was hemorrhaging companies to Petaluma and Santa Rosa, where the land and leases were less expensive, the labor pool was just as smart and, most important, there was room to grow.
Today, that action seems to have subsided, though the local environment keeps evolving, owing more to the economy than zoning restrictions or unfriendly business attitudes. But Marin still has a distinctive business climate, a testament to a quirky combination of creativity, too much money and tastes that run toward the eccentric.
For instance, Hamilton, an office park built from airplane hangars, flourishes while the more traditional San Rafael Corporate Center struggles to find its feet. Union money so dominates local elections that former assemblywoman Kerry Mazzoni is dispatched when she challenges for a county supervisor’s post, but the incumbent victor, Susan Adams, has dropped the ball in bringing any sort of life to the Marinwood strip mall. The opening of the Novato Whole Foods is treated with the same reverence as a visit from the Pope, but the development surrounding it, the Millworks, failed to sell any condos. To be fair, the timing of the development couldn’t have been worse, but even before the economy headed further south than Baja, Novato residents were complaining that the complex was really big.
No kidding.
Such an uneven business landscape makes it tough to predict which businesses will succeed. On one hand, Marinites will swear they hate chain stores, preferring to think globally and shop locally. But Costco in Novato remains a mob scene on weekends, Target just got through expanding and adding a grocery section at Vintage Oaks (while a second Marin location in San Rafael continues to percolate) and Starbucks remains a wonderful place to set up an ironing board and gather signatures for whatever you wish to place on a ballot. On the other hand, a proposed location for a Peet’s Coffee in Sausalito was bounced in favor of a new pizza joint operated by the same company that owns Buckeye Roadhouse and Bungalow 44 in Mill Valley and Pizzeria Picco in Larkspur. No chains those, and Real Restaurants, the company that supplies administrative services for all those eateries (as well as eight more in the Bay Area), is headquartered in Sausalito.
Speaking of restaurants, it’s now legal to bring your dog to dine with you in Marin, providing you are chowing al fresco. The county Department of Environmental Health has changed its regulations regarding Fido putting on the feed bag with his or her master’s as long as the dog doesn’t have to walk through the restaurant to get to the patio. The change was made after restaurant owners complained about the Department of Environmental Health slapping them with $150 fines every time a pet was found joining the family for dinner when it was perfectly legal to have a dog on the sidewalk.
In Marin, very little is as sacred as pets. In the interest of full disclosure, our cat Miles pretty much runs our lives, and receives monthly acupuncture treatments to help boost his immune system in battling a chronic skin cancer. Please insert your own Marin joke here.
While eating breakfast with your beagle is no problem, buying a Harley is. Marin lost its lone remaining Harley Davidson dealership, forcing HOGS (Harley Owner Groups) to go to Michael’s Harley Davidson of Cotati to buy bikes, and MotoHaven in Novato for service. Harley dealerships should have been the kind of businesses that would hold their own in Marin—at one time, there were two locations (Corte Madera and Novato)—but a stumbling economy doomed the two-wheeled shops.
Maybe the best example of Marin’s difference is the deal that sent the Point Reyes Light from Robert Plotkin to a group of community leaders not long ago. The Light, a West Marin community newspaper that won fame and a Pulitzer by exposing the Synanon cult, was purchased by Plotkin in 2005 for $500,000 with the promise of transforming it into the West Coast New Yorker. Though the former Monterey County prosecutor toted a journalism sheepskin from Columbia, Plotkin soon learned the combination of being an outsider and insinuating the locals were rubes didn’t do much for circulation or ad sales. He continued to pound his head against the wall, causing a fair amount of bleeding, not the least of which came off the Light’s bottom line.
But the utter rejection of Plotkin by the locals tells just part of the tale. The group that bought the paper is a low-profit limited liability company, or L3C. It can make a profit, but the profits must be reinvested. The Light is owned by a new nonprofit, the Marin Media Institute, which paid $350,000 for the paper. The nonprofit model may be the next big move in journalism as small newspapers struggle to cover the news, turn a profit and compete in a digital age.
