Incumbents, challengers square off for two seats on Tiburon Town Council

Four candidates are competing for two seats on the Tiburon Town Council in the Nov. 5 election: Vice Mayor Holli Thier, who says she wants to take Tiburon to the future; Councilmember Isaac Nikfar, seeking his first full term on the board to continue work improving the town’s parks for residents; Chuck Hornbrook, the current chair of the Parks, Open Space and Trails Commission who says he is looking for more accountability among town leadership; and former mayor and councilmember Andrew Thompson, who says his focus would be on changing community behaviors and connecting residents to improve livability in town.

The winners will serve through November 2028 and will take their seats at a busy time for the council. In November, the board is expected to approve its long-awaited parks master plan, which is intended to guide the long-term use of the town’s 70 acres of open space and parks, including the Richardson Bay Lineal Park system that spans from Blackie’s Pasture to South of the Knoll Park and includes all of the Old Rail Trail. It will also face the prospect of finding additional sites for new housing after a recent Marin Superior Court order that the town remove 93 units identified at a Paradise Drive site from its already certified 2023-2031 housing plan over concerns about the environmental study.

Hornbrook wants to ‘not kick the can down the road’

Hornbrook, 57, moved to Tiburon in 2017 from San Francisco and lives in the Hill Haven neighborhood with his wife, Lisa, and their son, Griffin, who attended Reed Union School District schools and is now a sophomore at Marin Academy in San Rafael. He works part-time as an adviser to renewable-energy companies on sales and operational needs.

Raised in Denver, Hornbrook graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, in 1990 with a bachelor’s in economics. He went on to receive master’s degrees in business administration and environmental science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

He worked in Washington, D.C., at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit think tank, and at Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young before moving to the Bay Area in 1998, working at digital-printing tech company Electronics for Imaging Inc. and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

Locally, Hornbrook has been serving on the Parks, Open Space and Trails Commission since 2019 and is currently in his second turn as board chair.

He previously applied to fill an interim seat on the council in March 2023, following the resignation of Noah Griffin. However, councilmembers chose not to make an appointment and to instead hold a special election that August; Hornbrook did not run for the seat, which Nikfar won in a two-way race.

Hornbrook in 2020 mounted an unsuccessful bid for the Reed Union School District board, finishing third among four candidates for the two available seats.

He also served as a treasurer for Tiburon-Belvedere Residents United to Support Trails, or Trust, one of the local activist groups that sued the Martha Co. in 2017 over public access to the once-private Easton Point annex of the Old St. Hilary’s Open Space Preserve. He’s served on the Hill Haven Neighborhood Association board since 2019 and the board of directors for Muir Beach-based nonprofit Slide Ranch since 2021 and the Golden Gate Ferry Passengers Advisory Committee since 2020.

Hornbrook said he’s been civic-minded his entire life, as his father was a commissioner in Denver and involved in local Republican Party affairs before becoming an independent voter. Hornbrook himself in the mid 2000s ran for a seat on the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee and says he did disaster-relief work about the same time in Mississippi and Indonesia for similar reasons: “I am very unsettled saying ‘That is someone else’s issue.’”

Hornbrook said he considers his Town Council campaign “a continuation of all the things I’ve been working on” and said he thinks most councilmembers fail to make things happen or don’t make hard decisions, saying the only current board member who comes close is Jack Ryan.

He said he wants to be on the council to contribute to the town and “be able to make good decisions to help move things forward and not kick the can down the road and have us be frustrated and waste people’s time.”

So far, he’s issued position papers on improving trail safety, community safety, Tiburon Boulevard traffic, community gatherings and town accountability that are also posted on his campaign website, hornbrook4tiburon.com.

One of the major local issues Hornbrook wants to see addressed is implementing the parks master plan. He said the only major investment he’s seen the town make into parks was pledging $1 million toward Marin’s purchase of the 110-acre Easton Point annex to Old St. Hilary’s Open Space Preserve, a deal that was completed this September.

Though he supported the investment, “it’s not parks and spending time on updating play equipment and getting to understand what the needs of our citizens are.” He criticized the council’s recent approval of a plan to fill in and grade the sanitation ponds near McKegney Green with a gentle slope. The town purchased the ponds from the Richardson Bay Sanitary District and will add the swath of land to its parks system and has said the fill-and-grade work is necessary as part of state-imposed closure requirements; Town Manager Greg Chanis has said significant areas will be “essentially flat.”

Still, Hornbrook called the decision to slope over the ponds adjacent as a “figure things out later” method that isn’t cost-effective, given that survey results show a desire for flatter playing areas.

One competitor, Thier, has suggested a community pool since her own stint on the parks commission, and it’s ranked highly among community desires in multiple resident surveys. But Hornbook said he doesn’t support a community pool or pickleball courts at the location, as there’s no parking for a pool, which he says is a “bad use of capital.” Consultant WRT, which is developing the parks and recreation master plan, has ranked the implementation feasibility as “low” and estimated a recreation pool with deck and drainage would cost at least $3.2 million before other amenities.

Having pickleball on-site would be detrimental because of noise and winds, he said, and placing a tent over courts would eliminate the view of Richardson Bay.

In considering proposed improvements to parks as a councilmember, Hornbrook said, he would trust the recommendations of the parks and planning commissions and the Design Review Board. He cited his own experience as a parks commissioner, saying there have been times he felt the group’s recommendations were rejected by councilmembers who seemed unaware of why an item was before them in the first place.

“They’ve been appointed by the Town Council, but sometimes I feel as though the Town Council doesn’t appreciate the due diligence that their commissions do,” he said. “That’s what the commission should be doing, is acting as a filter to make their job easier.”

He’s noted the parks committee made recommendations to the council two years ago that a kayak and standup paddleboard launch — the No. 1 priority identified by residents in a recent survey for the parks master plan — would be ideal at Ark Row and Beach Road at Belvedere Cove. The council didn’t follow through, and when $600,000 in seawall repairs there were added to the latest town budget, officials didn’t consider adding the launch to that project.

Another issue Hornbrook looks to address if elected is Tiburon Boulevard traffic, where he says the council has also previously failed to act. He was on the consultant-selection committee this spring for an updated traffic study, but he points out that ideas recommended in the town’s 2001 traffic study were never pursued.

To reduce traffic on the road, he says construction parking weekdays should be staged at the Blackie’s Pasture dirt lot, which would reduce the distance to leave the Tiburon Peninsula; he’s said he’s received positive feedback from nearby residents. Hornbrook is also looking at potential carpooling programs for both construction workers and for Reed Union schools staff, and he says he’d reach out to local businesses to determine what regular shifts are to help develop park-and-go carpooling via the Marin Transit fleet or local buses.

Hornbrook also said he wants Tiburon to do a better job of communicating its public-safety measures and programs amid perceived safety concerns. Tiburon has had record-low crime for the third consecutive year in 2023 and is routinely among California’s safest towns, while police have attributed recent car thefts and tampering almost entirely to vehicles being left unlocked overnight, frequently with both the keys and thousands of dollars worth of personal items inside.

One suggestion was for the Tiburon Police Department to introduce technology to aggregate residential and local cameras in the event of a crime, but when The Ark noted a voluntary security-camera registration program already exists, Hornbrook said he wants to increase the program’s visibility as “there’d be tons of residents,” himself included, who would sign up.

He also suggested increased police patrols during holidays and summers when homes are vacant, a block-captains program like the one in Belvedere and quarterly reports from the Belvedere-Tiburon Joint Disaster Council.

“We live in a very safe town, statistically speaking — totally understand that,” Hornbrook said. “However, when something happens to somebody, it’s still a traumatic event and you need to approach that with an empathetic way and let people know what we’re doing in trying to address that.”

For e-bike-related issues, Hornbrook said he’d make the entire bike path of the Old Rail Trail 10 mph based on its current congestion and width, and he supports widening the bike path 4½ feet, to at least 21½ feet, the same as Mill Valley’s bike path, and he would look to increase maintenance budgets for the Old Rail Trail. At the same time, he wants to see broader shoulders or bike lanes along Tiburon Boulevard for cyclists who want to travel faster.

On Tiburon’s potential housing snafu, Hornbrook said he would again reach out to the Community Congregational Church and Tiburon Baptist Church through Senate Bill 4, nicknamed “Yes in God’s Backyard,” which allows religious houses of worship the right to build affordable housing on their property even if zoning doesn’t apply. The Baptist church had been on early town lists for potential redevelopment — which would spread some growth and keep some commuter traffic in northern Tiburon — but church officials weren’t interested.

Another potential solution, Hornbrook said, is to increase density in the downtown area, pointing to vacant lots at Shark’s Deli, which closed in 2014, and the former Bank of America building and its parking lot. Both sites are already included in the housing element, but the council rejected the Planning Commission’s recommendation to remove the controversial 4576 Paradise Drive site and instead allow more downtown density with fourth stories.

Hornbrook said the Paradise site’s inclusion in the housing element “was a bit of a stretch,” citing past experiences cycling Paradise Drive, and that there’d need to be community engagement and feedback sessions on downtown redevelopment to ensure “that there’s no views that are impacted.”

But Hornbrook said traffic needs be addressed before any alternate sites are examined, as any additional housing would receive backlash given potentials for increased traffic, especially downtown.

“We have to do that first,” he said. “That has to happen.”

For town events and community engagement, Hornbrook says he wants town commissions to work with the Belvedere-Tiburon Library and Tiburon Peninsula Chamber of Commerce to develop an annual slate of events, which would include doubling Friday Nights on Main from two to four nights, including the Fourth of July. He also wants to improve direct town communication with residents, including hiring a staff member solely for online strategies.

Hornbrook is also calling for increased accountability, with regular reviews of several town items, such as quarterly for the municipal budget and its expenses, revenue and capital-improvement projects; quarterly or annual reviews of building-permit turnaround times; regular reporting from joint-power authorities like the library, The Ranch recreation agency and the Tiburon Peninsula Traffic Relief board; and regular sessions with the chairs and vice chairs of the Planning Commission, Design Review Board and other boards to align goals and priorities.

“To me, it’s that accountability needs to much more kind of the rigor of running a town, and making it a smooth, operating piece,” Hornbrook said.

He said he wants to listen to all stakeholders in town, residents and workforce alike, and improve everyone’s time in Tiburon.

“I don’t think it’s fair to people, in the time that we’re here and our quality of life, to not solve issues or decide that there’s nothing to do,” Hornbrook said.

Nikfar lists parks, traffic mitigation as priorities

Nikfar, 45, moved to Tiburon in 2012, first living in the Bel Aire neighborhood before moving about a decade ago to the Del Mar neighborhood, where he lives with his wife, Jessica, and their three children, Victoria, Isaac Jr. and Arianna, who are all students at Redwood High School.

He grew up in Santa Clara and earned his bachelor’s in business from San Francisco State University, a portfolio-management certificate from Stanford University and an executive business certificate from Duke University. He works in sales at Adobe.

Over the years, Nikfar has coached youth sports for his kids’ teams and has been a leader for Tiburon Cub Scouts Pack 48. He’s also the volunteer athletic director for the St. Hilary CYO program.

Prior to his election to the Town Council, Nikfar served on the Parks, Open Space and Trails Commission starting in 2017, where he helped develop the town’s integrated-pest-management policy that restricts herbicide usage and served on the subcommittee working with the town and consultant WRT to develop the parks master plan.

Before winning the August 2023 special council election, Nikfar mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the board in November 2022, failing to unseat incumbents Ryan, Alice Fredericks and Jon Welner.

Nikfar said his top priority if elected to a full four-year term is improving parks and open space in Tiburon, pointing to his past commission work on the parks master plan as an example of the continued effort he looks to take on.

He said that as important as it is to be frugal and pay down debt and pension obligations as required, “it’s also really important to make sure that we are using the town funds wisely for specific improvements that are important — and priorities — to the residents of Tiburon.”

Nikfar said it’s easy for someone to take a “pot shot” at consultant fees the town has approved for the parks master plan or for a traffic study of Tiburon Boulevard, but added that the work done by consultants can be valuable. Developing a parks plan, for example, goes beyond “standing in the middle of a park and talking to people and seeing what they want in the park.” It includes ensuring everyone in Tiburon receives a survey to offer feedback, making recommendations based on the survey and looking at similar-sized towns, he said.

“Us as elected representatives, not living in a vacuum and making decisions in a vacuum, it’s about making sure that we have the best of the best in terms of information and resources at our fingertips,” Nikfar said. “And we should use those. We have a responsibility to use those.”

Nikfar said his preferences for possible parks and open space amenities lean toward having a community center and upgraded playgrounds, and he said he was willing to prioritize a standup paddleboard and kayak launch. But he said the “north star” should be the survey itself in determining what residents want, pointing to neighborhood meetings he’s had with residents from Bel Aire, Belveron and Del Mar, among others.

“As an elected representative, it’s our job to represent the people in town,” Nikfar said. “It’s our job to listen to the neighborhoods and what their preference is.”

Nikfar said he has a vision of improving traffic to the point where anyone in town, at any time, can go from downtown to Highway 101 in 15 minutes.

Part of that comes from having the best technology possible and being strategic when installing it, Nikfar said. He pointed to Caltrans’ plan to conduct its 4½-mile preventive-maintenance project on Tiburon Boulevard in winter 2026.

“We have the benefit of Caltrans coming in and repaving the roads so that we can start to upgrade our technology up and down the boulevard and ensure that we have the right mechanism at every intersection that’s needed to get that traffic flowing out of town more quickly,” he said.

Nikfar said the traffic study, which was approved by the council in May and will examine Tiburon Boulevard from Blackfield Drive to Beach Road, Trestle Glen Boulevard between Tiburon Boulevard and Paradise Drive and Paradise Drive between Main Street and Trestle Glen Boulevard, is important to understanding not just how much traffic comes in, but also times of day it comes in, where it comes from and where it goes. He said he’s also spoken to Belvedere Councilmember Sally Wilkinson and Mill Valley council counterparts about the traffic issue.

He said reducing resident reliance on cars is an area the town still needs to work on but suggested the Yellow Bus Program and carpooling to help keep cars off the road, noting his kids carpool to school and to after-school activities.

With Tiburon’s approved 2023-2031 housing plan now in limbo after the court’s decision on the Paradise Drive site, Nikfar expressed support for getting local control back into Tiburon’s hands but said the town needed real, achievable ways to build units.

“The reality is, as far as we know, the requirement to designate housing and making sure that we have a housing plan that will get fulfilled isn’t going away,” he said.

Nikfar said his preference was for more accessory dwelling units. He added that he wants there to be incentives with permitting fees and timing that makes those units easier to build, noting that focusing on accessory units spreads out housing, “which can ease traffic congestion and smooth that housing impact out” versus having “massively concentrated elements and apartment complexes or condo units” and what he says will be massive construction zones downtown for higher-density housing.

“I’m a supporter of letting Tiburon residents build out and be a part of this process and putting the control back in Tiburon residents’ hands,” he said. “I think that is the only viable path forward.”

Nikfar said he felt downtown had already absorbed “a significant amount of the housing in this housing element,” which required the town to identify sites for 639 new units over the next eight years.

“I think it’s already overburdened when we think about the impact of those new units,” Nikfar said. “I don’t think there’s a circumstance where I would be in support of adding more units downtown to what’s already been allocated if there’s any other mechanism to do so.”

He also expressed his opposition to the controversial inclusion of the Paradise Drive site in the housing element in the first place. Nikfar was on the council when it approved the site, and he’d been seeking his seat for more than a year when including his prior run for council, but he abstained from voting on the issue. He said there had been too many conversations that he wasn’t a party to.

Nikfar also said he wanted to improve public safety in town, including making the Old Rail Trail safer for pedestrians, and he added it’s important to “enable and empower” the Tiburon Police Department and firefighters “to do their job and trust that they’re doing everything they can for our community.”

On policing, Nikfar said he trusted what Police Chief Michelle Jean was doing with the department and said he would support funding any technology upgrades that may be required, as well as looking into any additional technology to help keep the town safe and more easily “find and identify people that have come to town to commit crimes.”

Nikfar said it’s important that residents elect councilmembers who know how to work with Town Hall staff, pointing to his experience on the council and on the parks commission. He said he understands Tiburon’s age demographics and the need for “someone who’s willing to roll up their sleeves and really has the time, and will make the effort, to represent (residents) and continue improving on things in town.”

“I think it’s incredibly important that you have someone that cares about the community and has been a part of the community and lives in the community,” Nikfar said.

Thier focused on taking Tiburon into the future

Thier, 59, has lived in Tiburon since 2013, residing in the Bel Aire neighborhood. Son Benjamin is a sophomore at the University of California at Davis, and daughter Jaqueline is a student at Redwood High School.

Born in Berkeley, Thier has bachelor’s degrees in political science and international relations from the University of California at Davis and received her law degree from the University of California College of the Law in San Francisco, formerly UC Hastings, in 1988.

An attorney by trade and owner of a construction-management and public-relations firm, Thier has also worked in commercial-business litigation, public government as a contract attorney for Vallejo and then as a deputy city attorney for San Francisco, as well as a mediator, arbitrator, administrative-law judge and judge pro tempore.

While in San Francisco, Thier was president of the city’s League of Women Voters chapter and was elected four times to the city’s Democratic County Central Committee to represent the 13th Assembly district. In 2002, she finished fourth in a race for the Democratic nomination for the state Assembly.

In Tiburon, she served three years on the Parks, Open Space and Trails Commission before getting appointed to an interim Town Council seat in June 2017. She won an election that November to serve the remainder of that term, which ended November 2020, and then was reappointed to a four-year term after no one stepped up to challenge her for the seat.

She’s hoping to continue work on several longtime priorities, including broadband for all, a Tiburon Boulevard trolley and a community pool.

Like other candidates, Thier said parks and the parks master plan are major issues facing the town.

She said safety issues and infrastructure upgrades are important, pointing to divots in Bel Aire Park that, after a recent walk-through of the area, she asked the town to fill in.

“Whatever happens in that space in the future is a community process, but this has to be done right now,” she said.

But Thier said she is “not willing to say where anything goes” for larger-scale improvements, noting she wants to let the community decide on where big-picture projects should go.

Thier has long floated the idea of a community pool on the site of the sanitary ponds. She said a pool is generally a popular concept, pointing toward its “high priority” designation in the community survey in the parks master-planning process, but again she said she’ll leave it up to the community to decide where it should go.

“For me, I’m going to respect the community process, I’m going to … work with the community in determining a good location, if that’s what the community still wants,” she said.

Thier was more explicit in her support for improving recreational water access on the Tiburon Peninsula, saying she’s hopeful to provide it in some way, given that many residents have told her they don’t have access but want it. She also expressed support for inclusive playground structures, saying that when new playgrounds are built or upgraded “we need to make sure they’re accessible so all children can play in Tiburon.”

To reduce traffic on Tiburon Boulevard, Thier has long suggested an open-air electric trolley, similar to the type that runs in Laguna Beach, to supplement Marin Transit’s Route 219. Local tourism and marketing agency Destination Tiburon picked up the idea and presented it to the council in late 2021, but it hasn’t made the council’s annual priority lists since.

Thier said she envisions the trolley starting on Tiburon Boulevard while eventually making its way into hillier parts of town to make it easier for those with mobility issues — something Route 219 no longer does. Funding sources could be pursued from state and federal grant programs, and Thier also mentioned Proposition 4, a $10-billion bond measure on the November ballot that, if passed, would go toward providing safe water supplies and preventing wildfires, among other environmental investments, with $850 million to go toward building clean-energy infrastructure.

“I think it’s critical to look at all funding sources, because this is the kind of transportation that is being encouraged right now,” she said. “And it’s something that not only will reduce traffic, but it’s going to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Thier also said Tiburon has made inroads to improving pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure in town, pointing to the work she did helping write the town’s pedestrian-bicyclist-driver safety plan while on the parks commission. But Thier said there’s more work to be done, adding that Caltrans’ plans to install Class 4, or separated, bike lines on Tiburon Boulevard as part of its 4½-mile preventive-maintenance project, now slated for a winter 2026 start, will help with reducing cars on Tiburon Boulevard.

Thier also voiced support for reducing how many cars are on job sites by incorporating vehicle limits into construction-management plans.

In light of the court decision to remove the 93-unit Paradise Drive site from Tiburon’s housing element, Thier said the most important thing was ensuring the town remained certified to avoid the builder’s remedy, where certain affordable housing must be built by right in municipalities with noncompliant housing elements, irrespective of local zoning.

“In any future decisions, that’s what I’m looking at,” she said. “And I’m going to make sure that our housing element stays certified and that Tiburon is protected from the builder’s remedy.”

The council may have to decide whether to appeal the court ruling, redo the environmental study to preserve the Paradise site or come up with new housing sites.

If it comes to making up lost units, Thier said she had a preference for accessory dwelling units, but she wanted a “communitywide process” to decide where any of at least 40 units would need to go.

Thier said her votes to approve the Paradise Drive site were done because Tiburon “was at risk of … not providing the information to (the California Department of Housing and Community Development) for a certified housing element.”

“I think we avoided the builder’s remedy, and we made sure that the town was not exposed to a rejection in the protections that our residents care about,” she said of her vote.

Thier also expressed support for continuing Tiburon’s mitigation efforts against climate change, considering herself an environmentalist “3,000%” and supporting building electrification and having more electric-vehicle charging stations in town. She said getting people into alternate modes of transportation would not only reduce traffic but also help lower greenhouse-gas emissions.

Thier, who chairs the Diversity Inclusion Task Force on which all five councilmembers serve alongside five community members, expressed support for Tiburon’s diversity initiatives, saying she wanted to see potential changes in town hiring processes to reach out to organizations and ensure the town has more diverse job candidates. She also said she supports increasing community and cultural events.

Thier said Tiburon needs to move forward, respecting history but also bringing needed services to residents. Among those is digital infrastructure, where she and Welner examined the feasibility of installing broadband in every Tiburon home. A consultant has since suggested partnering with Caltrans during its preventive-maintenance project, with the town now exploring the installation of a fiber-optic trunk line that could provide initial benefit to downtown agencies like Town Hall, the library, police and fire agencies and Reed Union schools and to downtown businesses, but also allow for adaptive traffic signals and smarter traffic management.

Thier said she rejects the “glass half full, half empty” concept, saying she sees “what could be” and that she responds to residents and their ideas.

“I know that our residents believe Tiburon’s great, and I look at how I can make it better for them,” Thier said. “And you need someone on the Town Council who’s looking at the future.”

Thompson says he has the skills to bring town together

Thompson, 62, lives in a Mar West apartment near the Tiburon Peninsula Club and owns the Reedlands home he grew up in, which he’s currently renting out. He has two adult daughters: Lexy, a crime statistician at the U.S. Department of Justice, and Skylar, a senior at Chapman University in Orange County who plans to work in investment banking after graduating.

He graduated from George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs in 1985 with a bachelor’s in international affairs and economics but has made a career in commercial real estate. He is currently a vice president at San Francisco-based Colton Commercial & Partners Inc.

Thompson previously served on the council from 1992 to 2003, taking two turns as mayor, but did he not run for reelection after unsuccessfully pursuing a seat on the Marin Board of Supervisors in 2004.

During his time on the Town Council, Thompson created a series of annual homeowners’ summits, where leaders of homeowners associations and other residents could tell councilmembers their concerns. He was one of the main proponents in the 1990s of building Town Hall at its current downtown location, 1505 Tiburon Blvd., instead of a new building on Ned’s Way. The current Police Department headquarters also opened during Thompson’s council tenure, in 1999.

Thompson said he wants to restart the homeowners association summits he created and fix sources of neighbor conflict, such as the town’s view ordinance, which he says should be reworded to show who’s responsible for cost allocation. He says recent changes have led to unintended consequences with devastating effects, as property owners with no clear responsibilities or costs don’t feel any obligation to preserve their neighbors’ rights. Disputes then turn neighbors into adversaries and result in costly legal battles.

He added that growing up in town gives him an advantage that other candidates don’t have.

“I think my generational perspective and experience gives me this unique insight and wisdom,” Thompson said. “And I think I can help the town tremendously.”

Thompson said he wants to join the council again because of what he calls contentious sentiments between neighbors or across the community, adding he “can see clearly how we can make significant things better in town.”

“I’m not over-exaggerating, I look at everybody in Tiburon as part of my extended family,” Thompson said. “I really care for them.”

Like Hornbrook, Thompson has posted a number of policy positions to his campaign website, andrewthompson4tiburon.com.

His overarching message is an initiative he’s calling “Tiburon Together” to promote community interconnectedness and reduce conflicts between neighbors via working with neighborhood associations, local Rotary clubs and other volunteer groups; enhance town communications with community forums, newsletters and social media to increase engagement in Tiburon affairs; and increase town-organized community events, such as barbecues and celebrations for local groups.

He said he thinks the town should hire a full-time staff member to focus on the initiative.

“It’s bringing community together, it’s getting off the phones, it’s interacting more face-to-face,” Thompson said. “And it’s also bridging barriers between racial backgrounds, age differences, gender differences — it’s just bringing people together. And I think our community is going to really react to that in a very positive way.”

Thompson said he’ll be proactive as a councilmember in part through revived neighborhood-association summits, which he said are valuable ways to find out about issues and nip potential problems in the bud.

“You’re figuring things out early before it gets bad, so (the summits have) to be reinvigorated,” Thompson said.

Thompson said he’s received positive feedback from local faith congregations, neighborhood association leaders and residents at large on his attempts at change.

“I look beyond just, ‘What is the limited social responsibility of the town,’ but what is a community need?” Thompson said.

Thompson said he wants to see the Old Rail Tail widened for pedestrians, but he also wants to figure out how to teach people where they should walk when they’re on the trail.

“In Germany and some of the other countries — in the Netherlands — if you step out of the walking area onto the bike area, man, do you get yelled at,” Thompson said. “It’s just behavioral modification, and it’ll work. And instead of people festering and arguing something, it’s problem solving.”

While he supports the idea of a parks master plan, Thompson took issue with what he considers excessive spending on the plan and hired consultants. Thompson said he would have limited consultant usage and instead used the Parks, Open Space and Trails Commission and potentially other communities, in addition to grassroots resident input, but he conceded “the horse is out of the barn as far as the contract on the consultants.”

Thompson said tangible improvements, like volleyball netting or even a bocce ball court, could be a good start because they’re lower impact and allow for incremental improvements over time. He has said, for example, that one of the four settlement ponds by McKegney Green could be filled with sand and used as a volleyball court to gauge use and the community’s response.

“What I’ve learned in Tiburon: You start small, see what takes traction, what’s popular and then you build from there,” he said. “That is the formula for success — just the opposite of a big, grandiose master plan. It scares the hell out of everybody … and then everyone’s fighting instead of working together.”

To address Tiburon Boulevard traffic, Thompson said he wants to have smarter light sequencing on the roadway to give more time for drivers to funnel through. While drivers on artery streets would wait longer, there’d still be a flow, he said. In the event there’s an accident, he wants to see police officers “put on their white gloves” and run everyone through quickly as a temporary fix.

Thompson also said he wants to see the Yellow Bus Program improve its punctuality, and he expressed concerns with Caltrans’ plans of adding bike lines as part of its 4½-mile preventive-maintenance project, as the presence of bikes, he said, will “slow down traffic even more.” He said he wants to figure out how to get more uses out of the Old Rail Trail, from getting e-bike riders to ride slowly to having more kids use it to get to school.

Thompson also said he wants to explore the use of roundabouts, encourage more residents to use mass-transit options and implement technologies for real-time traffic updates to help drivers better plan their travel. Reducing traffic, he stressed, comes down to telling people to change when they leave town during rush hour.

“Everyone needs to remember and have it super clear in their head when crunch time is and know that, ‘If I don’t have to leave and add to that right now,’ then you don’t,” he said. “It’s better planning.”

While encouraging e-bike use for local shopping is possible, he said, it won’t have a significant impact on traffic.

“Let’s just look at the realities of who lives here, and the individual freedom that a car gives you,” Thompson said. “You can’t get people to give that up.”

Thompson said he supports looking at where workers in Tiburon commute from to see whether any area has a concentration of workers and possibly send vans out to bring them into town, whether it’s through using Marin Transit or other entities.

Thompson said he views Tiburon’s state-mandated housing allocation of 639 units excessive, adding that he’s willing to challenge the state if the town can unite with other local jurisdictions in similar situations. Tiburon was one of 28 jurisdictions to appeal its housing allocation to the Association of Bay Area Governments in 2021, and all but one — 35 units were moved from Contra Costa County to Pittsburg — were denied.

“This is causing horrible land-use planning,” Thompson said, adding that any potential fire blowing south would make it impossible for the peninsula to evacuate.

Otherwise, Thompson expressed support for accessory dwelling units, saying they can help households bring in income, but he added the process to build and set up a second unit with utilities needs to be simplified and made less expensive.

He also wants to improve residents’ access to broadband, with a short-term plan to challenge Xfinity on discriminatory and monopolistic pricing practices that could include bringing in state regulators. On the long term, he wants to continue exploring the potential benefits of a fiber-optic backbone along Tiburon Boulevard.

While Thompson said there’s a certain grandiosity to his overarching goal to change residents’ social behaviors, he noted there are “practical realities” of youths glued to their phones and neighbors not knowing each other. He said he wants to “obliterate that whole feeling.”

“I think it’s not going to happen overnight, OK?” Thompson said. But he added that neither did building Town Hall without additional taxes or creating the neighborhood summits.

Thompson reiterated he has the generational knowledge to pull off the change he thinks is needed on the Town Council.

“When people start talking to me about that, and seeing that, they go, ‘Man, this is what we got to do,’” he said. “And they start getting excited about it. It’s going to happen. It’s just going to take some time.”

Reach Tiburon reporter Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634. DONATE to support local journalism, or SUBSCRIBE NOW for home delivery and access to the digital replica.

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