Fire and flood
Fairfax is not where this valley floods. We do pay for it, and the fee that pays for it expires in 2027.
June 30, 2027
The Flood Zone 9 fee, in the flood district's own words, "will last 20 years, terminating on June 30, 2027."
- The Flood Zone 9 fee terminates
- Measure C, which funds wildfire prevention, sunsets
Where things actually stand
First, some perspective. Fairfax sits high in the Ross Valley watershed. Water leaves here and arrives somewhere else. The towns with the serious flood exposure are the ones below us, lower and further down the creek. This is not a page about Fairfax being underwater.
It is a page about money. Flood Zone 9 covers Fairfax along with our downstream neighbors, we pay into it, and its funding ends on June 30, 2027. The council elected this November will have been in office for eight months when that happens.
The advisory board has met twice in 2026 and has no next meeting on the calendar.
Renewing a fee like this isn't a vote. It's a procedure, and Proposition 218 spells out every step of it.
First a written notice, mailed to every affected property owner. That notice has to go out at least 45 days ahead of a public hearing. Then the hearing itself. Then a majority protest procedure. And if the renewal is structured as an assessment under section 4 instead, it becomes a mailed ballot proceeding decided by a weighted majority.
Either route runs longer than the calendar currently allows for, and the clock hasn't started.
The engine that comes when you call
Ross Valley Fire covers Fairfax out of Station 21 on Bolinas Road.
What we already paid for
The detention basin at the base of White's Hill, on the old Sunnyside Nursery site, is built.
It was expensive, and what it actually buys is harder to find out than it should be. The figure that circulates locally is around 45 minutes of extra warning downstream in a storm, and even that only holds if the rest of the chain gets finished. The upstream and downstream pieces belong to other jurisdictions, and they are not finished.
I am not going to relitigate a basin that already exists. I would like the Town to publish, in one place, what it cost us and what it does. If the answer is good, that is worth knowing.
In February 2026 the County paused every Corte Madera Creek flood control project pending a comprehensive review, which the Public Works Director described as a "strategic reset."
Some of the local frustration about consultant spending on this is fair. Some of the delay is nobody's fault.
Federal floodplain rules say you can't build anything that raises the storm water surface downstream unless you mitigate it first. People here call it the "no rise" rule. CEQA review sits on top of it. Both are slow by design, because the fast version means moving someone else's flood risk onto them without asking them first.
Wildfire, in the same breath
$24.1ma year, across 17 agencies
- Chipper days $1.35m
- Telling people how to prepare $1.25m
- Everything else about $21.5m
- Chipper days
- The authority brings a wood chipper to your street on a set day so you can cut back brush near the house and get rid of it without hauling it anywhere.
- Home evaluations
- Someone walks your property and tells you what to clear, and where the embers would land.
- Measure C
- The countywide tax Marin voters passed in March 2020, at 70.8 percent, to pay for all of this. It expires unless voters renew it.
Measure C is the next thing to expire after Zone 9.
Fire Station 21 is meanwhile mid remodel, paid for by a $1.6 million county loan over five years at about 4.73 percent, with construction running from summer 2026 into early 2027. That loan reappears on the budget page, because it's the reason the fire line looks like it jumped 17 percent.
The insurance problem, which is really a housing problem
This is the one I get asked about most and it's barely discussed at council.
If you can't insure a house here, a lot of other things stop working. You may not be able to buy it, refinance it, or afford to stay in it. That makes insurance a housing question, not a paperwork one.
There's something a town can do about it, and Fairfax isn't doing enough of it.
California's Safer from Wildfires framework recognizes specific work on a home and on a neighborhood, and requires insurers to give discounts for it. Ember-resistant vents. A fire-resistant roof. Cleared defensible space. Vegetation management across a whole street rather than one garden at a time.
The town-level job is to make sure that work happens, that residents know the discounts exist, and that nobody is left trying to navigate a complicated system alone.
The FAIR Plan matters here too. It's a genuine safety net and it was never meant to be anybody's main policy, because it covers less than an ordinary homeowners policy does. A town that reduces its risk is a town whose residents need it less.
- Push the wildfire work Fairfax already pays for through Measure C as hard as it will go, and treat the discounts as part of the point rather than a side effect.
- Publish, in one place, what a Fairfax homeowner can do to their house and what it's worth on a premium.
- Advocate with the County and our state representatives for a system that rewards a town for lowering its risk instead of pricing it on a map.
What I would do
- At the first council meeting I sit in, ask on the record for the Zone 9 renewal timeline and the Proposition 218 calendar that has to go with it. Then publish the answer, including if the answer turns out to be that there isn't one.
- Establish who holds Fairfax's Zone 9 seat and make that occupancy public and current. A seat nobody can name is a seat nobody is using.
- Treat evacuation route capacity as a road funding test rather than a separate wish list. The same pavement dollars are deciding both questions, so they should be decided together.
What I don't know yet
Whether the County intends to renew the Zone 9 fee, restructure it, or let it lapse. There is nothing published either way.
I also don't know who currently holds the Fairfax seat on the Zone 9 advisory board. I've seen names asserted and I haven't seen one confirmed.
Am I missing anything?
If you know something about fire and flood that I do not, or you would go a different way on it, I would like to hear it.
Your name and neighborhood help if you are happy to give them. Nothing you send will ever be shared without your permission, and I would never sell your information.
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