The future of the Tam Junction and Manzanita areas of unincorporated southern Marin County is about to be the topic of an in-depth community engagement process, but the county first needs to hire a consultant for the job. To do that, the county will first conduct its own outreach.   

The Marin County Community Development Agency will host two meetings at 7 p.m. on April 1 and April 15 at the Tam Valley Community Center in Mill Valley. 

County officials want to hear the community’s priorities on safety, access, economic vitality and climate resilience. Feedback will help shape a request for proposals from potential consultants. 

Once a consultant is selected this fall, an interdisciplinary team will collect feedback from residents and business owners before publishing a report outlining potential strategies for the Tam Junction district. The engagement will also include the formation of an advisory group to guide the planning process. 

Tamalpais Valley includes several unincorporated communities between Marin City and Mill Valley, including Tennessee Valley, Homestead Valley, Tam Junction and Almonte. 

At the April meetings, county officials will present preliminary research called the Tam Junction Placemaking Study, which focuses on the primary commercial corridor in Tam Junction and nearby Manzanita, a roughly half-mile stretch of Shoreline Highway between Almonte Boulevard and U.S. Highway 101.  

The corridor serves residents and businesses but also sees heavy traffic from visitors traveling to coastal West Marin, Mount Tamalpais State Park and Muir Woods National Monument. Parts of the waterfront area along Richardson Bay also face periodic flooding from winter storms, king tides and long-term sea level rise, county officials said. 

The county team working on Tam Junction can be reached at TamJunction@marincounty.gov. 

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.