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Aug 22, 2023

How a wooden fence and private parking divided a Point Richmond neighborhood

It all started as a low-stakes tiff about a 6-foot redwood fence, erected

It all started as a low-stakes tiff about a 6-foot redwood fence, erected parallel to a public road and narrowing the path for those who walked past it to Richmond's popular Keller Beach.

But years of neighbors’ complaints and regulatory mishaps eventually propelled the dispute into 18 months of vitriolic harassment of the family that owns the home behind that fence, and a raging debate about the minutiae of city permits that played out at the Richmond City Council last week.

"This whole thing is just absolutely ridiculous — are we really spending the council's time on a fence?" resident Ron Park said at the meeting.

Yes, we are. And one person's ridiculous contretemps, it seems, can be another person's holy war.

Flash back to December 2017, when the previous owners of the property at 8 Western Drive — located in the waterfront Point Richmond neighborhood and featuring a direct view of the Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline — were granted a permit to build a wooden fence with a rolling gate, a set of stairs and a retaining wall.

But when the fence got built, it ended up enclosing 1,580 square feet of the road's public right-of-way. The project effectively created two exclusive, off-street parking spaces and a nook to store the million-dollar home's trash cans and recycling bins — butting right up against one of the "No Parking" signs installed along the popular path leading to the beach.

Three years later, two curious next-door neighbors — Richard Katz, a scientist who developed yeast capsules for urinary tract infections, and Clair Brown, an economics professor at UC Berkeley — started gaining traction in their argument that the fence never should have been allowed to begin with. Their campaign against it included fervent emails to City Hall, threats of a lawsuit and numerous posts on former Richmond Mayor Tom Butt's infamous e-Blog.

Katz, the self-proclaimed "principal whistleblower" against the encroachment at 8 Western Drive, argued that the large fence unlawfully jeopardizes safe travel for pedestrians and cyclists, many of whom traverse the rural path to take in the view or access the beach beneath it.

Katz was especially incensed at city regulators — "government gone off the rails," he termed them — who he felt had ignored their own rules in allowing the fence to intrude upon the public right-of-way without ever seeking community input.

"When you have that kind of lawlessness, that dissolution of the underlying respect for the Rule of Law — anything can happen," Katz wrote in a June email, sent from his new home in Sonoma County. "And it was happening; it did."

By that time, the saga had taken a dark turn.

The current owners of 8 Western Drive, the Ortiz family, acquired the controversial fence when they purchased the house in August 2021. Ironically, the wooden barrier kept them physically safe while the drama around it unfolded — climaxing with reports of graffitied racial slurs, a doll hung from the fence and an arrow shot into the property.

"All we did was buy a house to live peacefully and contribute collectively to the neighborhood," Anna Ortiz said. "We did not ask for any of this."

Ultimately, city regulators acknowledged they had erred in allowing the fence initially without a public hearing. Not only does it encroach on the road, but it is taller than allowed under Richmond zoning rules. They asked for a do-over.

And this week, the Ortizes received official permission to keep the fence, after the Richmond City Council voted 4-2 Tuesday to approve the encroachment on public land at 8 Western Drive. Councilmembers Sohelia Bana and Claudia Jimenez voted no, and Mayor Eduardo Martinez was absent.

But Katz was not mollified. Now, he is arguing that the new agreement with the Ortizes violates the California state constitution.

"When you give a private family exclusive use of a valuable piece of public land — worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with a beautiful Bay view — for the rest of their life as long as they own the property, that is a gift," Katz said during Tuesday's meeting. "That is so against the law that if you vote for it, I’m not going to quit until you’re in jail."

Nearly all of the community members who spoke during Tuesday's meeting rejected the notion that the fence made the walkway along Western Drive unsafe, as Katz argued, including a visually impaired woman who frequently walks that area with her guide dog. Additionally, Richmond officials confirmed that they were not aware of any accidents that had occurred near the home's fence.

In fact, several Richmond residents who spoke at Tuesday's meeting were frustrated by the entire mess about a fence, which many hadn't noticed at all before people like Katz and Butt started blasting the issue online.

Said Park: "What an unnecessary can of worms to open."

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