On Wednesday night, roughly 50 residents filled Sweetwater Music Hall for Mill Valley Briefing's second live community conversation, this one on wildfire preparedness.
Who was there: Moderating was Peter Fimrite, a Tam Valley resident and former science and environment reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, and a former U.S. Forest Service firefighter. He was joined by four panelists: Michael Wara, who directs the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and has lived in Tam Valley for 25 years; Anne Crealock, planning and program manager at the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority; Leah Curtis, preparedness and education coordinator for Southern Marin Fire District and chair of Mill Valley's Emergency Preparedness Commission; and Carl Sanders, natural resources program manager at Marin Water, who runs the district's prescribed burn program.
Moderator Peter Fimrite (left) and panelists Michael Wara, Anne Crealock, Leah Curtis and Carl Sanders at Sweetwater Music Hall on Sept 16, 2026.
Why now: Fimrite opened by naming the reason for having this discussion: Mill Valley's first PG&E power shutoff in five years this July, followed by a vegetation fire that burned within a half mile of downtown a few weeks later. He framed the evening around two questions: what's actually working, and what isn't.
Where things stand: Each panelist opened with one line on what had changed most in the past year. Wara pointed to the state finalizing Zone Zero, the long-debated rule requiring homeowners to clear the first five feet around a structure, and said California's insurance market has at least stopped getting worse, even if it isn't improving yet.
Crealock said state agencies have moved faster on permitting since the Los Angeles fires in January 2025, and that a handful of Marin homeowners have moved off the state's FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort, and back onto private coverage. Curtis pointed to that same Zone Zero shift, plus a change in mindset she's noticed among residents since the LA fires, less "what if" fear, more "what can I do."
Sanders walked the room through deeper history first. "Our vegetation and landscape is fire-starved," he said, explaining that fires here once returned every five to ten years before European settlement, both from lightning and from Indigenous cultural burning practiced for hunting and food gathering. Mill Valley's last significant fire was in 1929. Nearly a century without one has let vegetation build up far beyond what these hills evolved with. This season, Marin Water burned about 120 acres, sharply up from the year before, and the district's board recently raised its annual burn target to 1,000 acres.
Crealock described the fuel break itself as ongoing rather than finished. "It's kind of like painting the Golden Gate Bridge," she said. "You start work, you keep going, and then by the time you're done, you need to go back and maintain it." That framing, she said, is worth remembering as the ballot measure funding the work comes up for renewal.
Optimism meets caution: The evening's sharpest tension wasn't between panelists so much as between optimism and caution. Crealock and Curtis pointed to real, measurable progress: defensible space chipper pickups up 37% over last year, more than 200 inspection violations corrected, and July's fire near downtown as what Crealock called a proof of concept, since vegetation management in that area is believed to have slowed the fire enough for crews to reach it before it spread to homes.
Wara pushed back on the comfort of that framing. Both local fires this year, Hillside and then Tennessee Valley, happened on calm, humid days with no competing fires elsewhere in the state pulling away resources, he said. The days that matter are the ones with high wind, when crews can't safely operate at all, and those days are becoming more common, not less. "We're at the first mile of the marathon," he said, "and we're running strong and we're gaining fitness as we go, but we've probably got to keep doing this for 10, 20 years before we're really going to be ready."
On affordability, Wara argued that grant money should target residents who genuinely can't afford defensible space work, not homeowners who can afford a two million dollar mortgage but ask for public help anyway. Curtis approached the same problem from a different angle, not who deserves help but how people actually take it. SMFD's most effective tool, she said, is often one concerned neighbor who pulls an entire street into compliance gradually.
If they could fund one thing: Closing the evening, Fimrite asked each panelist what they'd fund or fix if they could pick just one thing. Sanders pointed to something less tangible than acreage: the partnership between Marin Water's burn program and Marin County Fire, which uses prescribed burns to give young firefighters live-fire training before they're tested on a real one.
Curtis wants more residents to understand what their tax dollars, through Measure C and the city's MST parcel tax, are actually funding, and offered a line worth remembering either way. "Perfection is the enemy of preparedness," she said. "There's no right answer in this. We have to adapt."
Crealock cited a recent UC Berkeley study finding that home hardening alone helped roughly 25% of homes survive a wildfire, rising past 40% with Zone Zero compliance and higher still with defensible space out to 30 feet. Her ask was blunt: more of everything, since even Measure C's $23.5 million this year isn't enough to wait on.
Wara's answer was the most unexpected of the night: art. He'd like to see photographers and storytellers help residents see beauty in a fire-adapted landscape, rather than fear in it. On home hardening, he added "your house is not a bunker. We need a new language to talk about this that connects with people where they are."
What's next: Southern Marin Fire District holds an evacuation drill in Scott Valley on October 3, alongside Mill Valley police and the city. Two new part-time Neighborhood Response Group coordinators, Kevin Ritchie and Michele Grant, begin going door to door in the area this weekend to recruit volunteers. The full conversation will be released as a podcast episode in an upcoming newsletter.
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🏬 Downtown updates
🎨 Dorado 806 Projects opens at 38 Miller with the group show "Lesser Known Monsters", and the exhibition running through October 17. It’s in the former All Wrapped Up store that had been sitting empty for a few years.
🍸 Lima Nikkei has seated diners at the El Paseo space. The Peruvian-Japanese restaurant hosted a community dinner Thursday after a preview for family and friends earlier this week, the restaurant said, and is taking reservations for Monday. That space had been empty since Paseo Bistro closed last December.
Both were among the nine downtown spaces with a confirmed tenant when the Briefing counted 93 street-level storefronts in August, and the storefront tracker at millvalleybriefing.com/storefronts keeps every address updated.
sponsored by
MILL VALLEY HISTORICAL SOCIETYThis week in Mill Valley history: The festival that started in a store window
This weekend, the Fall Arts Festival returns to Old Mill Park. It has been coming back every September for decades. But it didn't start in September, and it wasn't called the Fall Arts Festival.
On October 25, 1957, Mill Valley held its first Harvest Festival. Scarecrows, witches, corn stalks and pumpkins decorated the street boxes along the business district. Loudspeakers were mounted atop downtown stores so that, as the Mill Valley Record put it, "the Mill Valley air will not only be filled with the scent of fall flowers, but with soft music as well." In the stores of some eighty merchant members of the Chamber of Commerce hung paintings by local artists. Festival goers voted for their favorites by dropping ballots in boxes inside the stores. Three prizes, $25, $15 and $10, were awarded.
The art committee included Lucienne Bloch, a Mill Valley resident who had assisted Diego Rivera on his Detroit Industry murals in the 1930s. She was one of eight artists who organized the exhibition, collected the work at City Hall and distributed it to merchants for display.
The Mill Valley Arts Festival at the bus depot, late 1950s. Pottery in the foreground, paintings on panels in the background, paper lanterns strung overhead. Within a few years the festival would outgrow downtown and move to Old Mill Park. (Courtesy of the Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library)
Lytton Square was blocked off on Saturday night for Mexican dancers from El Club Social Las Inditas of Oakland, a famous clown from Vallejo, the Marin County Stump Jumpers doing square dancing, a ventriloquist act, and street dancing until 10 p.m. The nine-day festival ran through November 2.
The day before it opened, the Record published an editorial. "The Festival is more than a retail commercial event: much more," it said. "It is an expression of a community working together, for a fun-having, cultural purpose... By far the most significant thing is this: it is an expression of the people of our town."
By 1962 the festival had outgrown its early venues: store windows, Lytton Square and Boyle Park. It moved to Old Mill Park, became a nonprofit, changed its name and adopted a jury system. By 1991 nearly 700 artists were applying for 134 spots, reviewed twice by a panel of six with strict anonymity. The ballot boxes in the store windows were long gone.
Tom Killion, the woodblock print artist, first showed his work at the festival at age 15 or 16 in the late 1960s or early 1970s, displaying on pegboards nailed to trees. "That's how we did it in those days," he told the Marin IJ in 2016. "It would soon become a famous place and a renowned event."
Sources: Mill Valley Record, Oct 10, 1957, Oct 17, 1957, Oct 24, 1957; Mill Valley Herald, Sep 9, 1991; Marin Independent Journal, Sep 14, 2016; Mill Valley Historical Society, Vignette 284; Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival, Our Story.
This story was sponsored by the Mill Valley Historical Society. Visit their new website at mvhistory.org.
Sponsors pay for placement, not coverage. Our reporting is always produced independently, without sponsor review or editorial input.
Tobacco ban comes to council Monday
City council holds a public hearing Monday on an ordinance that would end retail tobacco sales in Mill Valley entirely. The hearing follows a March meeting where council directed staff to draft a ban, after nineteen written comments and every in-person speaker supported it, according to the meeting video. Testimony that night came also from Tam and Redwood High students, who described vapes and nicotine pouches as a routine part of campus life.
The ordinance, laid out in the September 21 staff report, would prohibit both in-person and delivery sales of tobacco products and electronic smoking devices, exempting FDA-approved cessation products. Five Mill Valley retailers currently sell tobacco, and three rank among the city's top ten sales tax generators, City Manager Todd Cusimano told council in March. If adopted, the ban would not become enforceable until April 1, 2027, per the staff report, giving retailers roughly six months to sell through existing inventory. Monday's vote is on introduction only; final adoption would follow at a later meeting.
Corte Madera's town council adopted its own ban September 15 in a divided 3-2 vote, KRON4 reported, with retailer Total Wine testifying against it. Advocates say Mill Valley would join a small but growing list of California cities moving to end commercial tobacco sales.
City council meets Monday at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall. Public comment is welcome.
What we covered this week
🗂️ The legal bill for public records requests at Tamalpais Union High School District hit $75,659 in 2025-26, up 440% from the district's estimated annual average by our math, according to Superintendent Courtney Goode's Aug. 25 presentation. The district logged 43 more requests in the first 35 days of this fiscal year. We reported on the one requester whose filings cost $8,955 in a single month, a 31,000-page request still in production and the apology a trustee said the district owes.
🚌 Marin Transit wants to end free transfers for cash-paying riders and scrap the $325 Youth Pass, with a final board vote Oct. 5. We reported on how fast the Youth Pass would disappear if the board approves, why cash riders keep their transfers until January and why the district says the change clears its equity thresholds while most public comment runs the other way.
🦉 Mt. Tam's first year of Class I e-bikes drew 76% visitor support and lower owl breeding activity, and neither wildlife report links the two, according to Marin Water's Year One report. We reported on a bat species of special concern whose calls fall in the range researchers consider most sensitive to e-bike motor noise, the Barred Owl removed from a Mill Valley site in May and the lawsuit behind this narrower trial.
🔥 The Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority board approved a 170-acre fuel break above Tam Valley and Homestead Valley on Thursday. We reported on what the project's environmental filing says would happen if a fire started there, how it differs from the 673-acre break around Mill Valley and the state exemption that lets fire projects skip a step in environmental review.
If you want to read about any of these stories as they develop, the weekday Briefing lands in your inbox Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6am. A paid subscription makes this reader-funded, local news operation possible. It’s $12 per month, which you can cancel anytime, and the annual subscription comes out to less than $2.50 a week. Upgrading is only two clicks if you use Apple Pay.
📅 Next week in Mill Valley
ℹ️ See the full event calendar and bookmark it, as we’ll update that same link each week.
Monday, September 21
✍️ From Draft to Craft: Point of View and Narration, Mill Valley Public Library, 5:30–7pm. Weekly craft discussion and creative writing workshop breaking down narrative perspective through literary excerpts in the Creekside Room at 375 Throckmorton Ave. Free entry; registration required.
Tuesday, September 22
🎸 Marcus Rezak Band (Free Show!), The Junction Beer Garden, 6pm. High-octane guitar jams featuring Marcus Rezak with Anna Elva, Angeline Saris, Scott Guberman, Jen Freebairn, and Chris Hoog outdoors at 226 Shoreline Hwy. Free entry; all ages welcome.
🎭 Tuesday Night Comedy, Throckmorton Theatre, 8–10pm. Headliner Auggie Smith alongside Dauood Naimyar, Roger Lizaola, and Juan Carlos at 142 Throckmorton Ave. Doors open at 7:30pm.
🎸 Ariel Posen with Zach Person, Sweetwater Music Hall, 8pm. Renowned roots, rock, and slide guitarist brings his soulful songwriting to 19 Corte Madera Ave. All ages; doors open at 7pm.
Wednesday, September 23
🎬 Plastic Detox: Screening & Discussion, Mill Valley Public Library, 6–8pm. Plastic Free Marin hosts a screening of the documentary The Plastic Detox, followed by a community discussion on plastic impacts and human health in the Creekside Room at 375 Throckmorton Ave. Free entry; registration required.
Thursday, September 24
🧠 Trivia Night, The Depot Cafe and Bookstore, 5:30pm. Weekly team trivia on the downtown plaza at 87 Throckmorton Ave. Free entry; all ages.
🪕 22nd Annual DjangoFest Mill Valley, Throckmorton Theatre, 8–10pm. (Fri, Sat 8-10p, Sun 5-7p) Opening night of the premier four-day Gypsy jazz festival celebrating the music of Django Reinhardt at 142 Throckmorton Ave. Full 4-day festival pass: $215.
🎤 Carsie Blanton with The Burning Hell (SOLD OUT), Sweetwater Music Hall, 8pm. High-energy folk-pop and activist songwriting at 19 Corte Madera Ave. All ages; doors open at 7pm.
Friday, September 25
🎸 John Pearce & Musical Feast, The Depot Cafe and Bookstore, 5:30pm. Alt-country, folk, and classic rock on the downtown plaza at 87 Throckmorton Ave. Free entry; all ages.
🎸 Pete Floyd, Sweetwater Music Hall, 8pm. Bay Area Pink Floyd tribute band delivers an immersive rock showcase at 19 Corte Madera Ave. All ages; doors open at 7pm.
Saturday, September 26
🎶 Concerts in the Plaza, Mill Valley Downtown Plaza, 11am–7:30pm. The Mill Valley Arts Commission presents a full day of free live outdoor music and dancing on the plaza at 87 Throckmorton Ave.
Lineup: Give Me a Dollar (11am–12pm), Lorin Rowan & the Deep Blue Jam (12:30–1:30pm), Caroline De Lone (2–3pm), Musical Feast (3:30–4:30pm), HowellDevine (5–6pm), The Rubinoos (6:30–7:30pm).
🤡 Clown Daddy Presents: HAMLET, O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, 7–8:30pm. A physical comedy and clown reimagining of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy at 616 Throckmorton Ave ($25; tickets required).
🎸 Acoustic Son, The Depot Cafe and Bookstore, 7:30–9pm. Live acoustic rock wrapping up an evening of plaza music at 87 Throckmorton Ave. Free entry; all ages.
Sunday, September 27
🪕 Marin Bluegrass Sessions September, Sweetwater Music Hall, 12pm. Monthly daytime bluegrass gathering and jam at 19 Corte Madera Ave. Doors open at 11:30am.
🌾 50th Anniversary Running Fence Special Installation, O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, 2–5pm. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s iconic Sonoma/Marin installation. Mill Valley artist Douglas Sandberg showcases an original fabric fence section on the OHCA grounds alongside his photographs, ephemera, and books in the Loft at 616 Throckmorton Ave. Free entry; RSVP required.
🎶 Amy Wigton, The Depot Cafe and Bookstore, 6–7:30pm. Live outdoor acoustic set on the downtown plaza at 87 Throckmorton Ave. Free entry; all ages.
🔍 Businesses and venues mentioned in this section are covered on editorial merit only. No business has paid for coverage. Promotional content is always labeled.
