A long-anticipated final environmental impact report for a controversial housing proposal in Strawberry has been released for public comment.

The report examined the application by North Coast Land Holdings to build a residential care center with 150 apartments for seniors and an additional 337 dwellings. The property is the former site of the Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary.

It’s been 15 months since the Marin County Planning Commission held a public hearing on the draft version of the report.

“It’s moved extremely slowly,” said Don Dickenson, who was a member of the commission when the review was last discussed in September 2024. “At the time, we were told the final EIR would be coming back to the commission for comments in early 2025.”

The 684-page final report, which responds to 160 public comments, is laced with citations from court cases supporting its reasoning.

“There were a large number of comments on the draft EIR, so it’s taken some time to prepare responses,” said Sarah Jones, director of Marin County Community Development Agency.

Michael Gallagher, president of the Seminary Neighborhood Association, said his group is “considering litigation to force a re-do of the EIR.”

“The final EIR has many defects,” he said.

The Seminary Neighborhood Association has two chief objections to the report. First, the association says the report it fails to analyze the developer’s educational plans for the site. North Coast maintains that it is entitled to operate a 1,000-student college on the 126-acre site.

“We support much about North Coast’s proposal to develop housing,” Gallagher said, “but it continues to be unacceptable that a smaller, self-contained, school still has not been analyzed.”

Charles Goodyear, a representative of North Coast Land Holdings, wrote in an email, “As we have said previously, North Coast intends to locate a graduate-level academic institution at the Seminary, with some portion of faculty and students residing at the property. North Coast is not seeking a commuter school to occupy the site.”

The association also asserts that the environmental report neglected to analyze a viable alternative, a proposal generated in 2019 by a community group in consultation with North Coast.

“Despite many public comments calling for analysis of the ‘Seminary Tomorrow’ alternative, the county did not do it,” Gallagher said.

The association disputes the developer’s claim that a conditional use permit, granted to the former owner of the property in 1953, gives it permission for a campus with up to 1,000 students. Riley Hurd, the association’s attorney, has asserted that the conditional use permit became void following the creation of a master plan for the site that was approved by county supervisors in 1984 and has since expired.

Dickenson, who was a county planner at the time, has said he agrees with that assessment.

Dickenson said that when the 1984 master plan was written, the Southern Baptist Convention chose to sell off parts of the seminary property for private residential development and use the money for projects in Southern California instead. Dickenson said the assumption was that the master plan was replacing the conditional use permit.

According the final environmental impact report, however, questions about the validity of the conditional use permit “pertain to land use and operational conditions, not environmental protection under the California Environmental Quality Act.”

“To the extent resolution of these questions becomes necessary, this would occur outside of the purview and process of CEQA,” it says.

Jones said, “The school is not part of the applicant’s proposal. For that reason we have no basis to analyze it.  Even though it exists on the property, it’s not part of this project.”

As for analyzing the Seminary Tomorrow proposal as an alternative, the environmental impact report deems the proposal legally infeasible because it would require a reduction in the size of the residential development. The Seminary Tomorrow plan would have cut the base zoning of the site from 2.47 dwellings per acre to 2.31, allowing up to 234.

The draft environmental impact report found that the proposed project would result in significant and unavoidable impacts related to greenhouse gas emissions, temporary construction noise and transportation related to vehicle miles traveled, and the final report made no significant changes in those findings. Perhaps the most significant change in the final report is an increase in the number of proposed affordable residences from 50 to 70 to comply with the county’s inclusionary housing requirement.

“At the end of the day, even with the many flaws in the EIR, this process has revealed that this project will have multiple, significant environmental impacts that can’t be mitigated,” Hurd said. “With that information, how could the Board of Supervisors ever vote to approve the project as currently proposed?”

Jones said, “Under state law, the Board of Supervisors can’t deny or downsize a housing project.”

The county is accepting additional comments on the final environmental impact report through Jan. 26. The Marin County Planning Commission is expected to review the final report in March and decide whether to recommend its adoption to county supervisors, who have final say.