Election 2026: Four candidates seek three seats on Richardson Bay Sanitary District board
Four Tiburon Peninsula residents are seeking three seats on the Richardson Bay Sanitary District board of directors in the district’s first contested election since 2018.
Incumbents Mark Fitzgerald, Peter McIntosh and Patrick Walravens face challenger John Turnacliff. The three winners will serve four-year terms through November 2030, joining sitting board members Mark Slater and Jeff Slavitz.
Board members receive $125 for every meeting they attend and are eligible for the district’s dental plan.
Election 2026: The Richardson Bay Sanitary District board candidates at a glance
Election 2026: Read complete coverage at thearknewspaper.com/election2026
The Richardson Bay district serves northern Tiburon from Gilmartin Drive to Highway 101 and all of Strawberry from its headquarters at Blackie’s Pasture. It collects wastewater across its service area and pumps it to Mill Valley for treatment through the Sewerage Agency of Southern Marin, a joint-powers agency it belongs to with four other member agencies.
Consolidation was the central question the last time these seats were contested, in 2018, and it is again.
Board members voted unanimously July 21 to reject all seven findings and nine recommendations in a Marin civil grand jury report, “Better Service at Lower Cost — Optimizing Essential Services for the Future of Marin,” that urged the county’s more than 50 special districts, including the Richardson Bay district, to explore consolidation. The report found that fragmented districts duplicate administrative work and leave residents with uneven fees and service levels, thin staffing and weaker long-term resilience.
District officials countered that consolidation had already been studied and that the report failed to account for existing joint operations or the financial risks of merging.
The argument predates this board. A 2011 Marin Local Agency Formation Commission report and a 2018 civil grand jury report both concluded the county had too many sewer agencies, and the Richardson Bay board that year opposed even adding language to its response about exploring consolidation of services on a limited scale. In 2012, at the board’s urging, district ratepayers defeated a ballot proposal to consolidate with other member districts of the Sewerage Agency of Southern Marin.
The Ark interviewed all four candidates in August and September about consolidation, their other priorities for the district and why they are running.
Mark Fitzgerald, incumbent
Tiburon resident Fitzgerald, 39, is seeking his second full term. The board voted 4-0 on Aug. 1, 2022, with Sue Benvenuti’s seat vacant, to appoint him to the remainder of her term after she stepped down for health reasons. He won a four-year term that November after no one challenged the seat.
Fitzgerald has been a captain in the Tiburon Fire Protection District since 2021 and has worked there since 2011. He attended Butte College’s fire academy in Oroville and has taken fire-science courses at Santa Rosa Junior College and the College of Marin.
Fitzgerald, the son of Ark contract bookkeeper Marion Fitzgerald and her husband, Jim, grew up in Tiburon, attended Reed Union School District schools and graduated from Redwood High School. He has lived in the Bel Aire neighborhood since 2022 with his girlfriend and their two dogs.
Fitzgerald said he is seeking reelection because he enjoys serving on the board and overseeing the district.
His job with the fire district and the work contracts that come with it have “been very helpful for me” as a board member, Fitzgerald said.
Fitzgerald praised the district’s operations and its staff’s relationships with the community.
If reelected, he said, he wants to focus on continuity. He said he expects employee turnover in the next five years, and the district will need “to have trained employees that are familiar with the job” they may need to take on.
He also praised the district’s fiscal discipline and said the most important part of being a board member is making sure taxpayer money “is spent appropriate and not excessively and not in a wasteful way,” such as scheduling capital-improvement projects cost-effectively.
Fitzgerald, who previously worked in the construction industry, said that experience helps him understand the decisions District Manager Johnny Tucker and his staff make about the district’s systems.
Fitzgerald said he supported the district’s response to the civil grand jury report and largely agreed with Tucker’s position.
Tucker said in July that consolidation talks surface “every six or eight years.” He said he and others in special districts consider the factors the grand jury points to things “we’ve already taken advantage of 20 years ago,” when the district signed several mutual-aid agreements with neighboring agencies.
Fitzgerald said new circumstances could merit cost-sharing agreements or a case-by-case look, such as with advances in information technology. But he said there likely would be no cost or service benefit to ratepayers and that a larger operation would mean less customer care and less attention to detail.
“From my experience with the district, (I) can see that (Tucker’s) efforts to keep the cost down, in consolidation, I don’t feel like would be a benefit to the constituents,” he said. “And part of that’s because as things grow larger, you get less knowledgeable people about the ins and outs of a local small system.”
Fitzgerald said he wants to stay on the board to make sure the district keeps doing its job well and stays transparent.
Fitzgerald also pointed to his local roots: he lives a house away from his childhood home. He said he wants to give back to the town he works in and the community where he has “spent, really, my whole life here.”
“I’m proud to be part of that and take the pride and the responsibility of the well-being of the district as kind of a personal affliction,” Fitzgerald said. “If things go bad there, then I would be part of that. If things go great there, then I was part of that. And the goal is to make everything go well and be good and run smoothly.”
Peter McIntosh, incumbent
Strawberry resident McIntosh, 65, is seeking his second full term. The board president, McIntosh was appointed Nov. 16, 2021, on a 3-0 vote with Walravens absent, after the death of board member Frank Trusheim that September. He was appointed to a full four-year term in 2022 when no challengers emerged.
McIntosh is a co-founder of EnviroSmarts, which makes environmental sensors, including water-leak detectors for businesses and condominium complexes. They are designed to sound an alert and shut off water at the source within three to five seconds of detecting a leak.
McIntosh received a bachelor’s degree in advertising and communications from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He has lived in the district since 2011 with his wife, Kathy; he has one daughter and two stepdaughters, all grown.
McIntosh said he is running again to continue the “good management” the board oversees, particularly in keeping sewer-service charges low.
The district’s direct customer charges in fiscal year 2026-2027 are $826 per equivalent dwelling unit and nonresidential unit and $565 per multifamily residential unit, unchanged from the prior year. Sanitary District No. 5 of Marin, which serves Belvedere and the rest of Tiburon, charges $2,460 per equivalent dwelling unit in Belvedere; in Tiburon, Sani 5 charges $1,942, and customers pay another $518 through property taxes to reach the same total. Tucker has said the region’s high property taxes let the Richardson Bay district keep its own charges low.
“We really help manage Johnny Tucker and the crew here that do an amazing job of keeping the pricing low and the quality high,” McIntosh said, citing examples such as staying current on maintenance and repairs, particularly because spills can draw fines from federal regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency.
He also credited the low fees to Tucker’s scheduling of contractor work during off-peak times and to buying repair materials ahead of need.
McIntosh said he also wants to maintain the district’s relationship with the Sewerage Agency of Southern Marin, where he serves as the district’s liaison.
That includes coordinating on the regional agency’s $4.2 million reconstruction of the Salt Works sanitary pump station, on outbound Tiburon Boulevard between Blackfield and East Strawberry drives. The work is scheduled for completion in November.
The job is “being aware of all that, just continuing that relationship,” he said.
McIntosh said he also believes he is the right candidate to handle unexpected opportunities. He pointed to the district’s 2024 sale of its former wastewater ponds to the town of Tiburon, which required delineating boundaries and deciding next steps.
“I think I’m the right candidate who understands what the hikers want, what the dog lovers want, what the bird watchers want, what the town of Tiburon wants,” he said. “And it’s important to make sure that everybody’s — I don’t want to say happy — but they’re working on the same page.”
On consolidation, McIntosh said the district’s topography — which requires pumps to push sewage over hills — creates needs different from those of a district serving, say, Sausalito.
He also pointed to staffing needs that differ from those of other sanitary districts, including fellow members of the Sewerage Agency of Southern Marin. Consolidating sanitary districts and telling them to share the same pricing, McIntosh said, is “how we have a problem,” particularly because his district tries to buy ahead.
“Now I’m not saying (other districts are) not doing it, but look at the price of what they have to charge because their budgets keep going up every year,” McIntosh said. “We’re able to keep our pricing down, and I think that the people in this community really appreciate not having to pay much more for sewage.”
McIntosh said it is important to know what goes into bay waters, including nitrogen levels.
“I love the fact that we have an impact in in bringing those levels down,” he said.
McIntosh said he is motivated by giving back to the community and that he loves “being a volunteer and helping out.”
“I’ve done a great job, I think, and I want to continue doing a great job,” he said.
John Turnacliff, challenger
Strawberry resident Turnacliff, 70, is seeking his first term on the board.
Turnacliff has spent more than 30 years in equipment financing and owns Golden Gate Equipment Finance, which finances heavy machinery, information-technology and manufacturing equipment.
Turnacliff graduated with a bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Southern California. He has lived in Strawberry for the past 25 years, has been in a relationship for 25 years and has no children.
Turnacliff is also chair of the Marin County Republican Central Committee, the party’s governing body in the county.
His involvement with the local Republican Party is why he chose to run.
“I’m always encouraging people to run,” Turnacliff said, “so, at some point, I said, ‘Well, you know what? Maybe I should put my toe in the water too.’”
He attended the board’s July meeting, where members joked about how hard it is to find residents willing to fill seats. They were responding to the grand jury’s recommendation that districts adopt term limits.
A few days after that meeting, Turnacliff said, he noticed no one had taken nomination papers.
“I looked, so I went in and signed up,” he said. “And by the end of the week, all three of them signed up.”
Turnacliff said the skills he learned in equipment financing carry over to the board. He pointed to reading financial statements and projections, judging how long equipment lasts, negotiating financing terms and spacing out maintenance.
“I think I bring that to it, which would be more important (than) somebody just walk in off the street, to actually have a background in projects and financing and the planning for them and so forth,” he said.
If elected, Turnacliff said, he wants to talk with Tucker to understand the district’s priorities “and hear it straight from them” rather than be someone who would “go down and kick the tires.”
Part of that outreach, he said, would be with the crews doing the work, to hear whether operations could run better — by finding other options or cheaper materials, for instance.
“I’d ask the people who have had to live with the decisions if they think they’re the right thing and then work my way back up,” he said.
Turnacliff said he was not sufficiently informed about the district’s consolidation debate but that he is generally open to studying the idea.
“If it made sense, both financially and operationally, then I think it’s worth a serious look,” he said.
He said he was ready to accept whatever conclusion made the most sense for the district, including if consolidation is a bad idea should it would leave operations too detached from local ratepayers.
“I’d have to analyze those and see where the trade-off would be, but I’m not opposed to it just off the cuff,” he said.
Turnacliff said the district has done well “because nobody’s heard much about it” and that he has not heard complaints from his neighbors. He said he was ready to learn from board members who have served well and to build on their work.
He said he sees the role as part fiduciary, part watchdog for residents who do not follow district operations — or do so only when there are signs of trouble.
Though the district’s sewer-service rates have not changed since fiscal year 2020-2021, Turnacliff said he wanted to be “somebody in the trenches for the voters,” holding off rate increases until they are “the last resort.”
“I’m kind of watching the hen house, the sewer system and what people are doing there for the people that don’t ever want to hear about it or think about it,” Turnacliff said.
Patrick ‘Pat’ Walravens, incumbent
Tiburon resident Walravens, 60, is seeking a second full term on the board.
The board voted 4-0 on June 26, 2020, with the seat vacant, to appoint Walravens after Ron Kosciusko resigned that May. He was appointed again in November 2020 to finish Kosciusko’s term through November 2022 after no challengers emerged. Like Fitzgerald and McIntosh, he was appointed to a four-year term in 2022 when no one filed against the three seats.
Walravens is a managing director and senior equity research analyst at Citizens Capital Markets & Advisory, a subsidiary of Citizens Financial Group Inc.
He began his career as an attorney at Cooley LLP in San Francisco before serving as a vice president of Lehman Brothers in the city from 1998 to 2001. From 2001 he worked at the investment firm JMP Securities, which Citizens acquired in 2021.
Born in Brussels, Belgium, and raised in Denver, Walravens earned a bachelor’s in economics from Stanford University. He later earned a law degree and an MBA in a joint program at the University of California at Los Angeles.
He has lived in Tiburon for 26 years with his wife, Samantha. The couple has four children, all grown.
Walravens said he is seeking reelection to keep serving the community and to see that the district holds to its mission of environmentally responsible sewer collection for its 4,000-plus households.
He pointed to financial stewardship as his “No. 1” way of helping and overseeing the district, while backing its maintenance and operating goals, including capital-improvement projects carried out over time.
“We’re lucky to have an amazing staff in the district, and it’s our job to provide them with the oversight and the support they need from the board in order so they can keep doing a great job for our community,” Walravens said.
Walravens said he considers the district a “pretty well-run operation.” About 10% of its pipes remain to be replaced, and it will eventually need to reevaluate its pumps and utility holes. But “these are all the things that our staff are expert at,” he said.
Part of that responsibility is watching how the district operates, Walravens said. Asked about consolidation, he said he thought the district was running “quite well the way things are.”
“Of course, you’re always open to looking at where efficiencies can be gained,” he said. “But, on balance, I think the way things are currently structured is highly effective.”
Walravens said the role is community service and that he sees his experience as both an attorney and a financial analyst as “a meaningful amount of experience to the role.”
“I think that combination of skills is helpful,” Walravens said. “But I serve at the pleasure of the voters.”
Reach Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634.