Election 2026: Tiburon Town Council hopefuls talk traffic, finances, housing at Ark forum
Tiburon Town Council candidates mostly agreed at a Sept. 29 forum that residents should help oversee town finances but split on Flock cameras, housing sites and paying for parks.
More than 50 people packed Town Hall’s council chambers and nearly 150 people tuned in on The Ark’s Instagram page for the forum, hosted by The Ark and moderated by the League of Women Voters of Marin County, to hear from incumbents Alice Fredericks and Jack Ryan and challengers Kathleen Defever, Chuck Hornbrook and Faris Jafar. The top three vote-getters in the Nov. 3 election will win four-year terms that end November 2030.
Defever, 48, is a lawyer who has served since 2018 on the Planning Commission and is seeking her first term on the council.
Election 2026: Read complete coverage at thearknewspaper.com/election2026
In her opening statement, she pointed to her expertise in insurance and her work representing fire victims, saying the denser housing the town must plan for under its housing element, which requires sites for 639 units by 2031, would add to fire risk on the peninsula.
“I am the person most equipped to handle those questions and to come up with constructive solutions,” Defever said.
Fredericks, 86, is a former behavioral-medicine researcher at the University of California at San Francisco who is the longest-serving councilmember in Tiburon’s history and has served as mayor on five occasions. She’s seeking a seventh term after being first elected in 2001.
She pointed to her work representing the town on countywide agencies, such as the Transportation Authority of Marin, and on county sea-level-rise planning committees.
“My work in the last few years has focused on community and government bodies that foster collaboration and coordination — and please don’t go to sleep, because in this day and age, it’s very important,” Fredericks said.
She also said the town is not done with park improvements, floating the idea of acquiring the Richardson Bay Sanitary District’s remaining land for a community center.
Hornbrook, 59, is a part-time adviser to clean-energy companies and a member of the Parks, Open Space & Trails Commission.
Hornbrook in his opening remarks said he was looking to “deliver progress and real accountability” for long-term planning “rather than repeating the patterns of the past.” He said he wanted to establish a citizen finance oversight committee like Belvedere’s within 90 days of taking office, ease Tiburon Boulevard traffic with immediate operational fixes and long-term capital investments and improve safety on the Old Rail Trail by widening it and managing speeds.
“Tiburon cannot afford to drift into a quiet, disconnected enclave,” Hornbrook said. “We need a vibrant, fully functioning town that works for every single generation, from young families to retirees.”
Jafar, 42, is the founder of a wealth-management firm and seeking his first term on the council and first elected office.
His opening statement centered on building a Tiburon community that spans generations. He said he was concerned “that our neglected finances and lack of long-term multigenerational planning is threatening that dream for all of us.”
“It’s time to get our fiscal house in order and take better care of each other,” Jafar said. “I have good news: We can fix this and emerge stronger.”
Ryan, 59, is a retired derivatives-trading manager seeking his second full term on the council after winning a special election in 2020 and a full term in 2022. He was mayor in 2023.
Ryan said he was committed to improving local parks under the town’s parks master plan, and he pointed to his background in finance and to community ties broad enough “that I’m able to represent everyone.”
“I believe that my record over the past six years, how I vote and how thoughtful I am about the issues is testament to that,” Ryan said. “It sounds mundane, but it’s essential to making local government work.”
Hornbrook is endorsed by all five sitting Reed Union School District board members, the Marin Women’s Political Action Committee, the Marin Democratic Party and Marin Professional Firefighters. Defever is endorsed by the women’s PAC and the firefighters union. The women’s PAC also endorsed Fredericks, and the Democratic Party also endorsed Ryan.
Finance committee draws wide support
Candidates were first asked how they would restore timely financial reporting amid residents’ concerns over how Tiburon has reported its finances. Those concerns followed delayed year-end audits and a budgeting process that did not include up-to-date actual spending figures from the prior year, including in the budget for the current fiscal 2026-2027. The town’s most recent completed audit covers the fiscal year that ended in June 2023, and the council hired an accounting firm in August under a $195,000 contract to clear the three-year backlog. The fiscal 2024 audit is expected to be complete in October.
The town’s finances will also shape how it pays for projects, from park improvements at the former sanitation ponds site near McKegney Green to an upgrade of the Public Works Department’s corporation yard behind Reed Elementary School.
Fredericks attributed the delays to “two unfortunate incidents”: a “legal hang-up” that restricted the town’s hiring of financial staff and the search for someone to help it catch up. She said the town has since resolved both.
“What we’re doing in the future depends on all of you,” she said. “It depends on your input and working with the auditors and book accounting firms that we have hired to keep us on track.”
On paying for parks Fredericks said a bond is the fastest way to build everything in the parks plan but would leave the town in debt for years. She said the town should “reconsider our debt policy and look at some fee adjustments to all projects,” adding that relying on fees would take longer.
Hornbrook said falling three years behind on audits would be inexcusable in most workplaces. He proposed an independent resident finance committee that would review the budget and outstanding items each year and report back to the council.
“This is very important for us to do to bring confidence back for the citizens of the town to understand that what they’re seeing and believing are numbers that they can then plan for: park improvements and other things that we need to do as a community,” Hornbrook said.
On paying for projects, Hornbrook said he wanted to review the town’s revenue and costs first, to make sure “we are actually collecting what we can on a maximum level,” before exploring other options, such as Mill Valley’s use of both a sales tax and debt. Mill Valley voters approved Measure L, a 1% sales-tax increase, in November 2024. The city estimates it brings in $4.2 million a year for city services and facilities, including playgrounds and fields.
His priorities for capital projects are park improvements, town infrastructure and traffic.
Jafar also expressed support for an oversight committee, saying it’s in line with his vision for community-centric planning.
He also said focusing only on finances was “too narrow” and that the town should create community forums on topics such as real estate, traffic and parks “so that we can invite all stakeholders to collaborate.” Those forums could fill gaps on a council whose members “won’t always have the domain expertise in every important topic,” he said.
“The intellectual capital of our passionate residents can step in to fill the gap,” Jafar said.
He similarly said communitywide collaboration was important to figuring out how to raise revenue without taking on debt or further taxing residents, saying there was room to collaborate with the Reed Union School District “to better understand what our shared assets are, shared resources are.”
Ryan said he supports a finance committee. But he said the three-year audit backlog doesn’t erase the “50 years of audited history” behind the town’s financial safeguards, adding that audits confirm the town’s cash and check that spending follows town policy.
“So, even though we are behind on the audits and we have a plan to go forward with it, I think that is the right way to approach this, and it’ll solve the problem quickly,” Ryan said.
Ryan agreed with Hornbrook that the first step is assessing the town’s finances and how it spends money.
“I don’t relish the idea of being a bank and hoarding tax money,” Ryan said. “I think it should be deployed for the benefit of the citizens.”
He called Mill Valley’s use of debt “a very clever mechanism,” saying Tiburon is one of only three Marin towns without a local sales tax on top of the countywide rate. He said the town could raise its sales tax to pay off debt “if it came to that.”
Defever said she generally agreed with an oversight committee but said her bigger concern is the cost of lawsuits, which she said is shrinking the town’s budget surplus.
Preliminary year-end reports for fiscal 2025-2026 show the town spent $535,277 of the $575,000 it budgeted for legal services. In fiscal 2023-2024 it spent $856,144 on legal services, according to the town’s budget documents, against $491,650 in that year’s adopted budget.
“I would like to get ahead of that and investigate it and see what’s happening there,” Defever said.
On projects, Defever said she supports improving the parks “100%” but that the town needs “to focus on the things that are really important,” such as the corporation yard.
“The corporation yard is something that has needed attention for at least a decade — it is absolutely unsafe, it is,” Defever said. “If we have a major earthquake, it’s going to hurt someone.”
School buses get the credit on traffic
Candidates were also asked how to ease traffic on Tiburon Boulevard and how much the town should invest, while an adaptive-signal pilot at the Trestle Glen Boulevard intersection is not set to begin until spring.
Ryan, a board member of the Tiburon Peninsula Traffic Alliance, the joint-powers agency that runs the Yellow Bus Challenge school-bus program for Reed Union School District students, said the bus program “by far is the most effective way to take cars off the road.” He said the alliance just added a bus to take riders from its waitlist and now runs on pass sales and state money, with no town subsidy.
“Otherwise, the tools are very limited for us, unfortunately,” said Ryan, who was the program’s paid part-time coordinator before his 2020 election.
Defever also agreed with supporting the school-bus program, saying traffic has improved during school commute hours since it was first implemented. She said the town needed to explore commuter times to see who’s entering the town and why and see what can be done to mitigate traffic with that additional information.
Fredericks also expressed support for the school-bus program, and she pointed to changing people’s behaviors as an option that is difficult “when you’re not all working together to consolidate trips or provide some carpooling.” Looking further ahead, she said the best fix would be getting people from the hills to public transit on Tiburon Boulevard, possibly in autonomous vehicles that carry more than one passenger.
Hornbrook proposed a carpool for teachers in the Reed Union School District, which he called the town’s largest employer, that would pick them up at Larkspur Landing. He also proposed moving the contractors who park in Tiburon lots, because Belvedere limits contractor parking on the island, to Blackie’s Pasture, ahead of what he called the choke point on Tiburon Boulevard.
“By doing this, these incremental small things — this is not a silver bullet, but these small things — we can maybe have some great solutions,” Hornbrook said.
Jafar pointed to collaborating with the school district to explore how to reduce traffic related to commutes, school events or other matters.
“The data is there, we just got to pick up the phone and talk to them,” he said.
He also encouraged greater dialogue on traffic reduction and on other matters, like housing, with Caltrans, which owns Tiburon Boulevard as Highway 131, “because without their buy-in, nothing gets done.”
Paradise Drive housing site draws criticism
Candidates were asked where new housing should go under the town’s 2023-2031 housing element, which requires Tiburon to identify sites for 639 new units. As of this year, Tiburon has permitted 62 units, or 9.7% of its total allocation. Accessory dwelling units remain the town’s primary source of new housing.
Defever said the Planning Commission was the first body to take up the housing element “and the first ones who were forced by the state to approve things we did not want to approve.”
She said the commission had recommended putting more density downtown, but the units were instead assigned to a 9.6-acre site on Paradise Drive, a choice she said “makes absolutely no sense.”
“That’s a very problematic question,” Defever said, adding that she was “looking outside the box to figure out how to avoid causing more problems on the peninsula.”
Fredericks pointed to a League of California Cities resolution creating a statewide working group to “evaluate the legislative pushback and develop recommendations to address this housing shortage.” She said seven units were built in Tiburon in the last eight-year housing cycle and that while downtown is “marginally realistic” for new housing, “high groundwater, sea-level rise makes it very difficult for builders to include affordable housing in their units.”
“I think this is an ongoing problem, and the solution is bigger than just our town,” Fredericks said.
Hornbrook said the council has a responsibility to protect what makes Tiburon special but also to work proactively with the state’s demands to avoid legal battles.
He agreed with Defever that the Paradise Drive site is unsuitable and called for more housing downtown, where he said state law lets the town limit parking because of the nearby ferry terminal. But he said the town must address traffic before adding housing downtown.
Hornbrook also called for more accessory dwelling units to be produced.
Jafar said it was important to address housing now “because if we don’t, the law suggests that we lose control to the state and to developers who are not aligned with our interests.”
He also called for expanding accessory dwelling units as aggressively as possible, which he said would reduce the size of developments needed downtown. Downtown units within walking distance of the ferry could house teachers, police officers, firefighters and other local workers, which he said means “not a single new car on the road because those community members are already here every single day serving our community.”
Ryan, who was mayor in 2023 when the council approved the housing element, said the town spread the new housing sites evenly across town, which he said left everyone unhappy.
He said the town could do a better job approaching property owners about substitute sites to replace units it may lose, such as asking Tiburon Baptist Church whether it would consider having its parcel rezoned for housing.
“It doesn’t mean you have to build,” Ryan said, adding that downtown “is the most interesting place” but questioning whether zoning it for more units would lead anyone to build there.
Most would keep license-plate cameras, with limits
Town officials have said little about the Police Department’s allowing outside law enforcement agencies to run potentially illegal searches of Tiburon’s automated license-plate logs, which are captured by Flock Safety cameras around town.
Candidates were asked about the town’s usage of the license-plate readers, particularly as an Ark audit revealed 34 outside police agencies ran 8,542 searches of the town’s license-plate cameras for federally entangled investigations in the seven months after the town rewrote its plate-reader policy in December and began requiring monthly audits.
Hornbrook said the cameras should be used for security rather than surveillance, noting that many communities have embraced license-plate readers.
He called for keeping the data no longer than 30 days, logging who searches it, penalizing improper access and barring any sharing with federal agencies.
“We need to be able to control the data … but yet at the same time use the information to make a safe and secure community,” Hornbrook said.
Jafar said any agreement between the town and Flock, or any company for that matter, “should represent the interests of our residents, and that’s full stop.”
He said police officers should have access to technology that helps them do their jobs, “but again, only to serve the interests of our community.”
“It’s our money, we do it on our terms,” he said.
Ryan also expressed support for license-plate readers but was not set on Flock as a camera provider. He credited the Police Department’s work to address vulnerabilities in its system, including in who can access the data.
“Our law enforcement has solved some issues, some crimes by accessing a bigger space and getting license plate hits farther outside of Marin,” Ryan said, adding that for now he supports the department’s decision to keep the cameras running.
Flock does not require two-way sharing: Tiburon can search other agencies’ cameras without letting those agencies search its own.
Defever, who has been the most critical of the five candidates about the town’s Flock cameras, said she was troubled that a private company was capturing the data and tends to “err on the side of privacy at all times.”
She repeated her call for protective measures such as requiring a warrant to search the data, with a streamlined process for serious crimes.
“The private companies shouldn’t have the data, and we shouldn’t be sharing the data with the entire world,” Defever said.
Fredericks said she believed the town was doing its best, alongside other jurisdictions, on how to best use Flock cameras. She said she was in favor of keeping the cameras “unless it turns out nothing can be controlled.”
Evacuation drill idea draws support
Council hopefuls were also asked about how they would address issues related to the environment, from sea-level rise to wildfire risks and evacuation.
Jafar said it was important for the town to have strong finances to navigate risks like sea-level rise. He said the town should ask the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help evaluate the risk.
In areas where potential losses could occur, Jafar said proactive preparation was required.
“Permanent loss of those properties is devastating to the owners, but it also has negative implications for our finances,” Jafar said.
Hornbrook proposed an emergency drill like Mill Valley’s to “figure out what we can and cannot do,” an idea Jafar and Ryan both endorsed.
Hornbrook also said it was important to begin saving money that would go toward mitigating inevitable climate-change impacts. He said the town should ask Public Works crews, who see flooding firsthand, to set priorities and should keep coordinating with county and state agencies.
“But first and foremost, it is listening to our town staff and the folks in Public Works to say what are the priorities and what hits us now with king tides because it’s just going to get worse in those areas,” Hornbrook said.
Ryan said that the biggest risk is residents not knowing what to do, which could lead to blocked and congested egress routes.
“I think the only way we could see how bad that’s going to be is to have a drill,” Ryan said.
Ryan said that for mitigating climate-change impacts, the expensive projects that come along with them are “beyond our scope as a municipality in our finances.” But he pointed to the town’s climate-action coordinator, Grace Ledwith, who he said helps the town find grants and “be part of the bigger conversation.”
“In the interim, I think we’re doing what we can,” Ryan said, pointing to $75,000 the council approved for Public Works flood equipment ahead of an expected strong El Niño. “But in terms of preventing sea-level rise, it’s just a bigger picture that’s beyond our scope.”
Fredericks said she would rely on the fire district’s recommendations during an actual fire because where residents should go depends on where it is burning and which way the wind blows. She also encouraged residents to sign up for emergency alerts, including AlertMarin, as did Hornbrook.
Defever said she wants Tiburon to join the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, the countywide joint-powers authority funded by a 2020 parcel tax. The Southern Marin Fire Protection District, which serves northern Tiburon, is a member. The Tiburon Fire Protection District, which covers the rest of the town, and the city of Belvedere were the only two jurisdictions in the county that opted out when the authority formed in 2019.
“I’ve been having dialogues with firefighters and with the wildfire prevention authority as well on how to improve these services because we are not ready, and it could be disastrous,” Defever said.
She said it’s difficult to predict which natural events would take place that would impact the town, from gradual sea-level rise to intense storms. But she said seawalls around town need repair, pointing to Belvedere’s efforts as an example to follow.
“There are a lot of investigations we could do to really make some practical solutions toward recovery for sure, even if we don’t get to it in advance,” Defever said. “But absolutely I support that we spend more time on that.”
Candidates grade the current council
The moderator closed the questions by asking each candidate to name one thing the current council has done that they would keep and one thing they would change.
Defever said the council does an excellent job, but she would have handled the town’s housing allocation differently.
“We really need to rethink how we’re approaching the housing because that is a dangerous issue as we know from emergency, evacuation perspectives,” she said.
Fredericks said the council made a mistake in letting its finance committee, made up of the mayor and vice mayor under town policy, go without meeting for a couple of years while the town was in the middle of litigation.
“Everything else we did was either good or really striving for the good,” Fredericks said. “And what we would do again really depends on community feedback.”
Fredericks said in a later email that litigation limited the staff time available to produce reports but that she still received “broad updates on the budget” from the town manager in her regular briefings on town business.
Hornbrook agreed with Fredericks that everyone on the council was trying to serve with good intentions. He praised the council’s recent move to share monthly financial reports, calling it “the first step in the right direction.”
But he said the town should do more outreach to residents, including through surveys.
“The town should do a better job at reaching out to the rest of the community to get their feedback on all these different items — more than just the allotted three minutes,” Hornbrook said, referring to the time limit on public comment at council meetings.
Jafar again called for multigenerational planning, saying the change in attitude “will go a long way to having halo effects across our community.”
“It needs to be ingrained in the motion of community building, well-coordinated, thoughtful, long-term planning to meet the needs of the entire life cycle of our residents as they age and grow through,” Jafar said.
Ryan joked that “obviously, the one thing I would keep is me,” then said he was satisfied with how the town spends its annual budget “in a way that reflects what the community wants.”
What he would change, he said, is adding an independent finance committee because a budget committee made up of the mayor and vice mayor brings varying levels of financial expertise.
A “finance committee will solve that, and that would be a great thing to have happen,” Ryan said.
Closing pitches
In his closing remarks, Ryan asked voters for their support.
“Local government is all about connectivity, and it’s about me being on the council to serve you and to make the town what we all want it to be,” he said. “It’s that simple. It’s not politics.”
Jafar said he wanted voters to recognize the town is stronger together when they take care of multiple generations, from giving parents peace in knowing they can retire in town to allowing their kids to return to the area to raise the next generation of children.
“Let’s come together to preserve our dream and make the future generations proud,” Jafar said.
Hornbrook paid tribute to a recently deceased college mentor who “took a smart, passionate, underachieving student” and helped him become the person he is today.
“Leadership is not measured by your promises at a podium, but by the tangible impact you deliver in the community with others,” Hornbrook said. “I roll up my sleeves, and I get things done.”
Fredericks said about 60 of the town’s more than 6,000 registered voters were in the room but that attendance like theirs is “what energizes and inspires what we get to do.” She said she wanted to improve town communications so residents engage with long-term projects such as sea-level rise before those projects reach their doorsteps.
“Now is when we set us up to get it done,” Fredericks said.
Defever said she is the candidate who looks deeply into issues to find out what can practically be done, saying other candidates offered plans and studies without concrete steps.
She pointed to her work as a planning commissioner and her volunteer work with the Rotary Club of Tiburon-Belvedere as examples of what she’s doing to meet goals beyond announcing plans.
“We need someone who spent their career actually getting things done in a broad fashion because the Town Council looks at all of the issues, not just a siloed issue that someone might have an expertise in,” Defever said.
The Ark is sending the candidates the submitted questions the forum did not have time to reach, and their answers will run in the Oct. 14 edition.
Reach Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634.