Austin Murphy, PRESS DEMOCRAT
Under an azure sky in the spring of 2024, half a dozen hikers emerged from a grove of oak trees onto a meadow high up on Sonoma Mountain.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” exclaimed Matt Maguire, with a showman’s flair, “I give you the Petaluma Valley!”
To the west was a verdant carpet of ranchlands and rolling hills, a thin marine layer burning off over the Pacific, which lay just out of sight.
Their vantage for that panorama was Lafferty Ranch, a preserve owned by the city of Petaluma since 1959. Rugged, slanted and steep in places, this 270-acre rectangle stamped in a cleft of the mountain contains the headwaters for Adobe Creek, and was purchased by the city as a watershed.
In 1996, Petaluma passed an ordinance declaring that the open space “shall be made available for passive recreational use by the public.”
Easier ordained than done, it turns out.
Twenty-nine years later, Lafferty Ranch is still not close to becoming a park accessible to the general public. A small but litigious group of neighboring landowners has stood in the way, squaring off with the city in a series of rancorous and costly court fights spanning generations of family members and drawing on land records dating back to the 19th century.
Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/petaluma-lafferty-ranch-lawsuit-park/