Proposed New North Bay Neighborhood Brings Environmental Concerns

Here are the morning’s top stories on Tuesday, October 13, 2026

• In a small town on the fringes of the Bay Area, a former software engineer wants to create a new kind of neighborhood — one that’s built around an event center where Silicon Valley thinkers could gather and share ideas. There’d be a hotel and an amphitheater and maybe even a K-6 school. But as the project nears final approval, it’s facing a new wave of backlash from some residents who have concerns about its impact on the environment. 
• A state lawmaker is calling for oversight hearings into lockdowns that were imposed at a San Diego County correctional facility during last month’s intense heat wave. Assembly Public Safety Committee Chair Nick Schultz says he was “gravely concerned” about the well-being of incarcerated people at the Donovan Correctional Facility.

For the past 11 months, Jennifer Sullivan has been anxiously trying to sound an alarm. The Esmeralda Land Company has proposed building a resort hotel, hundreds of homes, an event center, a preschool and a public park on a 266-acre property that once housed a wood treatment plant.

Tucked in the Sonoma County town of Cloverdale, the 8-acre plant was known to use harmful chemicals and discharged them into the soil and groundwater, she said. Sullivan worries that disturbing the site with new development could resurface those chemicals and expose current residents to new harms. “This is the community that I live in,” Sullivan said. “The decision to approve this development is serious — it’s got serious consequences for our water, for public health.”

On Wednesday, the Cloverdale City Council will consider whether to approve the project — one of the largest developments in the city’s recent history — along with its extensive community benefits package and already-completed environmental reviews, essentially clearing the path for its eventual construction. As it does, however, council members are weighing the homes, jobs and tax revenue such a project might generate against a new wave of concerns from residents over environmental harms.

Esmeralda CEO Devon Zuegel said she generally understands those concerns but argues the project has already undergone extensive environmental reviews. “This site has been studied for over two decades continuously,” Zuegel said. “And if 20 years is not a long enough review, I just don’t understand, is 100 years enough — 25 years? What is the point where it becomes enough?”

Still, Sullivan isn’t satisfied. And she’s preparing to take the fight to voters. If the city council approves the Esmeralda development as is, Sullivan wants a referendum and said she’ll start collecting signatures to place such a measure on a ballot.

But some officials are skeptical about how widespread Sullivan’s concerns are among the general population. Vice-Mayor Todd Lands said the opposition might be loud, but he has seen more support for the project through letters from residents and conversations in the community. “I’ve noticed it’s about the same 15 to 20 people that have been anti-Esmeralda,” he said. “As the letters start steadily coming in, I’m starting to learn more about how the public actually feels as a whole.”

Earlier this month, the Cloverdale Planning Commission voted 4-1 to recommend the council approve Esmeralda’s plan with conditions that seek to address some of Sullivan’s concerns, including requiring the developer to hire a consultant to monitor compliance with all environmental mitigation measures. Officials with the Esmeralda Land Company have hosted several informational town hall meetings with residents since 2024, but Sullivan said she didn’t hear about it until last winter. The scale of the project surprised her, she said, particularly the fact that Esmeralda wants to build a resort hotel with up to 160 rooms and more than 600 homes on site.

A California lawmaker says he will press for oversight hearings after state prison officials imposed lockdowns during an intense heat wave at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility last month.

In an interview with KPBS, Assembly Public Safety Committee Chair Nick Schultz said he was gravely concerned for the health of incarcerated people at the state prison in the Otay Mesa area of San Diego. He said he would seek clarity from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which oversees the state prison system. “Just because someone has committed a serious crime and might be doing time at Donovan does not mean that they should be subject to cruel and unusual conditions,” said Schultz, a Democratic assemblymember from Burbank. “I will push for information and answers from CDCR when we return in January.”

The lawmaker’s remarks came in response to KPBS’ reporting last week that Donovan officials locked down parts of the prison for multiple days during the heat wave in September. As temperatures spiked to 94 degrees indoors, several incarcerated people said, correctional officers restricted their access to large fans, ice water and other ways to stay cool.

Schultz said those reports raised serious questions about the effectiveness of CDCR’s heat safety plan, especially during security protocols like lockdowns. He plans to call on the Assembly to schedule oversight hearings in Sacramento when the new legislative session begins in January. During those hearings, lawmakers can ask state prison officials specific questions about the heat plan.

Advocates and civil rights lawyers say the current heat plan doesn’t go far enough to protect incarcerated people as climate change brings more frequent and more intense heat waves to California. For example, it lists cooling measures like ice water and fans but doesn’t specify when to implement those measures. The plan also does not include any specific language about lockdowns, said Lily Harvey, a staff attorney with the Prison Law Office in Berkeley.