Measure X FAQ

Measure X is a sweeping, 266-page rewrite of Sausalito's core planning and zoning rules. If approved by a simple majority in November 2026, it immediately becomes law.

Voters are being asked to enact the entire rewrite as written. In a single measure, it:

• Crosses out the Marinship Specific Plan in its entirety across 128 pages of the measure.
• Amends ten chapters of the Municipal Code across 73 pages.
• Amends Sausalito's 450-page General Plan across 57 pages, reaching its introduction and four separate elements.
• Rewrites key provisions of the voter-approved Fair Traffic Limits Initiative, changing zoning decisions throughout Sausalito.

If passed, Measure X would immediately allow 650% more floor area on Industrial land and 900% more on Waterfront land. It would also end voters' final say over future zoning changes in every commercial and industrial area except the Downtown Historic District, transferring those decisions to the City Council.

Measure X was drafted by a small private group outside Sausalito's normal public planning process—without Planning Commission development, community workshops, staff drafting, City Attorney review during preparation, or any overall environmental review. Only after it qualified for the ballot did City staff and independent consultants analyze it. They found conflicts, ambiguities, and gaps the City would have to clean up if Measure X passes.

Sources: Measure X §§3–6 and 9, pp. 2–263 and 265; 2021 Sausalito General Plan; City staff report, pp. 1 and 17–18; Goldfarb/BAE report, pp. 1 and 39–45.

No. Measure X is an all-or-nothing vote: a yes vote enacts the entire 266-page measure.

The ballot does not let voters support Measure X's stated goals while rejecting its much larger buildings, repeal of the Marinship Specific Plan, changes to voter control, or other provisions. They all come as one package.

Measure X is not an advisory vote or an invitation to begin a planning process. A conversation comes before a law. Measure X asks voters to pass the law first.

The City Council may be able to amend portions later, but voters cannot choose those changes on this ballot—and there is no promise that a future Council will remove the provisions they oppose.

Sources: Measure X §§3–12; Goldfarb report, pp. 20–22.

Measure X makes six major changes to development rules, voter control, and the future of the waterfront:

• Takes away the public's vote on future zoning changes in every commercial and industrial area of Sausalito except the Downtown Historic District. A Council majority would make those decisions instead.
• Allows dramatically larger buildings. Measure X permits 650% more floor area on Industrial land and 900% more on Waterfront land. Building coverage rises to 70%, and height can reach 47 feet.
• Authorizes a broad range of new commercial uses, including retail, restaurants, fitness and recreation, and numerous office-type uses listed under other names. Several independently permitted office-type categories are outside the advertised 40% commercial-office cap.
• Repeals the Marinship Specific Plan in its entirety, removing its parcel-specific traffic, shoreline, public-access, working-waterfront, and infrastructure rules.
• Removes existing tools for making development pay toward infrastructure without supplying a replacement funding plan for traffic, drainage, or shoreline protection.
• Makes its program difficult to weaken or undo and lets its proponents continue defending it at City expense if the City declines.

Sources: Measure X §§3–7 and 11–15; City staff report, pp. 3–5 and 7–15; Goldfarb/BAE report, pp. 18–22 and 38–45.

They found that Measure X would authorize far more development while leaving major traffic, shoreline, funding, displacement, and legal problems unresolved.

Their key findings include:

• Measure X allows 650–900% more permitted floor area without a buildout traffic study. No study examined traffic from full buildout—or even from the 1.8 million square feet BAE found possible on just 12 likely redevelopment sites.
• Artists, makers, and maritime businesses could be displaced by higher-paying tenants. Many office-type uses could occupy 100% of a building and would not count toward Measure X's advertised 40% commercial-office cap.
• Existing shoreline, flood, and infrastructure protections would be repealed. Measure X also removes the rule requiring developers to contribute toward infrastructure and provides no replacement funding mechanism.
• A drafting error could make every existing home and business in Sausalito legally nonconforming. That could sharply limit the ability to expand or alter a property and could prevent a use from resuming after six months of voluntary vacancy.
• Measure X ends a 40-year voter-approval right throughout Sausalito's commercial and industrial areas except the Downtown Historic District—a right voters used as recently as 2025.
• Its promised ICB Building and historic Arques Shipyard protections may not work. The legal review called the language “vague and unenforceable” and warned of a possible regulatory-takings challenge.

BAE identifies possible outcomes such as greater flexibility, reinvestment, business attraction, and increased long-term fiscal capacity. But those outcomes are not automatically public benefits. In this case, “flexibility” is the flip side of repealing existing rules and protections. Reinvestment and new business demand could bring activity, but could also raise rents and displace artists, makers, and maritime businesses. These are possibilities, not forecasts or guarantees, and the reports do not conclude that they outweigh the risks.

The central problem remains: Measure X asks voters to authorize vastly more development now, before its traffic, shoreline, financial, and legal consequences have been resolved.

Sources: City staff report, pp. 3–5 and 9–18; Goldfarb/BAE report, pp. 15–22, 37–40, 45 and 50.

FAR controls how much can be built. Lot coverage controls how much of the ground a building can occupy.

• FAR: total floor area across all stories.
• Lot coverage: how much of the lot the building can cover.
• Height: how tall the building can be.

On a 10,000-square-foot Industrial lot, FAR 0.40 allows up to 4,000 square feet of total floor area. FAR 3.0 allows up to 30,000 square feet.

Sources: Measure X §10.26.040 and Table No. 2, pp. 27–29.

About 11.7 million square feet of legal capacity—more than 10.2 million square feet beyond today's maximum.

Across 95 Industrial and Waterfront parcels, there are approximately 3.90 million square feet of land after water-covered portions are excluded. Applying today's and Measure X's limits to that same land gives:

• Industrial land: approximately 9.01 million square feet total under Measure X—7.81 million more than today.
• Waterfront land: approximately 2.68 million square feet total under Measure X—2.41 million more than today.
• Combined: approximately 11.69 million square feet total—10.22 million more than today.

Water-covered portions of parcels are excluded. This is maximum zoning capacity, not a construction forecast.

The BAE report's separate 1.829-million-square-foot figure considers only 12 selected properties. The report says that figure is neither the maximum theoretical capacity of all parcels nor a forecast of likely construction.

Sources: BAE report, pp. 42–43; City of Sausalito zoning map; Marin County parcel records; parcel-by-parcel calculation applying current and Measure X FAR limits.

Yes. Measure X upzones every Waterfront-zoned parcel from the Spinnaker through central Sausalito to the Marinship—not only the Waterfront parcels inside the Marinship.

That includes the entire group of privately owned parking-lot parcels in front of the Spinnaker Restaurant, followed by a line of Waterfront parcels extending north along the shoreline to the Marinship.

Sausalito's zoning map identifies 21 Waterfront parcels outside the Marinship. Some are partly or entirely water and have little or no land area today, but Measure X upzones all of them. On the existing land portions alone, their combined maximum floor-area capacity would rise from about 40,936 to 409,362 square feet.

Sources: Measure X §10.26.040 and Table No. 2; City of Sausalito zoning map; Marin County parcel records.

No. No study has examined traffic from Measure X's full development capacity—or even from the 1.8 million square feet BAE identified on 12 selected sites.

BAE also says many private Marinship roads likely cannot accommodate significant development.

That gap is larger than it first appears. The traffic from Measure X would be added to housing already planned and newly zoned along Bridgeway. The reports did not study the combined effect. One pending project at 1 and 3 Harbor Drive alone proposes approximately 477,000 square feet and 294 homes.

Bridgeway is already headed toward intolerable delay without Measure X. Measure X authorizes far more commercial capacity before anyone has calculated the combined result.

Sources: BAE report, p. 50; City staff report, pp. 14 and 16–17; 1 & 3 Harbor Drive entitlement plans, sheet G-102.

Yes. Voters are being asked to enact a 266-page measure.

Here is what those pages contain:

• Pages 1–4: title, findings, and changes to voter-approved Ordinance 1022.
• Pages 5–77: changes to the Sausalito Municipal Code.
• Pages 78–206: repeal of the Marinship Specific Plan, with its 128-page body crossed out.
• Pages 207–263: changes to the Sausalito General Plan.
• Pages 264–266: rules for future standards, amendments, competing measures, and legal defense.

Sources: Measure X, complete 266-page text.

The Marinship Specific Plan is the working rulebook for Sausalito's working waterfront. Measure X deletes it in its entirety without putting an equivalent replacement into law.

The plan recognizes that Marinship properties are not interchangeable. It divides the area into 11 planning areas and approximately 60 planning parcels, with rules tailored to each location's access, traffic, existing uses, shoreline, geology, flooding, and public value. Section 5 of Measure X says that entire plan is deleted.

The repeal removes:

• Working-waterfront protections. Parcel-specific rules favor small-scale, low-traffic arts, maritime, industrial, and waterfront uses instead of treating every property as interchangeable commercial land.
• Protections for different kinds of artists. Applied arts may occupy no more than half of a parcel's arts space; the balance is reserved for fine, industrial, or marine arts. Commercial uses must also be paired with noncommercial uses.
• Traffic and infrastructure protections. Development is limited according to the traffic a property generates. The plan also identifies street, intersection, drainage, path, and pier improvements and assigns responsibilities to benefiting properties.
• Shoreline and environmental safeguards. The plan addresses shoreline setbacks, flooding, subsidence, unstable filled land, geological suitability, drainage, water quality, and pollution.
• Views, open space, and public access. Protections include mapped view corridors, the Bridgeway view window, shoreline and open-space setbacks, waterfront paths, bicycle and pedestrian connections, and small-boat tie-up requirements.

Measure X does not modernize the Specific Plan. It repeals it before a replacement exists. Measure X keeps or rewrites a few individual rules, but for protections such as view corridors, shoreline setbacks, and public open space, it says only that the City may adopt new standards later. The replacements are not included, and the City is not required to adopt them.

Sources: Measure X §§5–7, pp. 78–206; City staff report, pp. 9–10; Goldfarb report, pp. 18–19.

Yes. When it takes effect, Measure X repeals the view protections written into the Marinship Specific Plan and strikes the matching view-corridor map from the General Plan. No replacement is included.

Today these protections work at two levels. The Marinship Specific Plan defines the view corridors and the standards that keep them open. The General Plan carries the same corridors on its own map and directs the City to move them into the zoning code. Measure X repeals the Specific Plan in full and deletes the General Plan map and program. The rules that disappear:

• Ten designated view corridors. The protected sightlines that keep Bay views open from Bridgeway, other streets, and the homes that look through them.
• The Bridgeway view window. It keeps eye-level Bay views open along the east side of Bridgeway from Napa Street to the northern City limits.
• The building-placement rule. New Marinship buildings must be sited to leave Bay views as open as possible.

At the same time, Measure X raises the height limit along the east side of Bridgeway, from Napa Street north, from 32 feet to 47 feet, about four stories.

Measure X says the City may adopt new view-corridor standards later for the Industrial and Waterfront zones. It sets no deadline and does not require them.

Design review doesn’t guarantee your view

Design review still happens, but it applies the rules in force, and Measure X changes the rules.

• Design review balances your view against the owner’s right to build. The General Plan states its goal for views in the title of the section: “Balance View Protection with Property Rights.” The policy that carries out that goal tells a new building to “minimize” how much it blocks the primary views from neighboring properties, then adds that “some minor loss of view may be consistent with this policy if necessary to protect a property right.”
• Measure X greatly enlarges the property right. The property right in question is the owner’s right to build what the zoning allows.

  Waterfront lotsToday, that property right is a three-story building on 10 percent of the lot. Under Measure X, it becomes a building covering 70 percent of the lot, with ten times today’s floor area.

  Industrial lotsAll of Sausalito’s Industrial lots lie east of Bridgeway, from Napa Street north. Today, the property right there is a three-story building on about 13 percent of the lot. Under Measure X, it becomes a building covering 70 percent of the lot and rising to 47 feet, with seven and a half times today’s floor area.

  The bigger the building an owner is entitled to, the stronger the argument that view loss is “necessary to protect a property right.”

• The repealed corridors were a firm rule, not a balance. In the required corridors, views were to be “maintained open, free of structures or landscaping that measurably obstruct views of Richardson Bay.” Measure X removes that rule and keeps only the balancing test.

Design review can ask a building to block less of a view. It cannot bring back the corridors or today’s size limits.

Sources: Measure X, pp. 142–149 (Specific Plan view corridors and the required-corridor standard at pp. 143–144, Bridgeway view window, and building placement, repealed), pp. 231–232 and 251–252 (General Plan Program LU-4.1.1 and Figure 4-4, deleted), pp. 4–5 and 214 (height, floor area, and lot coverage limits; Industrial area location), p. 251 (Objective CD-3 and Policy CD-3.1), p. 264 (§7, future standards), p. 265 (§9, effective date); City staff report, pp. 4 and 10; Goldfarb report, pp. 7 and 12–13; Sausalito Municipal Code §10.54.050(D), design review findings.

Only after its protections were carried forward into revised zoning.

The 2021 General Plan did contemplate eventually retiring the Specific Plan—but not simply repealing it. It directed the City to:

• Use a public process to incorporate the Specific Plan's land-use policies and development rules into the Zoning Ordinance.
• Carefully evaluate and update its detailed parcel guidance in a clearer, more usable format.
• Carry forward view-corridor protections and consider infrastructure, sea-level rise, subsidence, and liquefaction.
• Retire the Specific Plan only after the revised zoning was adopted.

That work was never completed. Measure X does not carry out that plan—it abandons it. It repeals the Specific Plan immediately, deletes the General Plan programs that called for its protections to be carried forward, and provides no completed replacement.

Sources: 2021 General Plan Programs LU-4.1.1 and LU-4.1.2; Measure X §§5–6, pp. 78–263.

A broad mix of new commercial and office-type activities—including uses that may occupy 100% of a building's permitted floor area.

Measure X replaces the current rules with a 65-category use table for the Industrial and Marinship Waterfront zones. Uses independently permitted by that table are outside the measure's 40% commercial-use limit, subject to any required use permit and use-specific standards.

The expanded range of activities includes:

• Office-type and professional uses: financial institutions and financial-service businesses; medical, dental, and mental-health offices and laboratories; business and office support services; publishers; industrial and marine research and development; and “applied arts,” including architecture, engineering, software design, and graphic design.
• Distribution and delivery uses: wholesaling and distribution operations, parcel-delivery hubs, equipment rental and sales, storage yards, and accessory storage.
• Visitor and consumer uses: restaurants, outdoor dining, catering, ancillary retail, building-material stores, recreation and fitness centers, and auto, vehicle, and parts sales.
• Standalone parking: off-street parking is listed as a principal use, subject to a conditional use permit—not merely as parking accessory to another waterfront business. That could mean a large parking facility or garage built to serve substantially more cars.
• Other uses: vehicle repair, pipelines and transmission lines, vehicle storage, and temporary offices and events.

Many of these are office-type businesses in everything but name. Because they are independently listed in Measure X's use table, they are not governed by its 40% “commercial office” cap. Accessory offices are also separately permitted.

The practical question is not whether Measure X uses the words “office building.” It is whether a large new building can be occupied by banks, clinics, laboratories, publishers, software designers, architects, engineers, research operations, and office-support businesses. Under Measure X, it can.

Sources: Measure X §10.26.030(B), Table 10.26-1 and Chapter 10.88; Goldfarb report, pp. 40 and 45.

No. Measure X repeals existing rules designed to preserve maritime, industrial, and arts uses and protect them from displacement by higher-paying commercial businesses.

Today's Marinship Specific Plan and zoning rules do more than simply allow artists and maritime businesses. They shape the mix of uses so those businesses have room to remain:

• The rules favor a working waterfront. Their stated purpose includes preserving maritime and industrial uses and discouraging commercial businesses that could displace them or generate disproportionate traffic.
• New commercial office use is tightly limited. New offices generally must be accessory to an approved use, while commercial office and retail space must be accompanied by noncommercial uses.
• The arts rules preserve a mix of working artists. Applied arts may occupy no more than half of a parcel's arts space. At least an equal amount must remain available for fine, industrial, or marine arts. If one of those uses leaves, its space remains reserved for another required arts use.

Measure X repeals that framework in its entirety. It removes the arts ratio and parcel-specific protections, then opens the same properties to office-type businesses, logistics and distribution, retail, restaurants, fitness, recreation, and other uses able to compete for the space—all while allowing dramatically more floor area.

The economic review warns makers could be displaced

The independent economic review warns that existing arts, maritime, and industrial businesses are more price-sensitive than some of the newly allowed tenants. Greater competition could raise rents and displace the people Measure X promises to help.

Even Measure X's promised protection for the ICB Building and historic Arques Shipyard may not work. The measure neither defines nor maps the sites—and repeals the Specific Plan that does. The independent legal review calls the language “vague and unenforceable.”

Sources: Current SMC §10.26.030(A); current SMC §10.28.050; Goldfarb/BAE report, overall conclusion, pp. vi–vii; displacement analysis, p. 38; City staff report, pp. 9–10 and 15.

No—not the way it is being advertised. Many office-type uses fall outside the 40% cap.

Measure X exempts uses independently permitted in its use table and separately allows accessory offices. That leaves many office-type categories outside the cap, including:

• Financial institutions.
• Business and office support services.
• Publishers.
• “Applied arts,” including architecture, engineering, software design, and graphic design.

Even the nominally capped portion grows dramatically because Measure X raises the underlying FAR to 3.0. City staff calculates that accessory commercial capacity rises from roughly 0.15 FAR to 1.2 FAR.

Sources: Measure X §10.26.030(B) and Table 10.26-1; Goldfarb report, pp. 40 and 45; City staff report, p. 14.

In every commercial and industrial area outside the Downtown Historic District.

Measure X does not immediately upzone every commercial district as it does the Industrial and Waterfront zones. It does, however, remove the citywide voter-approval safeguard, allowing a future City Council majority to change zoning, permitted uses, FAR, setbacks, variances, and development agreements without a citywide vote.

Areas affected include Caledonia, Bridgeway, Spring Street, Nevada Street, Coloma, Old Town, and the waterfront. This is not an obsolete protection: Sausalito voters used it as recently as November 2025 to decide Measure J.

Sources: City staff report, pp. 3 and 7; Goldfarb report, pp. 20–22.

Measure X is a citizens' initiative. California law does not require CEQA review before voters adopt a citizens' initiative. As a result, no environmental study of Measure X was conducted before the vote.

The later City staff, legal, and economic reports were not environmental studies and did not substitute for one. The consultants said they had very limited time and relied on existing information.

A comparable rezoning initiated and adopted by the City would generally undergo environmental review before enactment. No comparable environmental review has evaluated Measure X's combined effects on:

• Traffic, intersections, and emergency access.
• Flooding, the shoreline, and sea-level rise.
• Potentially contaminated soil and groundwater associated with the Marinship's wartime shipyard and later industrial history.
• Infrastructure and public services.
• The cumulative effect of the development capacity Measure X would authorize across Sausalito.

Individual building proposals may still receive project-level review when required. But reviewing one future project is not the same as studying the combined effects of this 266-page rezoning before voters enact it.

Measure X asks voters to approve the zoning first, without an overall environmental review of what that zoning could produce.

Sources: California Supreme Court, Tuolumne Jobs & Small Business Alliance v. Superior Court (2014); DeVita v. County of Napa (1995); Goldfarb/BAE report, scope and limitations, pp. 1–2; City 70–74 Liberty Ship Way environmental record, hazardous materials and contaminated soils.

No. Measure X authorizes far more development on flood-exposed land, but it does not fund or require a single road, drainage, flood-control, or shoreline project.

Measure X contains:

• No project: no road, storm-drain, flood-control, or shoreline improvement that Measure X would actually build.
• No cost estimate: no calculation of what the needed work would cost.
• No dedicated money: no dedicated revenue and no financing district.
• No requirement that new development fund shoreline protection.

Measure X repeals the one existing rule that makes developers pay their share toward infrastructure. That rule requires contributions when developers are allowed to build more. Other Marinship Specific Plan provisions assign particular property owners responsibility for street and intersection improvements. Measure X repeals the plan, and City staff reports that Sausalito has no replacement impact fees for roads, storm drainage, or shoreline protection.

Measure X grants the increased building rights first—with no requirement that developers pay any portion of the road, drainage, flood-control, or shoreline improvements those rights may require.

Sources: City staff report, principal developer-contribution tool, p. 4; infrastructure assignments and absence of replacement fees, pp. 14–15; BAE report, pp. 36–37; Goldfarb report, pp. 5–7 and 18–19.

Measure X's proponents say new development will generate revenue for seawalls, roads, and other infrastructure without raising residents' taxes. They have presented no buildout forecast, revenue estimate, shoreline cost, timetable, or financing formula showing that this works.

When residents question Measure X's scale, supporters say only modest development is likely. When discussing revenue, they rely on substantial new development. Both claims cannot carry the argument: limited development produces limited new revenue, while large-scale development also brings traffic, infrastructure demands, and more private property exposed to rising water.

The independent economic review found the amount, type, and timing of development too speculative to forecast and did not quantify Measure X's fiscal result. City staff concluded that indirect revenues alone are unlikely, particularly in the early years, to support new and existing infrastructure needs.

Measure X contains no flood project, cost estimate, dedicated revenue, financing district, or requirement that new development pay for shoreline protection.

Sources: Measure X proponents' website; BAE report, pp. 2 and 29–38; City staff report, pp. 4–5 and 14–15.

No. Voting No does not trigger a $500 tax.

Some residents report being told in private conversations that if Measure X fails, every Sausalito property owner will be charged $500 for sea-level-rise adaptation. That is not true.

Voting No does not enact any tax, fee, or assessment. No $500 charge is part of this election, and the City's Shoreline Adaptation Plan contains no such proposal. The City cannot simply impose a new local tax: voters would have to approve it. A property assessment would require a separate legal process, special-benefit findings, notice, and a property-owner ballot.

Measure X neither prevents nor approves a future tax or assessment. It grants the upzoning now while leaving the financing question unanswered.

Sources: City of Sausalito Shoreline Adaptation Plan; California Legislative Analyst's Office, Understanding Proposition 218.

Yes. The City's independent legal review found internal inconsistencies, and the City staff report identified additional conflicts, ambiguities, and drafting errors.

These are not simply misspellings or awkward sentences. They create uncertainty about which rules apply and whether some of Measure X's promised protections would work at all:

• Connected zoning rules would no longer match. Measure X changes the voter-approved Ordinance 1022 without making corresponding changes elsewhere in the zoning code.
• The status of the Waterfront zone would be unclear. Conflicting language creates uncertainty about how the zone is categorized and which rules govern it.
• Measure X gets an existing development limit wrong. Its text misstates the Industrial zone's current floor area ratio.
• Footnotes and substantive provisions conflict. The City would still have to administer the resulting law despite those unresolved instructions.
• The promised protections for the ICB Building and historic Arques Shipyard may not protect them. Measure X neither defines nor maps the two sites—and repeals the Specific Plan that does. The legal review calls the language “vague and unenforceable” and warns that it could expose the City to a regulatory-takings claim.

If Measure X passes, the errors become law too. City staff estimates $150,000–$250,000 for a clean-up ordinance, fee study, and General Plan amendments needed to resolve Measure X's conflicts. Some corrections could also require environmental review, adding more time and expense before the City could adopt them. Why enact those problems in the first place?

Sources: Goldfarb report, pp. 4, 13–16 and 39–40; City staff report, pp. 4 and 18.

Yes. The City's independent legal review found that Measure X's own text would classify every existing use in Sausalito as legally nonconforming—not only uses in the Marinship.

Measure X says: “Existing uses as of March 13, 2026 shall be considered Non-conforming Uses and Structures.”

In plain English, your home or business could stay. But the nonconforming label could make ordinary changes much harder:

• The use of your home or business would remain legally nonconforming unless a conditional use permit is obtained.
• Enlarging or structurally altering it would generally require special approval. Otherwise, the property would have to change to a permitted use.
• If you voluntarily left it vacant for six months, you could lose the right to use it the same way again. You could lose the right to move back in or reopen it.

This is not a harmless typo.If Measure X passes, this citywide provision becomes voter-enacted law. Correcting it would then depend on Measure X's conflicting amendment rules, a future vote, or potentially a court decision. Why enact the error in the first place?

Sources: Measure X §§3 and 12; Goldfarb report, pp. 15–16 and 21–22; SMC §§10.62.040(B), 10.62.040(E), 10.62.050(A)(3), and 10.62.070(A)(6).

Yes—but there is no quick or guaranteed way to clean it up after it becomes law.

The answer depends on who is making the change and where it would apply:

• Voters could change or repeal Measure X through a future initiative and election.
• In the Downtown Historic District, voter approval would still be required. Measure X clearly keeps that restriction in place.
• Outside the Downtown Historic District, the City Council may be able to make changes without another vote. Section 12(A) appears to allow this after the City completes its normal administrative and legislative procedures. Those procedures include environmental review and can sometimes take years.
• But Measure X contradicts itself about the Council's authority. The very next subsection says changes addressing ambiguities or inconsistencies must “further the purposes of” Measure X. That is difficult to reconcile with the broad amendment power Section 12(A) appears to provide.

California law generally prevents a City Council from amending a voter-approved initiative unless the initiative itself permits Council amendments. The City's independent legal review concluded that Section 12(A) gives the Council broad authority outside the Downtown Historic District. But the conflicting language in Section 12(B) creates uncertainty about the limits of that power.

Why this matters: If Measure X passes, all 266 pages become law first. Correcting its problems would then require another election, a potentially lengthy City process, or possibly a court decision about what the Council is allowed to change. “Fix it later” is not a simple solution.

Sources: California Elections Code §9217; Measure X §§11–13, p. 265; Goldfarb report, pp. 21–22.

If the City stops defending Measure X, the proponents can take over—and the City can be required to reimburse them.

Section 15 asks the City to defend Measure X. If the City declines or decides not to appeal an adverse ruling, the proponents may step in as “agents of the people” and continue the case themselves.

The City must reimburse the proponents for reasonable expenses and losses, capped at what it would have cost the City to conduct the defense. That means elected City officials could decide that continued litigation is unwise, yet the proponents could keep litigating and send the City the bill within that cap.

This provision gives the proponents an unusual, continuing role after Election Day—and limits the City's practical ability to end or settle litigation over the measure.

Sources: Measure X §15, p. 266.

The City's official election page collects the complete initiative, the City staff report, and the independent consultant report.

• Measure X — complete 266-page text
• Independent Goldfarb/BAE Measure X report
• City of Sausalito staff Measure X report
• City of Sausalito: 2026 election and Measure X documents
• City of Sausalito: Marinship Specific Plan and background documents