David Lee Hoffman pours cups of tea he brewed for visitors over an open fire on Wednesday, July 18, 2012, in Lagunitas. He has been building exotic, Tibetan and Chinese inspired structures on his Lagunitas land for 40 years without permits from Marin County. He now faces $460,000 in fines and a court order to tear everything down. (IJ photo/Frankie Frost)

By MARI SEREBROV | August 19, 2019 at 10:33 am

An outgrowth of the back-to-the-earth movement of the 1960s and early ‘70s, the Last Resort in Lagunitas is a testament to one man’s ingenuity and his dream of developing a practical, low-cost ecological system that could serve as a demonstration project for his community.

Now, nearly 50 years after David Lee Hoffman began turning his two acres of hillside into an artistic environmental model of living sustainably, Marin County officials are threatening to destroy everything he’s created by reneging on old agreements and assessing penalties approaching $1 million. That includes hundreds of thousands of dollars to mitigate off-site environmental damage that has nothing to do with the Last Resort.

What could be lost, if the county doesn’t back down in court later this month, is a unique integrated bio-management system that uses vermiculture, composting and healthy gray water processes to produce a natural fertilizer that enriches the soil for growing high-grade organic food. Also at stake are more than 35 buildings that the Marin County Architectural Commission has cited for their architectural significance.

So what is the Last Resort?

“It’s an important and significant example of East-West folk art,” according to sustainable architect Sim Van der Ryn, who was appointed California State Architect by former governor Jerry Brown and is on the architecture faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.

Others consider it a quintessential living history – a prime example of the do-it-yourself, back-to-the-land, Mother Earth ethos of the 1960s put into practice.

For Hoffman, the Last Resort is his home. It embodies three principles: water is precious, soil is sacred and human waste is a resource. Following those principles, Hoffman, who has an engineering and physics background, designed all the systems at the Last Resort to be completely isolated and self-contained so there is no chance of polluting the environment.

Considered a leading global authority on pu-erh teas, Hoffman is known in the tea world for introducing and popularizing fine handcrafted artisanal teas to the West. With his extensive background in vermiculture and soil fertility, Hoffman worked with China’s prestigious National Tea Research Institute, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Department of Agriculture to help them implement organic and sustainable tea-farming practices.

Hoffman has argued that the buildings, including the original house that was built in the 1920s, should be held to the historical building code. He admits that as he developed his compound, he didn’t bother with building permits. Back in the 1970s, no one in that part of the county did. “We were pretty much left alone,” Hoffman said. Even when the county started handing him red tags years later for not having a permit, there was a tacit agreement that everything was OK.

That all changed about 10 years ago when a new generation of building inspectors came into county government. The county initially agreed to settle the permit violations for $60,000 but then reneged on that offer, Hoffman said. Its latest settlement offer was $700,000 in penalties.

The costs escalated when a judge appointed a receiver to determine the property needs. With Hoffman expected to pay for the receiver’s time and all expenses, the receiver has called in multiple experts and agencies to identify violations that “could” be occurring at the Last Resort. Hoffman’s struggle to preserve his vision “got more complex and more convoluted with all these agencies,” he said.

Hoping to pass the ecological lessons he’s learned to future generations, Hoffman is working with the Lagunitas Project to preserve the Last Resort property in a Public Benefit Trust.

“I set out 46 years ago to create a living model of sustainability. I succeeded,” Hoffman said.

Meanwhile, commercial developers are circling.

The public is welcome to attend the case management conference in Marin Superiour Court at the Civic Center in San Rafael, 9 a.m. on Friday. Go to TheLagunitasProject.org for more information.

Mari Serebrov, who lives in Arkansas, is an award-winning journalist and author. She originally wrote this article for TheLagunitasProject.org.

Marin Voice: Commercial developers are threatening Lagunitas’ Last Resort

Marin judge grants ‘Last Resort’ compound another temporary reprieve

Lagunitas’ exotic Last Resort seeks reprieve from auction block

By Richard Halstead
(link)

It appears the final chapter has not yet been written for David Lee Hoffman’s so-called “The Last Resort,” a Tibetan-style experiment in sustainable living in Lagunitas.

Marin Superior Court Judge Paul Haakenson on Friday rejected a request from a receiver — whom he appointed in 2015 to bring Hoffman’s funky compound into compliance with the law — for permission to tear down two buildings at the site.

Haakenson also rejected a request by Hoffman’s attorney to validate the Marin County Architectural Commission’s determination in 2016 that all 36 of The Last Resort’s structures have “architectural significance.” Under state law, such a designation would mean that the buildings would be subject to the California Historical Building Code, which is less stringent than the county’s building code.

Instead, Haakenson directed the receiver, Eric Beatty, and Hoffman to meet and confer in an attempt to reach agreement on which of The Last Resorts’ structures are architecturally significant and thus should be evaluated under the Historical Building Code.

After settling on the property at 2 Alta Ave. and 230 Cintura Ave. in 1973, Hoffman, an importer of exotic teas, modified existing cabin-style residences that had been built in the early 1900s and made a number of other improvements. He added storage buildings, ponds, retaining walls and ornamental structures — including a full-size replica of a fishing boat suspended in a pond of rainwater — all without permits.

The style of his building was influenced by a decade Hoffman spent backpacking through Tibet, Nepal and elsewhere in Asia.

County health inspectors were not impressed, however, by Hoffman’s unpermitted outdoor composting toilet or kitchen composting system that utilized worms and a series of open-air moats. They said the moats were a breeding ground for mosquitoes and the toilet threatened the aquifer and nearby streams with contamination from sewage.

“There is no urgent need to deal with those buildings; they’re not unsafe,” Hoffman’s attorney, Peter Prows, said after the hearing.

Prows said the building of most concern should be Hoffman’s tea house, which he said is also the compound’s biggest and most architecturally significant structure.

“It’s built into and off the side of a hillside,” Prows said, “and the concern is if there is an earthquake it will just come tumbling down and people might get hurt. If you’re actually trying to solve a real problem like addressing things that are unsafe, let’s start there.”

In his filing, Prows stated that Hoffman has commissioned a plan from a San Anselmo architect, Adam Posard, to make The Last Resort safe, while preserving its historic structures, consistent with the Historical Building Code. He asserted that Posard’s plan should be made the basis for the receiver’s renovation of The Last Resort.

In his tentative ruling, Haakenson wrote, “The court is not opposed to modification of its 2015 order, and allowing the restoration of the property to occur under the less onerous regulatory requirements of the Historical Building Code, should the property be designated accordingly.”

But Haakenson also stated that any restoration plan that rests upon application of the Historical Building Code “will require the county to accept this designation.”

“It is not for the court to direct the county to apply the Historical Building Code in permitting construction, or approving any construction or restoration,” Haakenson wrote.

Haakenson noted in the ruling that Hoffman has twice before ignored court orders to bring his property into compliance with the law.

The Last Resorts’ application to the Marin County Architectural Commission in 2016 was supported by three experts. Sim Van der Ryn, former California state architect, lauded the “advanced ecological design” of the compound, comparing it favorably to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Mark Hulbert, a licensed conservation architect and cultural resources consultant, compared The Last Resort’s historical importance to that of the Marin County Civic Center. And Jo Farb Hernandez, director of SPACES, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of historically significant art spaces, wrote that “there could be no better example of a site worthy of preservation.”

Hoffman still faces an uphill battle, however, to preserve his ecological Shangri-La.

A previous ruling against him for ignoring building codes has left him saddled with more than $226,000 in fines. After the receiver was appointed in 2015, the court granted Beatty a $93,000 lien to cover the cost of carrying out the order. On Friday, Haakenson granted the receiver’s request for an additional $205,000 lien.

According to Beatty’s filing for Friday’s hearing, this lien “may not be extended unless the more than $385,000 in delinquent property tax assessments from 2014 are paid by Mr. Hoffman.”

Beatty, who could not be reached for comment, states in the filing that if the tax assessments aren’t paid, all of The Last Resorts’ properties could be sold at auction in 2019.

Lagunitas tea seller denied ask, gains time