Design session offers glimpse at possible futures for Petaluma fairgrounds

The future of Petaluma’s Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds is still unknown, but a recent workshop may have provided glimpses of that future by pairing up community members with professional architects in an unusual group design session.

The workshop, held last Sunday at Lucchesi Community Center by a nonprofit called Healthy Democracy, put several Petaluma residents in a room with six architects, broke them into groups, and got each group to generate a different vision of the fairgrounds’ future. The result was five creative designs, which will be presented to city leaders later in October.

Earlier this year the council unanimously approved a contract with Healthy Democracy, which began selecting panelists to form its Petaluma Fairgrounds Advisory Panel. Council members said at the time they wanted to try a new approach to repurposing the fairgrounds after years of discussion and controversy over the fate of the 55-acre, central Petaluma property.

For the past 50 years, the city has leased the site to the 4th District Agricultural Association for $1 per year. The association operates the Sonoma-Marin Fair, subleases portions of the parcel and also maintains the property. The existing lease is set to expire in December 2023.

The Petaluma Fairgrounds Advisory Panel has met several times since then, and perspectives and goals of its panelists continue to vary, along with their priorities for the future of the fairgrounds.

“I grew up going to the fairgrounds and having most of my childhood there,” said Patti Ingram, a panelist working on the outreach committee. “I just don’t want it to disappear.”

Eric Grosser, another panelist and co-chair of the outreach committee, noted that the property “is right in the middle of town now, and I’m aware of the east-west divide, and I think the fairgrounds is a good place to solve that.”

According to Healthy Democracy, a final report generated by its panelists included recommendations and preferred land uses. Although dissenting opinions were included in the report, five key areas of agreement were highlighted: a focus on agriculture, keeping the annual Sonoma-Marin Fair, keeping the space as an evacuation center, maintaining a year-round farmer’s market there, and eco-friendly noise mitigation.

The remainder of the report was dedicated to the scoring and breakdown of three overarching visions for the site that were developed by groups of panelists. These visions were the guiding force for Sunday’s meeting, where two architects were assigned to each vision, and panelists divided themselves into different groups by sitting at tables designated to visions one, two or three.

One vision held workforce housing, equitable access and reduced congestion in the existing transit hub to be among its core elements. Another envisioned “a safe, green open space that includes activities that can be enjoyed by the greater community; a place for the annual fair, as well as agricultural education and to remain a center for evacuation services,” panelists wrote in their report.

The third vision sought to preserve the current acreage of the fairgrounds property by renewing a modified lease with the 4th District Agricultural Association. “The history and heritage of our community should be honored while also improving the property to meet current and future needs. ... We support continued and expanded use of the speedway, and continuation of the annual Sonoma-Marin Fair,” the panelists wrote.

On Sunday, these visions acted as guidelines for the panelists when brainstorming with their architects at the beginning of the hour-and-a-half drawing session. The architects helped shape their visions and put them on paper.

“What some are calling a vision, a drawing, we’re calling a graphic translation of your work,” said Mary Dooley, one of the participating architects.

“I wasn’t really designing, I was just kind of copying down their design. I was kind of like a scribe, really,” said Joseph Lynch, a designer from MAD Architecture.

The tables had large maps of the fairgrounds property that were covered by translucent strips of paper for the architects to draw on. The informal process was highly collaborative, and panelists with conflicting ideas were forced to make quick decisions and compromises.

One of the main takeaways many of the panelists had from this workshop was finding out which of their ideas could make their way into the final design.

“It’s cool finally actually putting it (the vision) on paper,” said Jasmine Diaz, a panelist on the project. “Thinking about how people actually interact with spaces has been really helpful.”

Moderators from Healthy Democracy walked around the room observing the process and reminding participants of remaining time. Eventually, one or two people from each group went to the front of the room to share their designs as the rest of the panelists watched and asked questions.

The panelists will be given the opportunity to present their designs to the city in late October.

For more on the Petaluma Fairgrounds Advisory Panel, including its completed reports and live recordings of its sessions, visit the Healthy Democracy website.

Contact reporter Rebecca Wolff at rebecca.wolff@sonomanews.com.