Petaluma may get a little bigger after a recent City Council vote authorized the city to begin the process of annexing a 12.9-acre site on the city’s north end.

In a 5-2 vote, the council voted at its Oct. 21 meeting to seek annexation of the site (a former lumber yard converted to a craft market) at 5400 Old Redwood Highway.

Council members Mike Healy and Karen Nau voted against the article. Mayor Kevin McDonnell and councilors John Shribbs, Brian Barnacle, Dennis Pocekay and Janice Cader Thompson voted in favor.

The vote does not guarantee annexation, but it was the city’s seal of approval for applying for annexation to the Local Agency Formation Commission, the agency responsible for overseeing government boundaries.

The vote also allowed the site to be pre-zoned before annexation. The area will be zoned as a business park, open space and district combining parks and floodplains, should LAFCO approve the city’s request.

As described in a staff report.the site currently features a nearly 26,000-square-foot commercial building, two sheds and numerous businesses, including Kickwheel Pottery, Retrograde Coffee Roasters and North Bay Children’s Center.

Council members heard the issue. as a continuation of a June 17 hearing where the council requested more information on the impacts of water movement, potential land use and built-up surfaces. Modeling software analyzed the change in water flow there in the event of a 10- and 100-year flood for different scenarios, and the results were available for council members to consider.

Still, at the Oct. 21 meeting, flooding concerns remained a sticking point for Healy when it came to the more than 11,500 cubic yards of fill remaining.

“Our consultant and I agreed, unless an overall improvement in the area could be demonstrated, we didn’t feel it justified any changes,” said Gina Benedetti-Petnic, the city’s interim public works director.

The vote in favor of annexation was good news for some.

“We are excited to move forward with the next steps,” said Pauline Block, director of development and marketing for Cornerstone Properties, which owns the property.

He later added that “we intended to annex to expand services to our customers on site.”

Danielle Connor, co-founder of Retrograde Coffee Roasters, said she was “ecstatic” about the vote as it paves the way to potentially expand the business.

The company operates a coffee roastery at 5400 Barn and for the past five years has sought to also open a coffee shop at the location. But he signed a lease on the property in 2021, investing more than $100,000 and making significant improvements, only to discover that “annexation would be the only path forward to open our coffee shop there,” Connor said in an email.

Customers, many of whom visit Retrograde Coffee’s Sebastopol Cafe – wrote more than 150 similarly worded letters in support of annexation.

The Petaluma City Council is tentatively scheduled to hold a second reading of the article on Dec. 2 before moving forward with annexation proceedings.

You can contact staff writer Jennifer Sawhney at 707-521-5346 or [email protected]. On X (Twitter) @sawhney_media.