Petaluma has owned 270 acres near the top of Sonoma Mountain since 1959. Getting the public up there has taken a while longer — and this week a judge knocked a big obstacle out of the road.
Sonoma County Superior Court Judge John Tomberlin on Wednesday threw out a lawsuit brought by six Sonoma Mountain-area landowners against the city and two park advocates over public access to Lafferty Ranch. Tomberlin sustained the city’s demurrer without leave to amend, ruling the landowners’ complaint fails as a matter of law and closing the door on a third rewrite.
A demurrer is decided on the pleadings alone. No witnesses, no evidence — the judge asks only whether the complaint, taken at face value, states a legal claim. Twice now, this court has said this one doesn’t.
Ten claims, none left standing
Nicholas Pfendler, Donald McKinney, James Heppelmann, Mary Hable, Richard Tavernetti and Randal Smith, who own property along Sonoma Mountain Road near the ranch, sued the city in December 2024. Their second amended complaint stacked up 10 causes of action — public and private nuisance, negligence, trespass, intentional infliction of emotional distress, quiet title, inverse condemnation and others — built on the claim that the city and its hiking programs were sending the public across land the landowners own, without any easement or right of way.
The court had already sustained a first demurrer against every claim aimed at the city; only a trespass claim against the two individual defendants survived that round. The landowners got leave to try again. The rewrite didn’t fix it. The allegations “remain unacceptably vague,” Tomberlin wrote, and the complaint never says which of the plaintiffs’ properties was damaged, by whom or when. The court noted the plaintiffs listed two Penngrove addresses and “other properties in the area,” leaving the relationship between their land and Lafferty Ranch unclear.
The ruling also leaned on ground the court had already covered: in the earlier round, judicially noticed documents established the city’s right to use and maintain the entrance to Lafferty Ranch from Sonoma Mountain Road. The landowners, Tomberlin wrote, “attempt to turn the tables on the City and argue the City must now prove it owns an easement over the public access road in order to add gravel to it and allow members of the public to continue to travel over it. Plaintiffs’ attempt to hinder public access to Lafferty Ranch based upon conduct by City employees fails.”
It started with gravel
In February 2024, Petaluma pulled an encroachment permit from Sonoma County to add gravel between the shoulder of Sonoma Mountain Road and the ranch gate, so the entrance would hold up year-round. The landowners appealed the permit and lost that March. They filed a claim against the city — the required first step before suing a public agency — and then sued in December.
The suit also named Larry Modell and Matt Maguire, two Lafferty access advocates, as individuals. The complaint tied them to LandPaths and Friends of Lafferty Park — and that connection helped sink the claims against them. Volunteers are not public “employees” under the Government Code, the court found, so the claims that hung on their conduct failed with the rest.
Nearly 70 years, and counting
Lafferty Ranch came to the city in 1959 as part of its purchase of a private water company, and the land served as watershed for the city’s supply until 1992, when the state deemed the downslope Lawler Reservoir seismically unsafe. In 1996, the City Council adopted Ordinance 2022, committing the city to keep the ranch in public hands and open it for public use. The property holds the headwaters of Adobe Creek and looks out over San Francisco Bay, the Pacific, Mount Tamalpais, Mount Diablo and Mount St. Helena.
Three decades after that ordinance, public access still runs through a registration page: the city contracts with LandPaths for docent-led hikes, a program the city cleared in 2021, sign-up required.
The city’s counsel will submit a written order consistent with the ruling. The landowners can still take the fight to an appeals court. But at the trial court, the case is over — and the mountain Petalumans can see from downtown is one lawsuit closer to being theirs to walk.