North Bay Business Journal

SAN RAFAEL — The Marin Community Foundation will no longer be involved in a proposal to construct an affordable housing project at the site of filmmaker George Lucas’s Grady Ranch outside San Rafael, citing uncertainties in obtaining federal and state financing necessary to bring the project to fruition, according to a joint announcement today by the foundation and Mr. Lucas’s real estate company.

NOVATO — Marin Community Foundation today said it is seeking a developer to build affordable housing on filmmaker George Lucas’s Grady Ranch, a property north of San Rafael once pegged for a sizable state-of-the-art digital movie studio.

Marin County has learned some hard lessons about economic development, but we still have a long way to go. A step in the right direction is a new advisory group being convened to review planning processes and how the county interacts with Marin’s businesses and residents. This group was conceived by the county as a result of the Grady Ranch failure and years of contention between planners, applicants and Marin residents.

Under the leadership of BEST (Building Economic Success Together), a new regional economic development initiative and a public-private partnership designed to facilitate business success in Sonoma County, seven incentives to attract Lucasfilm to Sonoma Country quickly appeared.

NOVATO — Lucasfilm has partnered with the Marin Community Foundation to explore options for building affordable housing on the Grady Ranch property near San Rafael that George Lucas originally planned for a sizable digital-movie studio.

SAN RAFAEL – The decision by Lucasfilm to withdraw advanced plans for a new digital movie studio in San Rafael’s Lucas Valley will reverberate throughout the Marin County economy for many years and result in the loss of hundreds of jobs and tens of millions of dollars to the regional economy.

The political class in Sacramento is obsessed with raising taxes, enacting new regulatory schemes and green economy pipedreams. But they should be focused on this stunning trend.

As most people know by now, a very tiny but vocal and bitter minority of opponents and a Kafkaesque California regulatory environment has driven filmmaker George Lucas’s latest project out of Marin County and perhaps California.

Marin County as a place to do business took a huge step backwards on April 10, 2012. On April 10, Skywalker Properties decided not to continue the pursuit of its Grady Ranch project. Not only did a major project with great potential economic benefit for the County get derailed and ultimately canceled, an influential landowner trying to generate business on his land was thwarted unnecessarily. Marin County supervisors are now trying to broker a solution as one leadership step forward; Marin Economic Forum has asked our state legislators to step in as well.

SAN RAFAEL — County of Marin officials have been busy trying to convince filmmaker George Lucas to continue pursuing his Grady Ranch digital media studio, and local business groups have launched a new joint effort to help keep and attract employers like him.

A lot of people are saying how sad they are that Lucasfilm is withdrawing its Grady Ranch studio proposal from Marin County. But no one can be sadder than George Lucas. Perhaps the saddest aspect of the the Grady Ranch saga is that it demonstrates clearly that even the genius and sensitivity of a George Lucas are no match for California’s out-of-control and unaccountable regulatory bureaucracy.

SAN RAFAEL — Filmmaker George Lucas has dropped plans to build a 270,000-square-foot digital movie studio northwest of San Rafael and will take the project elsewhere, his real estate company announced this afternoon.

SAN RAFAEL — The Marin County Board of Supervisors today listened to two hours of testimony for and against filmmaker George Lucas’ proposed Grady Ranch digital movie studio project northwest of San Rafael but put off action on an appeal of earlier project approval, agreeing with staff that newly obtained input on the project from state and federal regulators on the project needed further consideration.

To many observers, opposition to George Lucas’s proposed Grady Ranch digital film studio must seem like a scene from a bad movie.

The first thing to understand is that the master plan under which the project is proposed was approved by county officials in 1996. Sixteen years later, the famed filmmaker is asking to build his dream studio in the very place he started and in the county that has benefited so much artistically and economically from his genius.

SAN RAFAEL — An organization representing neighbors of a proposed 270,000-square-foot Lucasfilm digital movie production studio in Lucas Valley northwest of San Rafael has appealed the recent project approval by the Marin County Planning Commission.

As the North Bay tiptoes into 2012, it should take a moment to pat itself on the back just a bit. In 2011, the region’s economy fared better than much of the state. The three North Bay counties of Marin, Napa and Sonoma have three of the 10 lowest unemployment rates in California, Nos. 1, 6 and 8. While statewide unemployment declined by a little over 1 percentage point, rates in November were down from 1.4 to nearly 2 percent in the North Bay.

A number of major private-sector construction projects will be under way or are set to begin in 2012: Grady Ranch, San Rafael; Madera Vista, Corte Madera; East Washington Place, Petaluma; Marin County Emergency Operations Facility, San Rafael; Safeway expansion, Petaluma; Bell Village, Windsor; Multitenant warehouse, Napa; Kaiser data center expansion, Napa; The Barlow, Sebastopol; and Napa Century Center, Napa.