Annette Rose, longtime political force in Marin, dies at 82

Annette Rose, the Sausalito bohemian who championed its artists, counterculture and waterfront communities as an organizer, City Council member, mayor and Marin County supervisor for a quarter-century, has died.

Ms. Rose died of natural causes on Jan. 30. She was 82.

Family, friends and colleagues described Ms. Rose as an ultimate outsider and insider who never veered from her principles over decades of public life starting in the late 1970s.

“She loved being an advocate for the waterfront and people that really didn’t have a voice because it’s such a weird little island of art and creativity and funkiness in an area that became so radically wealthy,” said Alexander Rose, her son.

“Her passion was serving the lower-income and more creative communities of southern Marin,” he said. “It was a big messy set of people that didn’t like rules, were there basically because there were no rules, and all of a sudden the rules started being applied to them.”

Ms. Rose lived in boat communities, organized neighbors, fought city government, ran an art gallery and theater company, and eventually was elected to local and county office.

“Annette was a beautiful person and a true southern Marin original, fiercely devoted to the Sausalito waterfront community and preservation of Richardson Bay and our natural resources,” said Jill Hoffman, a Sausalito council member and former mayor. “One person really can make a difference in a community, and for us, that person was Annette.”

Ms. Rose’s accomplishments as a supervisor included stopping high-rises above Marin City and near San Quentin; legalizing floating home communities along Sausalito’s shore; preserving the Marin County Civic Center as an architectural gem; and sparking transit initiatives such as bus service to Muir Woods and Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit. She also pushed Marin City developers to build a public library.

As a Sausalito council member, which preceded her 12 years as a supervisor, she became known as its first maritime mayor for legitimizing its enclaves of boatyards, live-aboard boats and art spaces — while keeping condos and hotels at bay.

“The city now loves the waterfront. They love Galilee Harbor. It wasn’t always that way,” said Donna Bragg, who lived in a sailboat while Ms. Rose lived in an old tugboat in the mid-1980s. “We were living on old decrepit docks we recycled for years.”

Before her 1988 election to the council, at-times violent clashes pitted Sausalito’s wealthier “hill people” and establishment against the hippies, artists and anarchists living by the bay. When bulldozers were ordered to demolish ramshackle homes, Ms. Rose, with her second husband, Chris Hardman, who founded Sausalito’s Antenna Theatre, put life-size sculptures of families and children in front of the machines.

At that time, Ms. Rose’s home, an old World War II building by the docks, was condemned and she was forcibly evicted while eight months pregnant.

“I got marched out of our home when I was 12 by sheriffs,” said Alexander Rose. “Luckily, we had good friends that mom had made through politics and the arts community, and we were able to house-sit through my sister’s birth. And then we got our first house, an anchor-out, and we fixed it up and moved to Galilee Harbor.”

Ms. Rose was born in Washington, D.C., in 1943, and raised in its Virginia suburbs. Her father was from West Virginia, had a sixth-grade education, served as a marine in World War II and later rose within the Marriott Corp. Her mother was from Georgia. The family were blue-dog Democrats when the party’s conservatives ruled the South and racial segregation was the norm.

Alexander Rose said his mother erased her southern accent and after high school went to Mexico City to study anthropology. There she met Timothy Rose, who became her first husband. They came to the Bay Area in the mid-1960s, and Ms. Rose earned an anthropology degree from San Francisco State University. They moved to Mill Valley and joined Sausalito’s creative circles.

In 1969, they sold their possessions and decamped to Paris, France, where they lived for three years. Alexander was born there. And Ms. Rose began her career as an arts administrator, assisting a wealthy collector. They returned to Marin. She worked at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Her husband opened the Rose Bernardi art supply shop and gallery, and made mobiles.

By 1979, the couple split up. She befriended and eventually married Hardman, the father of her daughter, Trent, and was soon catapulted into helping run the Antenna Theatre, neighborhood organizing and a decades-long career in Marin politics.

In the Marinship area, old boatyards where people lived were being demolished overnight. Live-aboard boats were being cut from moorings with families on board. Displaced residents showed up at City Council meetings with chainsaws. Ms. Rose and others founded community groups. They bird-dogged the Planning Commission and City Council.

With local luminaries like Stewart Brand, who created the Whole Earth Catalog, they compiled and published lists of Sausalito artists, craftspeople, boat builders, studio, workspaces and others on the waterfront. They created Maritime Day events to recognize the community.

“They wanted to make it an art zone, rather than a war zone,” said Bragg.

After Hardman unsuccessfully ran for the City Council, Ms. Rose became friends with Robin Sweeney, Sausalito’s first female mayor and longest-serving council member. In 1988, the pair ran as a ticket, and Ms. Rose was the top vote-getter.

“Annette convinced her that we weren’t a bunch of bums because Annette wasn’t a bum,” Bragg said. “She was a very put-together person.”

Gradually, the Marinship area’s waterfront enclaves were begrudgingly accepted by local authorities and began to obtain permits. While on the council, Ms. Rose saw that there were regional agencies that affected the waterfront. So she ran for county supervisor in 1988, which was shortly before she met Maureen Parton, who would become her lifelong aide.

At the time, Ms. Rose was the only female supervisor. Her approach was “as smart as it was strategic,” Parton said. “She would keep her counsel to herself. She would let things percolate before she made a decision. And then it was something like Athena coming out of the head of Zeus. She had this all figured out and there was the solution.”

At the county, she won further legalizations of Sausalito’s harbor communities, which Parton said she saw as needed affordable housing. She also was drawn to preserving Marin’s open space.

Ms. Rose finessed donating the ridge above Marin City’s Golden Gate Village, the county’s largest public housing complex, to the federal government so no high rises would be built. She was unable to stop the Marin Gateway Shopping Center — she wanted small-town shops for local entrepreneurs — but pushed developers to build the Donahue Street public library.

When she was president of the Board of Supervisors, she successfully lobbied with her Sonoma County counterparts to stop a casino at Sears Point proposed by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.

At the county, she ushered in institutional reforms. Ms. Rose made sure agendas and budgets were published before meetings. She directed department heads to meet, plan and issue statements on visions, policies and programs. She saw the Civic Center had become run down and succeeded in raising millions to better preserve Frank Lloyd Wright’s only government building.

As a supervisor, Ms. Rose was targeted by two recall campaigns for using a county credit card for personal expenses, which she paid back. The first recall campaign came before her re-election to a third term in 2000, which she won by her largest margin.

“She lived a large life,” said Ian Sobieski, a Sausalito council member and former mayor who was sworn in by Ms. Rose and drew on her advice. “She lived all these chapters.”

Hardman died in 2024.