Bathroom Looms Over Depot Lease Talks

Perhaps more than any other store in town, the is Mill Valley’s signature local business, located right at the center of downtown.

But that location – in a building owned by the city of Mill Valley – also puts the Depot’s owner in a precarious position. In the latest twist in the polite-yet-unmistakable tug of war between City Hall and Depot owner Nicole Ricci, the City Council chose not to authorize City Manager Jim McCann to execute a 5-year renewal of the Depot’s lease but to instead discuss its terms in a closed session at its Feb. 21 meeting.

The reason? City officials want the restroom in the Depot café to be as publicly available as possible given the lack of any other public restroom in the heart of downtown. And while the inclusion of the public restroom is part of the Depot’s lease with the city, city officials want a sign posted on the Depot Plaza side of the building notifying the public of the bathroom, as well as some extended hours of operation, particularly during the warmer months.

Although Ricci hasn’t said no to those requests outright, city officials said they were concerned that these issues remain unresolved.

“I find it all really frustrating,” Councilwoman Shawn Marshall. “Did we lose our leverage when we gave them the two 5-year lease options two years ago? Is that why we can’t seem to get anywhere with this? It’s an ongoing irritation that we can’t seem to come to some sort of agreement.”

Ricci declined to comment on the council’s discussion and the bathroom issue specifically, saying it was too soon to say anything about the matter.

The city leased the building to the Depot in 1986, soon after the closure of a similarly named newsstand and restaurant that dated back to the days when the building was a depot for Greyhound and then Golden Gate Transit buses.

Puffin Enterprises, started by Ricci's parent Bill and Mary Turnbull, signed a 10-year lease on the building in 1986 with a number of specific conditions. Puffin paid for extensive renovations on the building at the time and made other improvements like the addition of outdoor seating on the plaza. In 1997, the parties signed a new lease through 2001, with two options to extend it for five years apiece. In 2009, the city granted two more 5-year options, and Puffin is seeking to exercise the first of those now.

The lease calls for the Depot to pay a percentage of its gross sales as rent per month, or a $7,479 base monthly rent if the rent derived from the percentage of gross sales does not exceed that amount. The percentages vary, however, based on an annual threshold. For instance, Puffin’s rent is based on 3 percent of all book store and café sales up to $1.4 million in revenue annually, but that goes up to 10 percent on revenue exceeding $1.4 million annually.

To account for rising prices of the products the Depot sells, Puffin requested that the city raise the threshold to $1.971 million. In his report to the council last week, Finance Director Eric Erickson noted that the Depot’s “gross sales do not generate enough percentage-of-sales rent event at the current level to exceed the base rate,” meaning the Depot regularly pays the base rate each month.

While the council wasn't opposed to the threshold increase, City Councilman Ken Wachtel suggested that Puffin’s request triggered negotiations beyond the mere extension of the current lease, and opened the door for the city to ask that the sign notifying people of the public bathroom – a sign which was put up two years ago for a six-month trial – go up again.

Although she hasn’t commented publicly, Ricci expressed concern to city officials after the sign trial period that long lines of people waiting for the bathroom snaked through the café.

McCann told the council that the city had the right to post its own sign on a city-owned building if it chose to, but said it was premature to do so before having a discussion with Ricci.

The discussion highlighted the broader issue of the city’s lack of a downtown public bathroom that was not located within an existing business.

“We’d very much like to be part of the conversation about the need to have a public bathroom, day and night and accessible to the public,” said Paula Reynold, interim chair of the Chamber of Commerce, told the council.

The council is expected to discuss that issue at its annual retreat on Feb. 15 at 4 p.m. at .