A Black entrepreneur who relocated floating homes to the Marin waterfront has filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging that Marin County discriminated against him because of his race.
The plaintiff, Dietrick Burks, purchased three floating homes from Docktown Marina in Redwood City in 2019 with plans to improve them and sell them in Sausalito.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asserts that Burks was met with “racially-motivated resistance” once marina residents realized that the person seeking to relocate the floating homes was Black.
According to the suit, the Marin County Community Development Department “acquiesced to the community’s racially-motivated resistance and invented numerous, burdensome regulatory requirements on plaintiff’s projects.”
The suit claims that the bureaucratic hurdles the county created stalled Burks’ projects, forcing him to shoulder “significant interest payments and operational costs due to the unwarranted delays.”
“By enforcing invented regulations against plaintiff solely because of his race, plaintiff’s constitutional right to equal protection under the law was violated,” the suit says.
Marin County Counsel Brian Washington said, “The county of Marin has been served with the lawsuit, and we are carefully reviewing it. We will respond through the legal processes at the appropriate time. I can say now, without hesitation, that the county’s building policies are applied uniformly and are not motivated by race.”
Neither Burks nor his attorney, Adante Pointer, responded to requests for comment.
According to the lawsuit, Burks successfully relocated one of the floating homes from Docktown, a community of houseboats that settled on state property in the Redwood Channel east of Highway 101, to a marina in Sausalito. He then renovated the houseboat and sold it at a fair-market value.
The suit states that at that time, Gary Star, who is White, “acted as the face of the project due to his familiarity with the Sausalito floating home community.”
The suit states that Burks met with resistance, however, when he began the permitting process to move the remaining floating homes and the local community discovered that he was the owner of the houseboats. The suit says about 90 residents signed a petition to the Board of Supervisors to prevent the relocation “in fear that an African-American would join the community.”
The suit does not quote from the petition, which makes no mention of Burks’ race.
The petition stated that Burks intended to make way for the next floating home by removing and destroying a houseboat at #4 Issaquah Dock that was created using a 1911 historic tugboat and was “long an important part of the identity of Issaquah Dock.” The petition stated that the replacement would be a “far larger floating home that is out of character with our dock.”
According to the suit, after county supervisors received the petition, they amended a section of the Marin County code to target Burks’ projects and prevent him from moving the homes to Sausalito.
The new regulations required anyone seeking to relocate a floating home to a Sausalito marina to have the houseboat’s dimensions verified by a licensed marine surveyor or civil engineer prior to its being moved. The new rules mandated that story poles representing the width, depth and height of the proposed floating home be placed within the perspective berth prior to relocation; and they required the director of public works to inspect and approve the floating home being relocated before it was moved.
The new regulations also mandated documentation of the history and origin of the floating home being relocated, the mooring location of the houseboat during the previous 12 months and descriptions of all modifications completed on the floating home.
The suit alleges that Burks applied for certificates of occupancy for his remaining floating homes, the only county requirement at the time, before supervisors approved the new rules.
“Indeed, the amendments defendant used to justify blocking and delaying the plaintiff’s permits were not law and were unenforceable,” the suit says.
The suit asserts that during the time Burks was attempting to secure permission to relocate his floating homes to Sausalito that several other houseboat owners, none of whom were Black, were permitted to move their floating homes there.
The suit also claims that a comment that Supervisor Stephanie Moulton-Peters made at a Feb. 26, 2024, Board of Supervisors meeting was discriminatory.
Moulton-Peters prefaced her comment by noting that Ian Moody, a Sausalito resident who built and repaired many of the county’s houseboats, died in 2021.
“When we had one local boat builder, we didn’t need this kind of standardization because the process worked in an organic fashion,” Moulton-Peters said. “But now that we have people bringing boats in from other communities, it’s important to have the standards clarified and made very transparent.”
Burks is seeking an unspecified sum as compensation for increased costs due to having to comply with the new regulations, pain and suffering, violation of his constitutional rights and attorneys’ fees. He also seeks punitive damages.