Ground Truth

Masonite Corporation — the hardboard-and-doors company whose Western Lumber Division ran mill operations across Mendocino and Sonoma counties — built a wood-treatment plant on the Cloverdale parcel in 1962. The treatment process did what wood treatment does: it pushed industrial chemicals into the cellular structure of cut lumber so that fenceposts and railroad ties and utility poles would not rot in the ground. The chemicals it used to do this were copper, chromium, arsenic, and pentachlorophenol.

Pentachlorophenol — known in the trade as PCP or "penta" — is a chlorinated phenol that, in the manufacturing process, generates dioxins and furans as byproducts. The Cloverdale plant employed up to twenty-five men at its peak; by the time it closed only six were still working there. Treated wood left here on rail cars and on trucks down U.S. 101.

The first warning to reach the public came on November 20, 1975, at a hearing of the North Coast Water Quality Control Board. Board staff testified that drippings of copper, chromium, and a trace of arsenic could wash from treated lumber stacks during winter storms and be carried into the Russian River. The next month, the Reveille ran the story under the headline "Masonite called on potential discharge hazard." By that point Masonite's Western Lumber Division had already shut the treatment plant down — voluntarily, on October 1, 1975, in advance of the rainy season. The company spent $17,000 cleaning up accumulated residues, hauling them to a Class I landfill in Benicia. Rebuilding the plant with the stringent controls regulators would now require would have cost about half a million dollars. Per the Reveille's account, low profits made the controls uneconomical and Masonite chose not to reopen.

The wood-preserving plant never reopened. By 1976 it was permanently closed. The mill itself — the sawing and milling operation — kept running, but the labor relationship soured. On May 5, 1977, about 190 hourly workers walked off the job. They were members of Local 2882, Lumber Production and Industrial Workers, AFL-CIO. Reveille coverage from that May shows pickets at the Kelly Road gate and sheriff's deputies present under a court order limiting picket numbers. The strikers' pay was $1.25 an hour less than at Louisiana-Pacific and Georgia-Pacific, and they wanted parity. A year later, in May 1978, the strike was still going. The mill was operating with replacement labor.

Masonite would sell the operation to Louisiana-Pacific not long afterward.

It took twelve years for the next public reckoning. In January 1987, the Sonoma County Health Department, acting under the recently passed Proposition 65 (approved by voters in November 1986), released a list of locations reported as actual or threatened discharges of hazardous waste. The Louisiana-Pacific site at 26800 Asti Rd. appeared on it: chromium, arsenic, PCP, copper. Monitoring wells and soil borings were already in place.

By January 1989, six years of investigation by the San Francisco engineering firm Kennedy/Jenks/Chilton had drilled twenty monitoring wells across the site. According to Cliff C. Smoot, Masonite's Community Relations Officer, the company had spent more than one million dollars on testing alone. The findings: copper, chromium, arsenic, and pentachlorophenol present in soil and groundwater "in concentrations in excess of acceptable maximums" in isolated areas. Masonite's project manager Dr. Kent Baugh told the Reveille that the chemicals were "not moving off the site either on the surface or underground." No PCBs were found at the wood-preserving area itself, though they had been detected at the adjacent former MGM Brake site.

The remediation plan was to proceed in four phases: on-site investigation (just completed), community awareness (beginning January 1989), feasibility study of cleanup methods, and a Remedial Action Plan. To prevent the California Department of Health Services from running its own parallel community-relations effort, Masonite — through Corporate Director of Environmental and Health Affairs James Rabe — filed suit against the agency in Sonoma County Superior Court on January 13, 1989.

A data repository on the investigation findings was established at the Cloverdale Public Library, as required under the state's community-relations process. The Remedial Action Plan itself would be a long time coming.

In 1993, Louisiana-Pacific closed the Cloverdale sawmill. Three hundred jobs ended at once. The mill structures came down sometime in the early 1990s; what stood for forty years on the parcel — kilns, sorting sheds, planer mill, the wood-treatment building, the boiler house — was reduced to concrete pads, foundations, and one half-million cubic yards of accumulated wood waste.

Half a million cubic yards is a number that bears reflection. Most of it was lawful waste — bark, sawdust, off-cuts, demolition debris from the mill itself. Some of it was not. Where the wood-treatment plant had stood, the soil and the wood waste in its immediate vicinity carried the residues of three decades of penta and CCA application.

The site went quiet. In 1994 the Highway 101 bypass diverted through traffic around Cloverdale; the town that had been a stagecoach stop, then a railhead, then a lumber town, now had to decide what to be next. By the early 2000s the parcel had passed through James Neighbor to Spight Properties II, LLC, a Bay Area limited-liability company. Spight engaged Tyris Corporation of Concord — Robert Sexton, president — as managing partner. Tyris closed the purchase on December 31, 2001, after 18 months of due diligence.

Sexton spoke publicly about the project for the first time at an August 7, 2002 luau hosted by the Cloverdale Chamber of Commerce at Asti Winery. The new owners, he told the crowd of more than a hundred, would have to deal with three major environmental issues inherited from the previous operations: "residue left by Louisiana Pacific (the old mill site), ground water contamination, contaminated soil, and a huge wood waste landfill." Tyris's plan was to recycle the wood waste on-site as base material for golf cart paths and roads — folding remediation into construction.

For seventeen years the parcel was a project file. Tyris and the City of Cloverdale moved through the slow choreography of California land-use law: a Specific Plan, an annexation process to bring all 266 acres inside city limits, a Draft Environmental Impact Report (2004), a Recirculated DEIR (2008) that dropped the spa and shrank the residential count, a Final EIR certified by the city in 2009. The General Plan land-use designation was changed to Destination Commercial; the zoning became SP-1, the Alexander Valley Resort Specific Plan.

Underneath the entitlement work, the actual ground was being addressed for the first time. In 2005, removal and closure of the Louisiana-Pacific wood-waste disposal area began under the supervision of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. The Masonite groundwater investigation — by then a separate regulatory case under geotracker ID T0609793185 — kicked into a sustained monitoring program. From 2005 forward, an environmental consultant named Debbie Kitsman would submit groundwater monitoring reports to the State of California twice a year, every year, for the next twenty-one years.

In 2015, Tyris's option ran out and a new developer, San Francisco's Laulima Development, took over the entitlements. Laulima's plan was a hotel of up to 150 rooms, 40 standalone bungalows, a spa and restaurant, 130 homes, an equestrian center. The City approved it. In 2016 a First Addendum to the 2009 FEIR made the golf course optional rather than mandatory and added the Asti Road frontage parcel back into the project area. A Second Addendum followed in 2018.

In 2017, Laulima's project fell through. The site went back on the market.

In October 2024, the Press Democrat reported that Esmeralda Land Company, a startup founded by Stanford-educated software entrepreneur Devon Zuegel, was conducting due diligence on the parcel. Zuegel had spent the previous June running Edge Esmeralda, a thirty-day "pop-up village" out of Hotel Trio in Healdsburg — a kind of summer camp for technologists, urbanists, and the venture-capital-adjacent. Cloverdale, Zuegel told the council, would be a permanent expression of that ethos: a "Chautauqua of the West," modeled on the 750-acre Chautauqua Institution on a lake in upstate New York.

The proposal as it currently stands calls for 605 homes in a mix of apartments, townhomes and single-family houses; two hotels; two restaurants; retail, office and light-industrial space; a racquet club; two indoor pavilions; an outdoor amphitheater; and a K–6 school. More than 1.8 million square feet of landscaped area. Home prices ranging $600,000 to $4 million. Targeted completion, 2035.

The project will not commission a new Environmental Impact Report. It is relying on the 2009 FEIR for the Alexander Valley Resort, the 2016 First Addendum, and the 2018 Second Addendum. On April 8, 2026, more than a dozen Cloverdale residents stood at city council to demand a fresh EIR. Former councilmember Mary Ann Brigham asked the council not to leave a generation of children "growing spare eyeballs and suing the city" because the environmental review was a quarter-century old. Resident Regina Biery raised water rationing. Resident Jennifer Sullivan made the procedural point that addenda do not require a public-comment period the way a fresh EIR does.

Zuegel says the project will include "affordable-by-design" one-bedroom cottages and four-bedroom multigenerational houses with attached ADUs, plus a parcel reserved for "deeply affordable" family housing. No dedicated, on-site affordable units are required of her under the current plan. The financial backing of the project is, by the developer's own description, partly drawn from the same Silicon Valley investor networks that have funded the controversial California Forever proposal in Solano County. Zuegel rejects the comparison.

Construction, if approved, would disturb soil across acreage that includes the former wood-waste disposal area, the former wood-treatment area, and the bedrock aquifer that as recently as 2023 carried pentachlorophenol at 67 times the drinking-water standard.

The simplest version of the case for community attention is this: the regulatory case is closed, but the regulatory case was never the whole story. Closure means the contamination is contained as engineered. It does not mean the soil is clean, the bedrock aquifer is safe to drink, or that disturbing the cap won't redistribute toxic byproducts of a manufacturing process the EPA spent forty years tightening rules around.

The parcel sits between U.S. 101 and the Russian River. The Russian River is the drinking water source for hundreds of thousands of people downstream, including Healdsburg, Windsor, Santa Rosa, and ultimately Marin County via the Sonoma Water aqueduct. Sonoma County's Wikipedia page says it plainly: "In 1993, 300 jobs were eliminated alone when Louisiana-Pacific closed its lumber mill." What the page does not say is that those workers and their families lived in Cloverdale, drew water from Cloverdale wells, and in some cases — it cannot be known how many — drew water from wells that, when finally tested by Masonite's contractors a decade later, contained penta at 57 times the safe level.

The asymmetry of the present moment is what most calls for attention. The chemicals were manufactured into the parcel by corporate owners that no longer exist in the same form: Masonite Corporation was acquired by International Paper in 1988 and has since been split, sold, and rebranded; Louisiana-Pacific moved its operations to other counties and other countries. The intermediate owner, Tyris/Spight, ran a real-estate play across two decades. The current proposed developer is a Florida-based startup whose principal lives in Miami Beach and whose investors are not fully disclosed.

The people who carry the legacy are the ones who will not move: Cloverdale residents, the Cloverdale Rancheria, downstream Russian River users, the future buyers of the homes that will sit on top of the cap. Future buyers are owed disclosure. Downstream users are owed monitoring. The Rancheria is owed consultation as a sovereign tribal government with cultural ties to this land that predate every industrial use of it. The workers' families — many still in town — are owed honest acknowledgment of what the work did to the place they live in.

None of this requires opposing redevelopment. It requires that the community insist on the terms of the redevelopment.