UKIAH, CA. 9/1/2026— The city of Ukiah is dropping the annexation proposal it spent two years building, saying the plan never won the public support it needed to go forward.
The City Council’s Annexation Ad Hoc Committee is suspending work on the initiative and “will not advance further efforts to revise the draft proposal,” the city said Monday in a press release posted to its website.
“The feedback received made clear that the current proposal does not have the foundation of public support and shared understanding needed to proceed constructively,” the release said.
The decision closes out a project that would have pulled unincorporated land in the Ukiah Valley inside city limits, shifting who provides police, code enforcement and infrastructure maintenance there, and who collects the taxes that pay for them. Any annexation would also have required approval from the Mendocino Local Agency Formation Commission, the county body that rules on changes to municipal boundaries.
Over two years, the city produced technical, environmental and fiscal analyses and collected comment through workshops, public hearings, written comments and individual conversations. That input, the release said, raised questions about the proposed boundaries, costs, service capacity, land use, representation and the public process itself.
The proposal had been narrowed before. The city reduced the geographic scope of what it then called the Ukiah Valley Reorganization in July 2025. It released a new proposal last April, called “Sapling,” and revised it again on Aug. 3 into a version called Sapling 2.0. That version added the Brush Street Triangle at the request of property owners there and removed about 15 acres protected under the Williamson Act, the state program that taxes farmland at a lower rate in exchange for keeping it in agriculture.
The city held a California Environmental Quality Act scoping session on the project in June, an early step toward a supplemental environmental impact report. It held community workshops in April, May and June of this year, and a public forum and a town hall in June 2025.
“People can disagree about the best long-term structure for serving the Ukiah Valley,” City Manager Sage Sangiacomo said in the release. “Continuing to advance the current proposal would not build the trust and shared understanding needed for a decision of this significance. At the same time, the regional service and infrastructure pressures that prompted this discussion have not gone away.”
Aging infrastructure, rising demand for services, a limited housing supply, the push for jobs and economic growth, and responsibilities split among multiple jurisdictions all continue to create regional problems, the release said. The city “remains committed to working constructively with its regional partners and the broader community.”
Annexation has been on the council’s agenda in some form since at least August 2020, when the council directed staff to study bringing in the Brush Street Triangle, the Masonite property and the city’s water treatment plant. In the years since, the city adopted a 2040 General Plan, reached a master tax sharing agreement with Mendocino County, updated its sphere of influence and consolidated fire and water services with regional partners.
The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors will discuss this Tuesday in their regular meeting.