Personal journey fuels Marlene Soiland’s quest as Sonoma County business leader

Marlene Soiland was seven days into a 30-day whitewater rafting trip and self-described “vision quest” in the Grand Canyon last winter when she left a group that included her husband for an afternoon walk alone.

Coming upon a natural amphitheater in the canyon wall, she felt compelled to start climbing. Despite her fear of heights, she scrambled over the loose shale until she came to a large rock with a perfectly drawn spiral on it. Nestled in the rocks above the image was the skeleton of a dragon-like lizard.

“Something spiritual and larger than me is at work here!” Soiland wrote in a journal entry dated Nov. 19.

She returned to Santa Rosa convinced that she’d been sent a message about how people should treat the environment.

“It’s one of the natural wonders of the world,” Soiland said of the majestic canyon during a recent interview at her Santa Rosa office. “But the Native Americans understand they don’t own it. Their job is to be good stewards of it, and to make sure it survives for the next generation.”

That sentiment, with its spiritual and eco-conscious overtones, is not the sort of thing most people would expect from a woman who holds a key executive position in a family business that has reaped huge rewards, financial and otherwise, over the past five decades from extracting natural resources from the ground.

The Soiland empire of companies - the first of which was founded by Marlene’s father, Marv Soiland, in 1962 - includes four rock quarries and a Santa Rosa asphalt plant.

Nor do daily yoga, meditation, use of healing crystals and other attributes of what Soiland describes as her “soul work” fit the traditional profile of a person who is one of Sonoma County’s most powerful business executives.

But Soiland, who serves on the boards of several influential corporate and nonprofit institutions, is not your typical business leader. Her many eclectic pursuits infuse her public persona. They also drive her latest public quest, to chip away at the divisions that have long existed between the county’s entrenched development and environmental interests.

That mission, which Soiland, 59, has taken up in her yearlong post at the helm of the region’s largest business coalition, the Sonoma County Alliance, has to contend with her family’s history in the growth of Sonoma County, including rock quarries that have supplied material for many of its roads and developments. The Soiland businesses have made the family a fortune while also turning them into a high-profile target for environmentalists and others who associate the family name with unchecked exploitation of the North Bay’s natural resources.

Soiland, who grew up in Marin and Sonoma counties, fends off the criticism by arguing that people use rock in a variety of ways in their daily lives - from building houses to pothole repair - and that trucking it in from outside the region would result in worse damage to the environment, including greater greenhouse gas emissions.

“If you import it from outside the area, you put the problem in somebody else’s backyard and put the greenhouse gases in ours,” she said. “So we’ve got to provide services for ourselves locally.”

Family business

At the heart of Soiland’s public mission is an intensely personal calling to better understand herself and her relationship with her father, the patriarch of the family of seven siblings and a man who looms large in Sonoma County’s business development community.

Marlene, his oldest daughter, recounted a moment when she was 7 and at home in Santa Rosa with her mother and two brothers, “praying” that her father had passed his test to become a licensed California contractor. When Marv Soiland arrived home to announce that he had, Marlene felt a joy she didn’t quite understand.

“I had no idea in 1962 what a difference that would make for me in my life,” she said.

A rare female executive in the construction industry, Marlene Soiland is the only woman on Exchange Bank’s board of directors and only the fourth woman in four decades to serve as president of the Sonoma County Alliance. She also serves on the board of the Community Foundation of Sonoma County.

Having risen through the ranks of the family business, Soiland, a mother of two sons and now a grandmother, helps run three of the family’s locations, including Stony Point Rock Quarry in Cotati, Soils Plus in Sonoma and Grab N’ Grow in Santa Rosa.

Her brother Mark oversees the day-to-day operations of the rock and soil companies for Soiland Company Inc. Marlene Soiland is the secretary/treasurer for the corporation. She also is president, CEO and owner of Soiland Management Co., with the responsibility for more than ?$10 million in commercial and residential properties for related entities, as well as overseeing all financial and employee resource matters. The companies she oversees employ about 40 people.

Her brother Dean owns BoDean Co. Inc., which includes a Santa Rosa asphalt plant, the Blue Rock Quarry in Forestville and the Mark West Quarry northeast of Santa Rosa.

Two other brothers are in the local construction and material supply industry.

Marlene’s sister Monica is married to Roger Nelson, who owns Midstate Construction in Petaluma. Another sister who resides in Florida is the only member of the family not connected to the construction or building trades.

Praise for bridging divides

Being part of a family business that involves the extraction of natural resources wouldn’t appear to be the kind of activity that would endear Marlene Soiland to environmentalists. But she’s earned wide praise for seeking to bridge historic divides.

“I love working with Marlene Soiland because she is a visionary, emotionally intelligent, thorough, goal-oriented and experienced,” said Ann Hancock, executive director and co-founder of the Center for Climate Action in Sonoma County.

But some who applaud Soiland for her business acumen also privately question or dismiss her views on personal growth. For her inaugural address to Alliance members at the Santa Rosa Golf and County Club in January, she recounted her monthlong trip down the Grand Canyon in November, devoted partly to “asking the land” for messages she could share with the business group.

She lauded indigenous people for being good stewards of the earth and concluded the speech by asking her fellow executives to “plant a seed” they could nurture through the year. Her recommendations included that they get a massage, revise their eating habits or meditate.

“We don’t hear that so often,” said Brian Ling, the Alliance’s executive director.

Inside her spacious second-?floor office at the corporate headquarters for the family business, at the Northwest Regional Industrial Park in Santa Rosa, Soiland did not project the image of a stereotypical executive.

Family portraits dominated the room, along with child’s toys tucked in a corner for use by Soiland’s year-old grandson, Royce. She wore a T-shirt and sweater, pants and leather Dansko clogs. Around her neck was a blue larimar stone given to Soiland by her husband, Mark Stanley, who works as a real estate appraiser. Soiland said the stone is supposed to help a person “speak your truth.”

She begins every day by meditating from 4 to 5 a.m. Then it’s off to the gym, where she participates in yoga, spin class, Pilates and other forms of exercise. She’s also training to become a practitioner of reiki, a Japanese Buddhist tradition that applies “life force energy” through the palms of the practitioner.

Her more far-flung adventures include going to Peru to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony, in which she consumed a hallucinogenic tea as part of a spiritual experience.

Based upon her recent trip to the Grand Canyon, Soiland said she hopes to emphasize the themes of “stewardship, intention and leadership” this year during her tenure as president of the Alliance.

“What is our intention?” she said at her office. “As businesspeople, are we just after corporate profits? Or do we want to provide good jobs for people and good homes for people and good lives for people?”

Opportunities and hard work

A cynic might say it’s easier for Soiland to advocate such views given the opportunities she’s been given and her family’s affluence. She can afford to go on long trips of self-discovery, launching out from her 5,500-square-foot house situated on 26 acres off River Road bordering Mark West Creek northwest of Santa Rosa. The home has expansive views of Sonoma County and beyond.

“I had opportunities that a lot of people don’t get, but I’ve also worked really hard, so there’s no part of me that feels like I should be ashamed for what I have,” she said.

Asked what she wants to see changed within the Alliance or with relationships between the region’s business and environmental interests, she offered no specific ideas, but instead spoke in generalities about wanting people to have the “consciousness and awareness to make sure that we’re doing what’s right for the community.”

Soiland said she and her brother Mark have been a driving force in seeking to reduce the environmental footprint of the family businesses they control. The initiatives include installing solar panels at the Cotati quarry, upgrading operating equipment to meet California’s new standards for air emissions and installing a recycling system for water in quarry operations.

Marlene said the pair also purchased Grab N’ Grow in 2009 to further their goal of increasing the sustainable product mix of the Soiland Company to 80 percent of total product sold. She declined to say how much rock the company extracts from the Stony Point Quarry annually, calling such figures proprietary information.

County supervisors in 2012 granted the company a 20-year use permit that allows the ?73-acre operation to expand by 14 acres and dig down an additional 40 feet, to 80 feet above sea level, and to mine up to 480,000 tons. The permit was granted over concerns by some neighbors about noise and effects of quarry operations on groundwater levels.

Soiland said the company has sought to address such concerns. She said the company is doing more than most other quarry operators are “as far as being environmentally conscious and aware and careful.”

But Soiland’s message about stewardship grates on her critics, who say it comes off as hypocritical given the corporate and personal profits the family has made in the mining and development business.

“They can go afford to go on a vision quest and come back expounding how we should take care of our environment,” said Allen Thomas, a board member of the Santa Rosa West End Neighborhood and Historic Association. “But I would invite Marlene and any member of the family to do a vision quest in our neighborhood when the asphalt plant is producing and it’s smelly and it’s noisy, and you are constantly woken up in the middle of the night and you can’t get a decent night’s sleep before getting up and going to your job to pay for your rent or your mortgage.”

Thomas is the leader of another neighborhood group that sued Santa Rosa after the city approved the installation of three 82-foot storage silos at the BoDean asphalt plant on Maxwell Drive. The group contends the silos are an illegal expansion of the industrial use of the property.

Marlene Soiland said she has no involvement in the BoDean operation run by her brother Dean, noting it is a separate company with its own management team.“I know very little about it,” she said.

But she offered a mixed review of the plant, saying she is “more than sympathetic - I’m empathetic” to neighbors’ concerns, while at the same time suggesting they have no basis to complain.

“Really, it’s an industrial operation that’s been there forever. It’s kind of like us living next to the airport and complaining about the planes flying over,” she said.

Dennis Rosatti, executive director of Sonoma County Conservation Action, said he was impressed that Marlene Soiland wanted to participate in a meeting held at his office in May to discuss the county’s disputed move to close the largest local compost operation. Rosatti said it was the first time in memory that a member of the business Alliance had joined in for such a discussion.

The compost operation is set to shut down by October because of a lawsuit that raised environmental concerns. Rosatti said it remains to be seen whether Soiland becomes a vital player in such debates.

“Although education and informed statements are important, it’s our actions that ultimately judge our character and are what we’re held accountable to,” Rosatti said. “We need more business people that understand and take action to promote environmental policy - because the environment is good for business, especially in a place like Sonoma County with a rich agricultural and diverse ecological backdrop.”

On a more intimate level, Marlene Soiland’s life and career reflect her staking out a separate identity from a father who has left a deep imprint on the region’s business community.

Through his trucking, pipeline and other related businesses, Marv Soiland has helped shape the North Bay’s modern infrastructure over the past half-century. He is perhaps best known for spearheading the development of 2,710 acres above Faught Road into Shiloh Estates, the exclusive Mayacama Golf Club and Shiloh Ranch Regional Park. For his life’s work, he was inducted into Sonoma County’s Business Hall of Fame, alongside other local luminaries such as Hugh Codding and Henry Trione.

“My father has been dominant in Sonoma County. I can’t go a day without someone asking me how he is or telling me a story (about him),” Marlene Soiland said.

On the one hand, she credits her father for giving her what turned out to be an opportunity of a lifetime by inviting her to go to work with him, just before she graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a degree in home economics.

Rose through ranks

She began as a bookkeeper learning how to program a computer, manage a retirement plan and handle labor negotiations. From there, she rose steadily through the ranks to become office manager, chief financial officer and then president of the management company in 1989.

Soiland said she never felt tension from other employees because of her relationship with her father, whom she referred to as “Marv” in the office, even when she was a teenager. But she said she never felt her father fully appreciated what she brought to the company.

“The fact that I actually have been by his side, and been the one that’s the go-to person for years, is kind of amazing to me,” she said. “I think it’s because he could see me as a support person rather than really being powerful in my own right.”

She said her pursuit of personal growth has been, to some degree, an effort to not “get lost in that shadow” and “to get to a place where I was comfortable with who I am. I didn’t need to be validated by someone else.”

Over coffee at a Larkfield Starbucks, Marv Soiland, 87, expressed pride in all of his children. But he singled out Marlene for being “a very rare talent.”

“I don’t know anyone like her,” he said.

Asked whether he has done enough to make her aware of how he feels, Marv replied: “I hope so.”

If anything, differences between the pair may reflect generational attitudes about a woman’s place in the workforce.

A U.S. Navy veteran, who served during the Korean War, Marv Soiland came of age in a time when women were not, by and large, welcomed into the club of private-sector power brokers. Now, his business legacy to a large degree rests with Marlene Soiland and her siblings.

Marv Soiland did not seem concerned about things going south.

“They’re talented and they are dedicated, and they know what they are doing,” he said.

The family patriarch and the daughter by his side in business, however, have starkly different approaches to their work.

Marv Soiland tells stories about breaking into the construction industry with only $3,000 to his name and the rough-and-tumble corporate dealings in which disputes were just part of the job.

His daughter tends to be less overtly confrontational.

“Women are nurturers and gatherers; they’re the community people. And men are the hunters and aggressors,” Marlene Soiland said. “So in every meeting, I go with my heart leading the way.”

She credits her father for incorporating environmentally friendly practices into many of his development projects, such as working with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife to create or protect vernal pools in Shiloh Estates and dedicating land for the regional park.

But Marlene Soiland voiced her desire to go much further with those endeavors, actively courting people her father probably still views with suspicion.

“Times are changing. We need to talk to one another,” she said. “We need to look at innovative and alternative ways of making things happen, as opposed to the way that it’s always been done.”

The recent Measure A tax proposal that county officials pushed to fund county road repairs is one example. Soiland and the Alliance backed the measure, as did several environmental organizations.

“We’re just in a different world in which funding isn’t going to come from the traditional sources,” she said. “We’re cutting back on fuel taxes because we’re driving more economically.”

The measure was defeated last month by a wide margin, however, and Marv Soiland, as a member of the Sonoma County Taxpayers Association, was one of those who opposed the initiative. He said he didn’t trust county officials would have used the money on roads.

Still, Eric Koenigshofer, a former county supervisor, made the case that it’s easier for developers and environmentalists now to find common cause because there are fewer major development projects for them to squabble over.

“The kinds of issues we’re facing now are the fine details about the day-to-day workings of a successful community,” said Koenigshofer, who represents The Ratto Group, the county’s dominant garbage hauler and recycling company, as a member of the Alliance’s board.

He also made the case that Marlene Soiland is uniquely situated to break down divisions between various interest groups.

“She brings not just a conventional view of business, but an approach to life that I would say has a softer touch and a more expansive view about how to bring people together,” he said.

Gary Hartwick, president and CEO of Exchange Bank, said Soiland brings a “calmness” and practicality into the board room. She is first woman to serve on the bank’s board since the 1950s and only the second female board member since the bank’s founding in 1890.

“Those are all traits that have probably come out of those adventures she’s on to find her inner self,” Hartwick said. “I think as a result of that, she seems to care about the other person who is in the room with her.”

Soiland said the pro-environment message she espouses is having an impact. She said the business Alliance, which was founded in 1975 mainly to advocate for the creation of Warm Springs Dam and Lake Sonoma, now has a roster that includes representatives from numerous environmental and nonprofit groups. Soiland has been a member of the group for years and as chair of the environmental committee helped craft the Alliance’s new mission statement: “Business Advocates for a Healthy Economy, Community, and Environment.”

“The Sonoma County Alliance is more representative of the make-up of our community,” she said. “It’s not Republicans versus Democrats, or environmentalists versus developers. It’s the people who care about the community.”

The outlook reflects the same hopes she holds for her personal and public life - that she can, to a degree, be all things, her answer to the age-old question posed to working women.

“I get to be a mother and I get to be a career woman. I get to be an environmentalist and I get to be a businesswoman. I get to live a balanced life. I get to be healthy. I don’t have to make a choice.”

You can reach Staff Writer Derek Moore at 521-5336 or derek.moore@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @deadlinederek.

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Editor’s Note: This story has been altered to better describe the lawsuit a citizens’ group filed against the city of Santa Rosa regarding the installation of silos at the BoDean asphalt plant.