Formation

In February 1949, more than fifty residents and taxpayers of the then-unincorporated community of Sleepy Hollow petitioned the Marin County Board of Supervisors to form a fire protection district under state law. On February 28, 1949, the Board unanimously adopted Resolution No. 1566, creating the Sleepy Hollow Fire Protection District and appointing its first three Commissioners — Julius H. Selinger, Patrick A. Quigley, and John W. Gottschalk — to serve until the community's first election later that spring.

From its earliest years, the District has never operated its own fire department. Its founding structure set the pattern that continues today: SHFPD exists to secure, fund, and oversee fire protection services provided by others, rather than deliver those services directly. In its first years, that meant relying on the Marin County Fire Department, dispatched from Woodacre and reaching Sleepy Hollow via the decommissioned Bothin Tunnel beneath White's Hill.

By the early 1950s, the limits of that arrangement were already visible: when MCFD's local warden took leave in 1951, the County withdrew Sleepy Hollow's pre-positioned fire truck entirely — a gap that pushed District leaders, including founding Commissioner Selinger, to argue publicly for formal regional cooperation rather than leaving response decisions to individual fire chiefs' discretion.