Belvedere, a city of 2,126 people on two islands in San Francisco Bay, voted 3-2 on September 14 to give first-reading approval to Marin County’s first ordinance on commercial drone delivery. No delivery drone has carried a package to a Belvedere doorstep yet. The city is writing the rules for the day one does.
The two no votes, from Councilmembers Pat Carapiet and Jane Cooper, were not against regulating drones. They wanted a shorter delivery window than the one the ordinance borrows from the city’s noise code. A second reading is expected in October; the council’s next regular meeting is October 12.
Belvedere Regulates the Ground Because It Cannot Touch the Sky
The ordinance leaves flight paths, altitude and overflight to the Federal Aviation Administration, which preempts local rules in the air. It regulates what happens on the ground instead: where drones may land, stage, load and drop packages, and where a company can put a delivery facility inside city limits.
A commercial drone facility, defined as a site set up to send or receive 20 or more drone deliveries a month, is allowed only in the city’s mixed-use zones and only with a conditional use permit from the Planning Commission. Medical deliveries do not count toward the 20. Deliveries to a home require the resident’s prior consent. Delivery activity is barred from public access areas unless the city authorizes it, and nothing may block emergency access routes. The ordinance adds nuisance rules covering privacy, noise, lights and trash, according to the Marin Independent Journal, which covered the hearing.
Delivery hours track Section 8.10.050 of the Belvedere Municipal Code, which sets quiet time at 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Drones can deliver the rest of the day.
City Manager Robert Zadnik told the council the geography is the argument. “Belvedere is compact with narrow streets, steep hills and constrained emergency access routes,” he said. Staff put the same case in writing in July: routine drone delivery would bring package retrieval, support vehicles, repeated noise, trespass and litter to streets with few emergency alternatives.
That July 13 meeting is why this took two tries. Staff asked the council to waive the first reading and adopt the ordinance in one sitting. Cooper called the language vague enough for delivery companies to exploit, Carapiet asked how it would be enforced, and the city attorney answered that the vagueness was deliberate, to keep the law flexible while the technology settled. The council sent it back to be simplified, The Ark reported. Mayor Sally Wilkinson, who helped staff draft it, made the case for moving anyway: “We want something on the books before this comes to life.”
The Only Fight on September 14 Was Over the Hours
Cooper proposed 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Carapiet backed shorter hours to head off complaints. Wilkinson answered that Amazon and FedEx trucks already run Belvedere’s streets with their lights on until 11 p.m. or midnight, and drones could replace some of that traffic rather than add to it.
Councilmember Peter Mark went further. Cutting drone hours tighter than the noise ordinance would send the community a message about drones, he said, and he called that message fear mongering. The majority held the hours, and the council directed staff to make minor wording changes before the second reading.
Wing Has Named the Bay Area Twice and No City Once
Wing announced on March 23 that delivery would reach the Bay Area “in the coming months,” with no date and no cities. On June 8 it named the region again, as one of seven Walmart markets to come online by 2027. Wing’s newsroom listed no Bay Area launch as of September 21.
The March announcement is what put drones on Belvedere’s agenda, the Press Democrat reported in July, and DroneXL flagged at the time that the Bay Area’s stacked Class B and Class C airspace makes it a harder operating environment than anywhere Wing flies in the US. The June expansion folded the region into a 270-store Walmart network with a 2027 horizon, per Wing.
The Bay Area’s loudest drone-delivery fight so far was over a test site, not a doorstep. DoorDash leased a warehouse at 1960 Folsom Street in San Francisco’s Mission District for drone research, the Teamsters pushed back, and on December 16, 2025 the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to require Planning Commission approval for outdoor laboratory uses in the Mission-area industrial zones for 18 months, Mission Local reported. That was a zoning and jobs fight. Belvedere’s ordinance is aimed at the delivery itself.
DroneXL’s Take
Belvedere did the thing Papillion, Nebraska, never got to do. When a reporter counted about 50 Prime Air drone movements in one hour over that suburb this month, the city council had never voted on any of it. Richardson, Texas, declined to pursue a rezoning of Amazon’s site on legal advice and pointed residents to the FAA. Belvedere read the same preemption map and found the part it owns: the driveway, the sidewalk, the launch pad and the clock. A town of 2,126 with zero drones has more say over drone delivery than a suburb with 50 flights an hour, because it wrote the rules before the first one landed.
Carapiet is right that the complaints will come. Amazon left College Station after two years of noise complaints, announcing the move in 2024. Belvedere’s answer is the consent requirement and the nuisance rules, not a curfew stricter than the one its own residents live under, and that is the right answer. Cooper’s 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. window would have banned the dinner orders DoorDash and Wing actually deliver while the FedEx van kept idling at 10 p.m. A rule that gives a drone a shorter day than a diesel truck is the local overreach that invites the preemption fights cities lose. Belvedere stopped one vote short of it. The October 12 meeting decides whether the second reading holds that line.
Sources: Marin Independent Journal, The Ark, City of Belvedere September 14 agenda, Belvedere Municipal Code, Wing
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
