Commentary: Don’t be fooled by SMART’s claims
In 2008, the folks behind SMART told us that if voters approved the quarter-percent 20 year sales tax they would build 71 miles of train and a 71-mile bike path and that annual operating costs would be $16.5 million per year. They also claimed SMART would alleviate traffic on 101 and help fight climate change. The problem is none of these promises ever materialized and now SMART is asking voters to approve an additional $2.4 billion on a 30-year tax extension nine years before the current tax expires.Â
Many more chapters to come
It’s only just beginning. Hundreds and hundreds of first-person accounts of both tragedy and loss and heroics and generosity will soon grow into thousands of interwoven threads that will become the history of the firestorm of October 2017. With time, the beginning hours of the wind-whipped firebombs and mass evacuations that started with a spark on Oct. 7 and 8 will be joined in historic texts by countless tales of rescue, relief and recovery.
Arts & Entertainment
Return to the Russian River
When Jake Messing stood in front of the mural he had just completed for Russian Riverkeeper on the north side of the nonprofit’s headquarters at 139 Healdsburg Ave., he had finished more than another mural. He had made a return to the source from the sea himself, like the salmon he portrayed.
