Editorial

The City Council’s informal decision on Dec. 16 to adopt a five-district, selected mayor format for city government in the redistricting process drew immediate reactions from several community members, who felt the decision was made unnecessarily quickly and short-circuited public discussion of the options. Here are a few of their comments:

Healdsburg’s Russian River Railroad Bridge is the sole remaining example of a steel Subdivided Warren Truss bridge on the former line of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. Built in 1901, the bridge has three spans supported by four concrete piers, a steel deck and superstructure on both sides of a single track. What does SMART plan to do with it?

The City Council must address this issue with a “formula retail ordinance” that expands the boundaries of the retail area and codifies “formula business.” The 2030 General Plan protects businesses directly facing the Plaza, but not those around the Plaza, which explains why Faherty can slip into Ooh la Luxe’s space.

"I am an affordable housing advocate, but Measure O and its aftermath are riddled with issues. I see it as a huge, uncertain affordability experiment, not a plan..." So writes a long-time Healdsburg resident about the city's plan to create an exclusion zone from the Growth Management Ordinance...

"Now that Measure O will be on the November ballot, the only fix is for the city to abandon or substantially reduce this density boost—or for the voters to reject Measure O and send the City Council back to the drawing board," writes one Tribune reader in our Letters to the Editor this week. Other readers weigh in as well...

Ariel Kelley attended the DNC last week, and found the current political excitement possible not only because of the Harris-Walz campaign and the Democratic Convention—"to me it’s actually about something so much bigger than a few days in Chicago," she wrote....