Editorial

As president of Sonoma County Winegrowers and on behalf of Sonoma County winegrape growers and their families, I wanted to take the opportunity to share how the local farming community is working together to preserve our agriculture character, including correcting the misinformation that has appeared in some local newspapers recently.

A “housing crisis” has been declared for all of Sonoma County by elected officials, affordable housing advocates and by the home building and construction industry. Rents and raw building costs have never been higher. Vacancy rates for rentals are almost zero and new housing construction is years behind the actual demand, these leaders tell us.

Editor’s note – As we celebrate our 150th year of publishing, the Healdsburg Tribune seeks to balance a reverence for the past, a keen eye on the present and a healthy curiosity about the future. Occasionally, a forward-thinking reader sends us what we like to call “A letter from the future,” examining present-day Healdsburg from an imagined perspective of the future. Jay Beckwith submitted this thoughtful and interesting essay.

Many of us who live here in Sonoma County have been wrestling with our identity the past few years. We stopped calling this place the Redwood Empire several years ago, but not all of us want to be known as wine country. By land mass, we’re still rural and agricultural. But, by many other measures we prefer to be urban and urbane, more hip and less hick. We get wowed with mentions of “Sonoma style” and “wine country lifestyle” from places like New York, Los Angeles or Paris.

Hold on to your butts — your cigarette butts, that is. Let’s face it: many smokers litter when discarding their cigarette butts. They are dropped on sidewalks, tossed out the car window, and left on beaches. A cigarette butt is so small, it is easy to feel like we’re really not littering at all. What’s a cigarette butt compared to tossing a bag of fast food wrappers into the street or pouring a can of used oil in the gutter?

When it comes to Obamacare, what matters most is what we, as individual patients and consumers do next and not what the U.S. Supreme Court just did.

I request that the city council reconsider their action to prohibit short-term vacation rentals. I understand that there are valid concerns about loss of low cost housing and the impact vacation rentals could have on our residential neighborhoods.

Red will be the dominant color for this weekend’s many red, white and blue Fourth of July celebrations, holiday picnics and weekend outdoor adventures. That is because we are now under a summer-long Red Flag fire safety alert issued by CalFire and others. Hot weather, busy humans and dumb moments are dangerous ingredients for tragedy and loss.

We have been living in a global village and sharing the same orbiting planet much longer than social scientists have been reminding us, or the first photos from outer space of our fragile blue-green marble confirmed.

The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors took the easy way out last week, cynically agreeing unanimously to require everyone connected to the county – except themselves – to comply with a living wage increase. Requiring county contractors and grant recipients to raise wages to $15 an hour was a fine thing to do, but exempting the county itself was disappointing, and turned the whole affair into an exercise in self-aggrandizement.