Editorial

I love Daisy Damskey. And I love her grandmother’s wisdom that everyone is entitled to his/her own opinion, but no one owns the facts. Well, here are the facts:

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.

I lived in Santa Rosa for 51 years. Since 1986 my wife and I have lived in Healdsburg. I feel  the long experience in these two “cities” gives me some perspective to make judgments about our current squabble about what is best for Healdsburg.

There are stark, disturbing clouds darkening parts of every community and neighborhood in Sonoma County. Please be alerted that these clouds are increasing and will not go away without our intervention.

The term “rain garden” is being used more and more by landscape architects and gardeners alike. It is a fanciful term that conjures images of a garden that magically creates rain. What a rain garden is, however, is one of many landscape features that fits into the category of “low impact development for storm water” or LID. Like many other LID features, rain gardens gather, hold, filter, and slow storm water runoff.

Once upon a time in America corporations did not enjoy the

Employee Recognition

— Rollie Atkinson

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.

I was heading home from a Giants game t’other day (that’s how Shakespeare would write ‘the other day’), sitting on the back of the ferry boat (or the stern of the ship as Shakespeare the sailor would have written). It was a lovely day. The sun was shining, the mist was refreshing, the Giants against all odds had won and the beer had given me a pleasant life-is-good-and-I-love-all-human-beings vibe.