Editorial

While America is heading toward its first “billionaires-only” election for a new president next November, is there anything us local peons can do to save next year’s important elections for new county government leaders?

—Rollie Atkinson

“How will we feed ourselves?” asked Joseph McIntyre last month to a packed house at Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center for the Arts.

In December, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors approved a $15 per hour living-wage ordinance. The legislation will increase wages for approximately 1,200 workers employed by the county and large county contractors — including park aids, animal care, security, janitorial, landscape, mental health, recycling and other low-wage workers.

Water! Everyone needs it. It’s vital to life itself. “Water is a finite resource with no substitute and upon which there is total dependence” (Ana Palacio, June 2007). So, whenever water issues are discussed, everyone comes to the table with a personal interest and a driving need to be heard.  We tend to use buzz words like efficiency and conservation when we talk about water, when what we really need to do is strive toward better stewardship of our water supply. Being good stewards of our water resources and managing those resources wisely is necessary in order to ensure the availability of water for ourselves and future generations.

Driving up the Oregon coast we heard a radio interview with a woman, someone who lived in the far-off troubled Arab world, I think she was Lebanese, saying she takes her family to the beach because people don’t usually bomb beaches. That’s something I never thought about. But here I was imagining a mother grabbing sunhats and sand buckets to take time off from war.