News

19-year-old Sierra Gage starts her day around 7 a.m., getting mail and packages ready to deliver around Forestville.

A second Red Flag Warning was issued this week. The warning is in effect from 10 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 21 to Friday, Oct. 23 at 8 a.m. and comes on the heels of a warning that was issued earlier this week for Monday evening through Wednesday at 8 a.m. The Red Flag Warning is issued for North Bay mountains, East Bay hills and interior valleys, Santa Cruz mountains and the San Mateo County coast.

The county has given the green light for art galleries to reopen, along with several other non-essential businesses such as salons, and local galleries are taking a slow and steady approach to opening their doors. Galleries such as Fulton Crossing and The Upstairs Art Gallery in Healdsburg are opening with limited hours and an emphasis on social distancing, and others like the Sebastopol Center for the Arts and the Cloverdale Arts Alliance are planning to reopen mid-July, also with limited hours and stringent health guidelines in place.  

Many people agree that Sebastopol is “unique” in the many ways they choose to define the open-minded community with traditional small town traditions and evolving progressive tendencies. What a recent Business Survey Report found out is the city is not so unique when comparing current economic challenges and the impacts of external forces like online shopping and non-local large corporation competition. The threats to small town retail and local economic vitality are being repeated across the country — and existed before the current COVID-19 pandemic.

In an eight-part series we look back at the world that was, here in our little corner of it. 2020 was a year of challenges. We’ll be publishing this eight-piece work daily as we work to the new year. Today’s piece is on elections that took place this year, and the challenges they presented.

The Nov. 4 meeting of the Windsor town council started off unusually, with an apology from current and projected future mayor, Dominic Foppoli. Foppoli, who looks on track to be Windsor’s first elected mayor (he currently holds the title under the old system of council-nominated mayors), wanted to respond to recent outcry over his decision to attend a town event after a positive COVID test.

There’s no use putting this off any longer; now is as good a time as any to tackle one of the most controversial topics of all. No, we’re not talking about capital punishment or global climate change; we’re talking about pie making.