News

Healdsburg City Council and the city’s administrative services and finance director, Heather Ippoliti, have started to review the city’s budget for the next fiscal cycle. The council met several times last week in both closed and open session meetings to discuss the city’s biennial budget for 2020-21 and 2021-22 and the necessary budget changes and cuts that will need to be implemented to soften the blow from the COVID-19 related economic recession.

You see the signs on restaurants all over town: “curbside pick-up.” Since restaurants were forced to close in March, many have pivoted to phone or online ordering and curbside pick-up. Most offer full meals (and, if their licenses allow, cocktails) boxed up and ready to take home.

On Tuesday, May 19, an attorney for the mother of David Glen Ward, the 52-year-old man who died in a bizarre interaction with sheriff’s deputies at the end of December, has filed suit against the two sheriff’s deputies involved, a Sebastopol police officer who was on the scene, the county of Sonoma and Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick.

Kim Dargeou, the interim supervising children’s services librarian at the Central Santa Rosa Library, is bringing the library into families homes with a new video series of weekly story times, science and craft projects and read-aloud programs for all ages.

Healdsburg-based nonprofit Farm to Pantry announced April 14, that hunger relief advocate and restaurateur Duskie Estes will take the reins as the organization’s new executive director.

Last July, we did an article on the efforts of the Laguna Foundation to restore a native colony of Sebastopol Meadowfoam, a small, white wildflower. It turns out those efforts were wildly successful as you’ll learn in this article from the Laguna Foundation.

The Healdsburg City Council agreed to a new 15-year term contract with Recology for garbage services with a new residential rate of $26.12 for 32-gallon bins at its meeting Monday night, May 18.

Sonoma West Publishers was among the first recipients of a COVID-19 related newsroom assistance grant from the Google News Initiative Emergency Relief Fund. More than 12,000 news organizations applied for an undisclosed number and amount of the grants

Correction: The festivities were arranged by Tony Fisher, not David Skolnik.

Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Redwood Empire Food Bank (REFB) has been providing the equivalent of over 80,000 meals to people in need per day, a 50% increase up from last year, and with the drastic change in demand, the organization says they are in dire need of more funds, food and volunteers.