News

Low-income Healdsburg residents who participate in the City Alternative Rates for Energy (CARE) program will now have 100% of their electric bill taken care of by the city for the next three months, until June, in light of the coronavirus pandemic and the financial stress it may cause families.

With kids home from school and parents home from work, many local families are having to adjust to a new temporary-normal. In an effort to catalog this new way of life, community members in Geyserville and Healdsburg have begun taking “porch portraits” of families in front of their houses.

No, there hasn’t been a sudden influx of wolves or a sudden increase in coyotes in west county over the last week. That howling you’ve been hearing every night around 8 p.m. is part of a safely distanced, social solidarity movement — a primal howl, recognizing the continuation of life and existence in the face of the coronavirus threat.

The Sebastopol Area Senior Center may be closed to visitors, but its staff is still hard at work — and it's stepping up to the coronavirus challenge in a big way. 

On April 4 at approximately 4:40 p.m., deputies responded to a call in the 8500 block of Trenton Road in Forestville. The caller reported a man and a woman came to the house earlier in the day making threats. The suspects had just returned, pointed a handgun at the caller, then drove away.

The Pellini family name stood in tall block letters at the center of Sebastopol for almost seven decades, painted over the entrance to the family’s Chevrolet dealership. The name also adorned Little League uniforms, the Ives Park ball field fence and on annual entries...

Sebastopol Community Cultural Center (SCCC) director Cordelia Holst has been fired from her position as director of the Sebastopol Community Center. The move was taken by a unanimous vote of the community center board.

To keep local journalism alive, the owners of this newspaper and three other community newspapers in Sonoma County are transferring their ownership to a new nonprofit created to help the papers compete in a 21st century news market defined by online competition and a flood of information that is often free.

Early last week, March 24, the city of Healdsburg activated their emergency operations center (EOC) to make sure the city is ready to respond if the COVID-19 situation worsens, or if there is an outbreak in the city.

Sonoma County residents are being told to expect a rising wave of COVID-19 infection cases over the coming weeks, while local public health officials and hospitals prepare for the worst. That involves the county’s six acute care hospitals and numerous community health clinics scrambling to find spaces for hundreds of extra patient beds. Inventories of PPDs (personal protection devices), COVID-19 test kits and life-saving ventilators are being assembled. What that future COVID-19 “surge” will look like will depend on hundreds, if not thousands, of individual vantage points.