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The City Council decided Monday night to ask the voters in November to modify the Growth Management Ordinance, removing the cap of 30 permits per year and allowing allocations to be determined by a new Housing Plan. I hope Healdsburg voters see the light and approve this referendum. The current GMO is a solution in search of a problem; we have never had a runaway growth problem in Healdsburg.

As part of its statewide election coverage, CalMatters has given Sonoma West Publishers permission to use its explainers of state propositions. Scroll through the module below to learn about Proposition 20. 

Some time ago a column entitled “Religion challenges left and right” by E. J. Dionne, Jr. appeared in the Press Democrat. “Whenever I write sympathetically about religion,” he noted, “I get bombarded with tweets and notes from readers who normally agree with me but cannot abide by the idea that religious belief should be seen as intellectually serious.” Having made that caveat he goes on to treat religion seriously in a summary of a study produced by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution. Dionne himself took part in the research for the study. The study divides citizens into four groups: 28 percent religious conservatives, 38 percent religious moderates, 19 percent religious progressives, and 15 percent nonreligious. These groups are correlated to political attitudes and party affiliations.  Not surprisingly, most religious conservatives are politically conservative and gravitate to the Republican Party, and most religious progressives and nonreligious are politically liberal and gravitate to the Democratic party.  Also not surprisingly, religious moderates are in between and just as they are religiously moderate they tend to be moderate Republicans or moderate Democrats in fairly equal numbers.