Letters to the Editor 9-1-16

Set the pool free
Editor: I write this letter in dismay that the Healdsburg Swim Center closed on Aug. 20 despite perhaps one or two months left of very warm weather. The popular children’s swim teams were abruptly cancelled despite signups into September, recreational swimmers and avid lap swimmers such as myself need to find other places to swim. The reasons given by park and rec include low staffing despite the insistence from many Swim Center lifeguards that they are available to work and would love the hours.
The lifeguards were told that the City of Healdsburg does not want to pay them benefits, therefore they cannot work any more hours. In the meantime, while that beautiful eight-lane pool lies dormant underneath pool covers, swimmers look about the area for places to swim. The river has an algae problem and is not conducive to lap swimming. The closest community pool is Santa Rosa, a commute smarter people try to avoid.
To continue local swimming one either has to know someone with a pool or have the bucks to join the private local club, which has only four narrow lanes, which rarely has a lifeguard on duty and is often crowded. I tried that pool today where 11 people uncomfortably shared four lanes and two people paced around on deck waiting to get in. The lovely woman I shared a lane with didn’t want me to swim with any sort of splash because she didn’t want her hair wet. Come on Healdsburg Swim Center, you have a jewel of a pool waiting for swimmers to utilize it. Set the pool free.
Stefanie Freele
Geyserville
We don’t need scaremongering
Editor: Gail Jonas and Janis Watkins want an answer to the question of whether developers will have to comply with a change to our city rules that would require developers to build some moderate income as well as low income housing. The California Supreme Court has unanimously said yes.
In CBIA v. City of San Jose, the court rejected the argument that a requirement that builders build some low income housing was an unconstitutional taking. Instead, the court concluded that such requirements were normal land use regulations, like zoning, and were constitutional so long as they serve a legitimate public purpose. The case did not deal with moderate income housing, but nothing in the court’s analysis suggests that it would reach a different result in a moderate income case.
The case was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, where only Clarence Thomas was interested in hearing it. Are Gail and Janis seriously arguing that if Clarence Thomas alone might reach a different result, our proposed rules are legally suspect?
More fundamentally, if it’s unconstitutional to require a builder to build some proportion of low or moderate income housing, then a GMO like ours, which prohibits a builder from building any homes at all once the limit is reached, is a far more intrusive  and illegal taking.
The issues surrounding Healdsburg’s housing and the GMO are complicated enough. We don’t need legal scaremongering thrown into the mix.
Phil Luks
Healdsburg
Versions of Healdsburg
Editor: To the proponents of the “No on Measure R” campaign, I ask the following: What is Healdsburg? And what are we protecting it from? Is your version of Healdsburg the same as mine? I was born here. I was raised here. I grew up on its streets, attended its parades, went to its schools. I am a Greyhound. I am a business owner. I am a proud parent of three young boys. And my wife and I are fortunate enough to own a house in town – just barely.
Our home ownership was only possible because of the great recession. But for economic calamity, we would not have been able to afford a home here. Are you trying to protect your version of Healdsburg from folks like us? A vote against Measure R does exactly that. It keeps young families, young professionals, and even native sons and daughters from returning home. That is not my Healdsburg.
Ironically, the current Growth Management Ordinance (GMO) has fueled and accelerated rising home prices. How does keeping the current policy in place actually help solve our housing problem? It is what got us here – to a dearth of affordable housing.
Are “No on R” supporters concerned about sprawl? Sprawl is characterless development that eats at the edges of towns. Sprawl is avoided in Healdsburg through the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB), not the GMO. The UGB defines where development can and cannot go, and protects agricultural areas from development for decades to come. And the city’s General Plan, through its policies and tools, shapes the character of all new development. The current GMO actually perpetuates a defining element of sprawl, homogeneity of housing. Because of the way the GMO distorts housing economics, it drives builders to construct nothing but large, expensive, single-family homes.
What about apartments? In the next five years, the need for more affordable residential units – rental apartments, townhomes, cottage courts – will be unprecedented. As millennial households start, or boomer households transition to empty nesters, the demand for new housing types and formats is far beyond what Healdsburg’s current GMO allows.
I believe that we elect leaders to make these types of decisions and we keep them accountable at the ballot box, not by stripping away their discretion through blanket regulations that cannot be flexible enough to match present-day housing markets, economies, or demographic needs. Our city council’s hands are tied by the GMO at a time we need their full creativity and participation in crafting a solution.
We should be intelligently shaping our future instead of running in fear. Healdsburg is what it is because it is not frozen in time. Healdsburg is a dynamic, evolving place, clothed in small town charm. It includes families and young entrepreneurs. It embraces new ideas and new businesses. This is the Healdsburg we love. We don’t need protection; we need vision and bold responses to tough challenges. That is exactly what Measure R is.
Matthew Welty
Healdsburg
AWOL on economic justice
Editor: Assemblyman Jim Wood has walked away from providing economic equality to those who harvest our food. AB 1066, which just managed to pass the State Assembly will, if Gov. Brown signs it, grant overtime pay to farmworkers after an eight-hour day and a 40 hour week — conditions the rest of us enjoy but they never have.
And Wood abstained. Didn’t vote. Shame on him, but — I suspect — kudos to the local dairy industry, whose fingerprints are all over this. For that matter, Sen. Mike McGuire didn’t vote, either, so that raises the fence even higher against parity for farmworkers.
What don’t Wood and McGuire get about economic justice?
Dave Henderson
Healdsburg