Bill Kortum’s county

All of Sonoma County owes its eternal gratitude to Bill Kortum for his five decades of open space preservation, environmental action and community leadership that shaped the land, coastline and our urban-rural land use patterns as we know them.
There is no question about his lasting legacy, but there remains a very important question over how his work will live on after the rest of his generation of original Sonoma County environmentalists also go to their graves.
Kortum, who died on Dec. 20, 2014, was memorialized this past Sunday in a public gathering of nearly 1,000 people including three current and past U.S. Congress members. He was remembered for fighting the atomic power plant at Bodega Bay, fathering the California Coastal Commission and saving 1,100 miles of public shoreline, spurring the county’s original city-centered growth plan and master-minding Sonoma County Conservation Action, the pivotal grassroots organization that has led all local environmental battles for the past 23 years.
From the far north of Cloverdale’s Russian River upper reach, to the south marshes below Petaluma, all of us living here benefit daily from Kortum’s public policy battles. Town dwellers in Windsor enjoy open green stretches at the Town’s edges. Visitors to the public coastline at Jenner, Salt Point and Sea Ranch also can thank the lanky Petalumian for his vision and perseverance.
It is said that “challenging times” is what it takes to make great men. Bill Kortum was more than that. It was Kortum who brought his own challenges to a Sonoma County in the 1970s that was destined to be developed into another Silicon Valley with as many as 1.5 million residents. This developer’s dream saw unending sprawl along the full length of Highway 101, big housing developments on the coast’s Highway 1 and the loss of hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland.
That is not what happened. And, while no single person alone changed the future landscape of Sonoma County, most of it would not have happened as it did without Bill Kortum.
Kortum was elected as a county supervisor in 1976 and was joined by Chuck Hinkle, Brian Kahn and later Helen Rudee and Eric Koenigshofer in reversing the land use plans from sprawl to city-centered growth and agricultural preservation. Kortum lost a re-call election funded by the developers, but he won the bigger war when the county adopted a historical General Plan in 1978.
There weren’t many bankers, builders, developers or big winery owners at Kortum’s memorial last Sunday but there should have been. They have been profiting from Kortum’s preservation work and vision for decades. The world-class lifestyle and incredible natural beauty of Sonoma County — now home to 500,000 residents — has become the superior alternative to Santa Clara’s Silicon Valley and most of the rest of the crowded Bay Area.
With mounting pressures to build more housing, expand winery production and serve more and more tourists, Kortum’s open spaces, free coast and urban growth boundaries are set to meet a new generation of growth challenges.
It would never be enough to only “preserve” pieces of land, scenic corridors or community separators, as Kortum and thousands of fellow citizen-activists did over the past 36 years. All these desired qualities of Sonoma County must pay for themselves. That is when they become sustainable. That is why Kortum also supported the SMART train, the incorporation and development of Cotati and the locating of Sonoma State University. His social justice stands included adequate and affordable housing for all. He endorsed new taxes to pay for parks, water use and energy conservation projects and the county’s Open Space and Agricultural Preservation District.
Bill Kortum died at the age of 87. He did great things and gave us plenty. His ashes should be spread across the entire county.
— Rollie Atkinson