Public safety ahead of tasting rooms
EDITOR: Road safety is the key issue with the Westside Farms project, located at 7097 Westside Road, with a hearing before the Board of Supervisors on Aug. 14 at 1 p.m.
Recently, there has been a rash of accidents near existing and proposed tasting rooms on Westside Road. The last one, in addition to taking out the power and phone service, started a fire that required water drops from a helicopter to extinguish.
This proposed Westside Farms hospitality and event center, with its 60,000-case winery across the street, is to be located on a half-mile section of road with blind hills and curves, and four other existing and proposed tasting rooms.
County standards clearly state that drivers should have enough sight distance to not be forced to hit the brakes or take other evasive action to avoid a collision with customers leaving a tasting room.
This requirement is designed to protect public safety, and is of particular importance for a road such as Westside, where there are nearly 30 approved tasting rooms and wineries, speeding drivers and lots of bicycles.
The real issue here is that county officials have decided to ignore this road safety requirement and use a downgraded standard in order to get this tasting room approved.
This means that approaching drivers will have a only a minimum amount of distance to react to a car or truck exiting the tasting room and slam on the brakes to avoid a collision, assuming that no one is speeding, there are no bicycles to avoid and no one has been drinking too much – a lot of assumptions.
The public expects our county officials to put road safety first, and on Aug. 14 make a determination to uphold its stated road safety requirement, and not downgrade the standard when considering more tasting rooms.
Marc Bommersbach
Healdsburg
On public education
EDITOR: When our children were starting kindergarten, we confidently enrolled them in the Healdsburg public school system. Over and over again, we have seen the soundness of our decision. Not only were all four well-prepared for their college careers, they also were well-prepared for life. They and their peers learned from each other and thrived in the multilingual and multicultural immersion program. During my tenure on the school board, I fought for our all of our town’s children to have access to this kind of education.
When the district started a dependent charter school in 2011, the goal was to offer a creative alternative to traditional education; however, the result has been a deep demographic imbalance. Divided classrooms do not reflect the makeup of our district and are depriving all of our children from the gift of learning with and from each other.
We believe, strongly, in public education. It is an education that is available to all, and is reflective of our diverse community and our collective values. Let’s make sure our individual classrooms benefit from this diversity and provide a stellar education to all students.
Paul and Pamela Deas
Healdsburg
Oral histories
EDITOR: The Friends of the Sonoma County Wine Library wish to acknowledge and thank Charlie Palmer and Daryl Groom and their organization Pigs and Pinot for the 2018 grant of $5,000 for the Wine Library’s ongoing visual history program.
This grant will allow the Friends to produce two additional visual histories of Sonoma County wine pioneers. Coupled with funding raised by the Friends in 2018, a total of five visual histories will be produced in this calendar year. Jeff Davis (je**@on***********.com) is the chairman and contact for more information about this program.
We, the Friends of the Sonoma County Wine Library are particularly pleased to be supported by Pigs and Pinot and urge anyone interested in these histories to come to the Wine Library in Healdsburg and view any of the 89 oral and visual histories we have produced to date.
In addition, we urge you to visit the library and browse our world-class collection of wine related books, periodicals and other grape and wine materials. We are actively recruiting new Friends board members and urge you if interested to contact me (Ju***@pe*********.com) or Jesse Shaw (je***@go*********.com) our membership chairman.
Julie Pedroncelli St. John
President, Friends of the Sonoma County Wine Library
