Letters to the Editor 3-12-15

Palm Drive’s failure
Editor: I truly understand why some (not all) Sebastopol residents want to reopen “their” hospital. Gail Thomas, of the Palm Drive Health Care Foundation, said it best at the February board meeting: “I want an emergency room five minutes from my front door.”
Who wouldn’t? The reality is, that is not going to happen for the 27 percent of the voters from the Monte Rio, Guerneville and Forestville school districts — “River Corridor” — who generate 42 percent of the tax revenue for this twice-failed district.
Palm Drive Health Care District (PDHCD) is a special district. As a special district, PDHCD is tasked with providing services throughout the district — not just Sebastopol and not just in the form of a hospital. They have not served the River Corridor although they have collected special assessments from these communities for 15 years ($20- $25 million).
PDHCD boundaries were drawn to maximize tax revenues. The River Corridor was included in the district for the high volume of taxable parcels (summer cabins and taxable lots) vs. low voter representation (absentee property owners do not have a vote). Had Cazadero and more northern communities, who must travel through the River Corridor to go to a hospital or medical facility, been included in the formation, they likely would have swayed the vote against forming the district, or at the very least voted against the parcel tax(es). (Gerrymandering: to manipulate or adapt to ones advantage).
Health care options: We now have two state-of-the-art hospital facilities that are actually easier and quicker to access. Sutter is approximately 16 miles and Kaiser is 18.4 miles from the Russian River Fire Department in Guerneville. Palm Drive is a slow 18.3 miles (10 traffic signals and a stop sign via River Road, the preferred route of our ambulance service). Sonoma County has a substantially large population that now belongs to Kaiser, and a growing population who are covered by Sutter, or other health care policies not accepted by Palm Drive.
PDHCD has no plan to exit its second bankruptcy and are no better off today than when they filed nearly a year ago. The luxury of filing under Chapter 9 is that there is no time limit to exit and no restrictions on continuing to throw money into the abyss, further indebting the taxpayers to a life sentence of paying for a service that may or may not exist, and raising the bar higher to ensure a third bankruptcy down the line, all to the detriment of the taxpayers.
Barbara DeCarly
Guerneville
Diversity needed
Editor: I would like to thank outgoing Design Review Board members Zachary Douch and Robert Beauchamp for the very generous contribution of their time and expertise to the City of Sebastopol. I am sure Mr. Douch will be a worthy addition to the Planning Commission and Mr. Beauchamp’s detailed consideration of design will surely be missed. I also would like to welcome incoming board members Cary Bush and Alexis Persinger.
At this time of transition, it is perhaps useful to consider what happens when diversity goes missing. All society suffers. Diversity is reflected not only in ethnicity, religion, genitalia and sexual orientation, but also in thoughts and opinions. When a dominant ideology takes command of a majority, it is so often at the expense of any minority belief, which can then be dismissed and stifled by the majority. A minority opinion is often deemed a threat to majority control and actively denigrated through ridicule, dismissal and scorn. In fact, the Founding Fathers attempted to deal with this very issue when they created a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy, as they realized that the minority would always be in danger of the threat of tyranny by the majority.
Furthermore, any new independent intellectual thought must, by its very nature, begin as a minority opinion. While independent critical thoughts and ideas are essential to advance a society, they are often deemed a danger to the status quo and one can observe an active attempt to silence such thought through derision and condemnation. Let us not be a community that tries to bully independent intellectual criticism into silence. Let us embrace it as a means to grow and progress.
In closing, I would like to invite you to participate in the Design Review Board meetings. In theory, this board is your board. Please attend and contribute. The meetings are held on the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 4 p.m. at City Hall on Bodega Avenue. On the Thursday before the meeting, our Planning Department puts out the agenda for the upcoming meeting with excellent description and analysis of the topics to be discussed. We can thank Kenyon Webster and Jonathan Atkinson for their consistent hard work in producing these documents. The documents can be downloaded from the city’s website at ci.sebastopol.ca.us.
I look forward to seeing you at the next Design Review Board meeting.
Christine Level
Sebastopol
An Efren shame
Editor: It’s only a matter of time before Santa Rosa’s daily newspaper announces and endorses Efren Carrillo’s campaign to get reelected. All I can say to the people of Sonoma County is: Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us. Fool us over and over again, we must all be Efren idiots.
Thomas Morabito
Sebastopol