Editorial

Governor Jerry Brown recently signed five important tobacco control laws, made possible because of the governor’s special session on health legislation.

At last we offer an editorial about love, hope and promise. And to think our main subject is about one of our biggest and most expensive government programs. How surprising for us to be praising Big Government.

SMART train officials recently took a reverse commute trip to Cloverdale after brief stop-offs in Windsor and Healdsburg to deliver updates on the commuter train project that was first launched by Sonoma and Marin county voters in 2008.

There appears to be some confusion in the minds of a number of our Healdsburg residents about the five-way intersection, infrastructure construction project commonly described as the “Roundabout Project.” This confusion begs clarification.

As the California June 7 primary gets closer (mail-in voting starts in three weeks) we are hearing more and more people complaining about a lack of choices among the five remaining presidential candidates. Even some of the candidates are grumbling about the “monopolistic” powers of the Democratic and Republican party machines.

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 your elected Representative here in Sonoma County, my highest priority is to make sure that your priorities are my priorities; and that I conduct my work in a transparent arena for you all to help me develop plans and hold me accountable for delivering.

“How will we feed ourselves?” asked Joseph McIntyre last month to a packed house at Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center for the Arts.

When the first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, Sonoma County was a very different landscape with a very sick Russian River, a deadened Laguna, lead-spewing automobiles, tons of highway litter and a county land use map poised for massive suburban sprawl from Petaluma to Geyserville.

The March 24 commentary “Housing Solutions” by Healdsburg Mayor Tom Chambers provided an incomplete picture of the City of Healdsburg’s efforts to dramatically change the Growth Management Ordinance (GMO) that voters passed in 2000.