Editorial

A lot of public interest has been expressed regarding the new building on the corner of North and Center Streets. Questions related to parking requirements, changes to the Development Agreement (“DA”) and the impact the changes of the building’s tenants have on the DA have been recent topics of conversation in our community. We have prepared this information in an effort to inform residents of the changes to this project.

Thousands of people visited last weekend’s Steelhead Festival at Warm Springs Dam and Lake Sonoma. The people outnumbered the fish — and that has been our problem in the Russian River watershed for the last 60 years. The epic winter runs of spawning steelhead that once numbered over 50,000 are now down to a very few thousand, if that many.

The current controversy over changes to the Meat Market project is part of a larger discussion. Open government gives us, the public, a voice in decision-making. One of the most important issues here is whether the public can or should be left out of the decision-making process on a project like the Meat Market.

With this week’s issue of The Healdsburg Tribune we announce a change at the top of our masthead. At the same time, we are letting our readers know not to expect changes anytime soon in how we gather, write and report the local news.

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.

D r. Jim Wood doesn’t seem like a person who would pursue higher office, because he’s not. When asked when he first wanted to go after a second career in politics, he replied that he never did and that it’s just one of those things in a person’s life that happens – that it just evolved organically. As he takes his seat, he is one of the state’s 28 new members of California’s Assembly.

A little over a week ago, I was driving with my father from Phoenix to San Diego. We were in the hills above San Diego when traffic on Interstate 8 came to an abrupt stop. Soon we saw signs telling us we were approaching a Border Patrol checkpoint. We noticed that the Border Patrol officer was having a long conversation with the driver of the car in front of us, finally motioning him over to the side where there were a number of well-armed officers. When I drove up, he motioned me on through with a wave and a simple, “Have a nice day.”

It’s a lofty goal to say you are striving for 100 percent of anything. So, when on Jan. 15, 2014, the Sonoma County Winegrowers committed to making Sonoma County the nation’s first 100 percent sustainable wine region by 2019, some may have questioned setting the bar so high.

Two months shy of my 10-year anniversary at the Healdsburg Tribune, I will say goodbye to the job that has transformed me into the person I am today.

Our editorial last week about saving for a rainy day must have had an impact on Gov. Jerry Brown when he proposed his $164.7 billion budget calling for “restraint” and warning against “exuberant overkill on our budget spending.’’