Editorial

June DeSilva hasn’t cooked a meal since March. It’s not because she can’t cook, it’s just that her friends won’t let her.

Rollie Atkinson

I do not intend the following to be mere nostalgia, but rather a description of a safer world in which a teenaged boy would not likely be shot by a police officer.

On Tuesday, November 15, 2011, a public hearing was held at the

There are 78 million dogs in the U.S. today. They eat and then each eliminates almost a pound of poop every day. The resulting 3.6 billion pounds of dog poop produced in a year can fill 800 footballs fields, one foot deep! This is no small nuisance. Sonoma County’s 43,000 dogs produce over 32,000 pounds daily. Cleaning up your pet’s waste helps keep our pets, the environment, and each other healthy.

My wife and I have been Healdsburg residents since 1990 and raised two children here. Measure R is an obsessive political ideological convoluted, manipulated, and a monstrously complex failure waiting to happen. Measure R is not a modification of the GMO, it is a complete political takeover for massive pro-growth and as presented will destroy the faint resemblance of small town charm and community forever. It will be the biggest disaster in Healdsburg’s history.

Two decades ago, lots of Sonoma County winemakers and innkeepers were jealous over the attention heaped on their counterparts in Napa Valley, but they swore they’d never actually want to be another Napa or another wine country version of Disneyland. Back then, Sonoma’s wine and hospitality people would chortle, “Sonoma’s for wine, Napa is for auto parts.”

Sometimes the world seems like an extra crazy place. It’s why we seek escape in comfortable places and pastimes like games or sports. But, nowadays even these can be challenging and confusing.

One of the reasons so many people in Healdsburg say “we are so lucky to live here,” is the Healdsburg Museum. On par with the city’s beloved library, the Museum is a keeper of the community’s culture.

The No on R signs with their ominous “Protect Healdsburg” byline remind me of the dad we met at the farmers’ market whose icebreaker question was “What do you do for work that you can live here?”— as though we belong to a special club and not a town. Or the guy in Parkland Farms who told me he wasn’t concerned about the Saggio Hills development because, “That’s all going to be high end stuff … What I’m worried about are the apartments they want to build downtown— it’ll look like Rohnert Park.”