Tim Meinken is seeking a seat on the Healdsburg City Council and will be on the Nov. 6 ballot, alongside two other candidates, Leah Gold and Evelyn Mitchell.
The three council hopefuls will vie for two seats. Incumbent Gold is seeking re-election and Brigette Mansell is stepping down after a four-year term.
Meinken has run before (this is his fourth run at a city council seat) and says “I haven’t slowed down since I ran two years ago. I haven’t stopped working to achieve the goals I had then.”
He notes that those goals were reinforced for him as a volunteer on the committee that, last month, brought an American Institute of Architects Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT), to Healdsburg. “I was a founding member of that committee,” he said.
A key recommendation from the SDAT experience, one that Meinken repeats, is that the city council, “needs to look at all our issues together. The city council tends to look just at specific issues — we need a comprehensive look at issues.”
Meinken says workforce housing is an important issue to him and to the community. “I don’t think Healdsburg necessarily has a housing problem, I think it has an affordable housing problem.”
He said he would take a bolder approach to housing and build on every parcel of city-owned land, naming the new city hall parking lot and the Cerri Building site as examples of where housing should be built, not parking.
He doesn’t discount parking concerns. “I want to finally solve the parking issues. We have studies, but no solutions. We have to make this a more commuter-friendly city.”
Meinken supports transit-oriented development patterns and would like to see significant development around the train station. “We have to integrate housing into our transportation system.”
On the perennial concern about tourism, Meinken said that he helped organize the tourism forum held in May 2017. “The community has spoken, we’re at our limits. The city council needs to go beyond the Plaza and the downtown commercial district and look at the whole community. Every hotel room has an incremental impact on the livability of Healdsburg.”
Meinken said the city works too hard to be welcoming to developers. “We need to flip this developer-centric approach to development in Healdsburg. What do the residents of this city want in their city?”
An idea that Meinken raised in the 2016 election that he still supports is the formation of a commission that would advise the council on Latino issues. “As wonderful as Corazón Healdsburg has been at addressing the Latinx interpretation at meetings.”
How would he fit in to the city council, if elected? “I spent 20 years as a management consultant helping people reach consensus,” he said. “It’s important to find issue-based alliances, so we don’t have city council members continuously stating their goals vs others’ goals. We should be meeting common goals as a council.”
Meinken and his wife, Anne Giere, own Gordian Knot Winery. “We have our production facility in Healdsburg,” he said. “No tasting room.” They have two children, Hannah and Griffin, who attended St. John School in Healdsburg.
