Letters To The Editor

The City Council’s informal decision on Dec. 16 to adopt a five-district, selected mayor format for city government in the redistricting process drew immediate reactions from several community members, who felt the decision was made unnecessarily quickly and short-circuited public discussion of the options. Here are a few of their comments:

The City Council must address this issue with a “formula retail ordinance” that expands the boundaries of the retail area and codifies “formula business.” The 2030 General Plan protects businesses directly facing the Plaza, but not those around the Plaza, which explains why Faherty can slip into Ooh la Luxe’s space.

"I am an affordable housing advocate, but Measure O and its aftermath are riddled with issues. I see it as a huge, uncertain affordability experiment, not a plan..." So writes a long-time Healdsburg resident about the city's plan to create an exclusion zone from the Growth Management Ordinance...

"We voted on Prop. 12 in 2018 to ban factory farming of the kind promoted by the Yes on Measure J people from outside the county, which was a statewide initiative. It went into full implementation on January 1, 2024. It has barely had the opportunity to go full swing and here we are targeting only Sonoma County. Why?" So asks one reader in our Letter to the Editor column, found online only this week...

"As the Executive Director of Corazón Healdsburg and Chair of the Board, we are writing to express our support for Measure O...." So begins our first entry in this week's Letters to the Editor. The second letter takes a different point of view altogether.

Dear Editor: I received a utilities bill from the City for my August usage. $1,096.84! That’s up from $727.77 in July, which was also outrageous. I called the utilities department several times the week of 16 September, left a message and received no response. I cannot...

Several letters were received these past two weeks about Measure O, the city's proposal on the Nov. 5 ballot to amend the Growth Management Ordinance, or GMO...

"Now that Measure O will be on the November ballot, the only fix is for the city to abandon or substantially reduce this density boost—or for the voters to reject Measure O and send the City Council back to the drawing board," writes one Tribune reader in our Letters to the Editor this week. Other readers weigh in as well...

Your articles continue to be well written and usually put together in an easy-to-read fashion. Thanks for informing local residents of what is happening in our town. Today’s paper, however, caused me to write to you...

Our readers ask things like, "Why is the City Council in the arts and culture business? I’m glad the City Council members got a raise, but why does Healdsburg even need a City Council? Wouldn’t a city manager be enough? Perhaps the best news from the meeting is how few people were there trying to get more money from the city taxpayers for their special projects...."