How Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Sonoma County are tackling big challenges in growth

Sonoma County's two largest population centers have big plans moving forward to tackle the tricky business of keeping the local economy humming amid ultralow unemployment and scant options to house enterprises and their employees.|

Barriers and solutions for infill development in Sonoma County

4 key barriers

1. Market uncertainty due to unknown demand for infill in key cities and urban areas in Sonoma County.

2. Lack of demonstrated viability and financing for infill and car-free living

3. Lack of supportive policy and process.

4. High costs and fees to build infill.

7 near-term priorities

1. Pilot projects with public partnership with possible concessions regarding fees, land purchase and streamlined entitlements.

2. Rent guarantees for employees from employers to boost demand for infill.

3. A joint powers agency (JPA) or renewal enterprise district (RED) to guide and fund infill development.

4. Zoning, parking requirement and development fee reforms to encourage rather than stymie infill development.

5. Improved availability of public sector infill financing and enhanced access to sales and use taxes.

6. California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) streamlining for qualifying infill (e.g., AB 2267).

7. A market study and project development navigator to help streamline infill investment and deployment.

Source: “Accelerating Infill in Santa Rosa & Sonoma County,” Council of Infill Builders, November 2018 (

nbbj.news/sonomainfill)

Sonoma County’s two largest population centers have big plans moving forward to tackle the tricky business of keeping the local economy humming amid ultralow unemployment and scant options to house enterprises and their employees.

“Though the economy is quite good, it has resulted in low availability of workers,” said Ethan Brown, business retention and expansion program manager for the Sonoma County Economic Development Board.

And when the October 2017 firestorms wiped out over 6,000 North Bay homes, including about 5 percent of Santa Rosa’s housing stock, that made the already challenging task of holding onto and attracting employers even more difficult than it was before the wildfires, according to Brown and his counterparts in Santa Rosa and Petaluma.

County and city business boosters have been moving rolling out initiatives to tackle the dilemma of short supply of housing and suitable workers. The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors approved the Strategic Sonoma five-year effort last July.

Two goals of that plan were the creation of the Sonoma County AgTech Innovation and Manufacturing Alliance and the Talent Alignment Council. The alliance is meant to take input from local producers in various industries and connect them with resources such as the 101mfg and California Manufacturers Council trade groups, Brown said.

Brown has been working with a local manufacturer that had been planning to move out of state, partly because of staffing challenges. He said it looks promising that the employer will stay local via programs such as the California Competes tax credits, manufacturer sales-tax exclusions and recruitment help from Sonoma County JobLink.

In the North Bay’s largest city and the fifth largest in the Bay Area, it is a two-pronged effort to get more than 5,000 homes rebuilt and to lay the foundation for long-term economic growth, according to Raissa De La Rosa, economic development manager for Santa Rosa.

And part of the work city officials did in helping to keep employers such as Keysight Technologies, Medtronic and Kaiser Permanente operational after the fires also helped the city learn more about what such businesses need to continue to call Sonoma County home, she said.

A common refrain is the need for downtown housing to attract professionals such as engineers and physicians, but infill developers active in the Bay Area have been reluctant to move forward with downtown projects because of existing city policies, according to De La Rosa. And a common request for services that would support downtown residents is a grocery store, but a frequent challenge in recruiting such a commercial tenant is the lack of residential density at the urban core, she said.

The city has been talking with Chicago-based Simon Property Group about redeveloping the now-vacant Sears store building at the Santa Rosa Plaza mall to include a grocer. Meanwhile, there also have been discussions with Cornerstone Properties, which owns The Press Democrat publishing offices at 427 Mendocino Ave., about redeveloping that site for a higher-density mixture of housing and other uses as well as redeveloping SMART property next to the downtown train station.

Coming out of the spring 2018 joint economic-development sessions that helped spur Strategic Sonoma was a planning effort through Sacramento-based Council of Infill Builders. The group completed a report in November that outlines four key impediments to downtown revival and seven solutions.

At the same time, the City Council approved the Up Downtown initiative aimed at such long-lingering problems. Two actions were cutting the design and permitting process while reducing fees by nearly two-thirds.

In Sonoma County’s second largest city, the food and beverage sectors have helped to send retail and industrial property vacancies below 5 percent and office vacancies below 10 percent.

“We feel we have a strong business environment,” said Ingrid Alverde, Petaluma economic development manager.

A key example of such growth is the filling up of the 280,000-square-foot Cader Corporate Center industrial development soon after construction was complete. That allowed for expansion by Clover Sonoma, Scott Laboratories and Cowgirl Creamery. Other transplants have been Miyoko’s Kitchen, Point Reyes Cheese Company and Revive Kombucha.

The city is taking ramping up its attractiveness to food and beverage companies with upgrades, nearly complete, to its wastewater treatment plant, Alverde said. That will allow North Bay vintners and other producers of process wastewater that’s too strong to send to normal sewers the option of trucking it to Petaluma instead of the usual destination: East Bay Municipal Utility District.

Jeff Quackenbush covers wine, real estate, construction and other industries. Contact him at jquackenbush@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4256.

Barriers and solutions for infill development in Sonoma County

4 key barriers

1. Market uncertainty due to unknown demand for infill in key cities and urban areas in Sonoma County.

2. Lack of demonstrated viability and financing for infill and car-free living

3. Lack of supportive policy and process.

4. High costs and fees to build infill.

7 near-term priorities

1. Pilot projects with public partnership with possible concessions regarding fees, land purchase and streamlined entitlements.

2. Rent guarantees for employees from employers to boost demand for infill.

3. A joint powers agency (JPA) or renewal enterprise district (RED) to guide and fund infill development.

4. Zoning, parking requirement and development fee reforms to encourage rather than stymie infill development.

5. Improved availability of public sector infill financing and enhanced access to sales and use taxes.

6. California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) streamlining for qualifying infill (e.g., AB 2267).

7. A market study and project development navigator to help streamline infill investment and deployment.

Source: “Accelerating Infill in Santa Rosa & Sonoma County,” Council of Infill Builders, November 2018 (

nbbj.news/sonomainfill)

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