Editorial: Love and hate in Sonoma

While retirement has changed me and allowed me to appreciate life in Sonoma more than when I was working full time, I’m not immune to personal bias and critical observations. I can be a curmudgeon with the best of them.

For example, I hate leaf-blowers. In retirement I have more time at home to watch the mow-and-blow garden crews come and go on our block. The racket is terrible. What they do to the air is worse. Dust and debris flies everywhere. It cannot possibly be healthy to breathe it.

Yet, in spite of what appeared to be adequate momentum within the city to ban or severely limit their use, the measure lost when a longtime councilman switched his vote after supporting the measure to begin with. I didn’t like his vote then, nor did I buy his reasoning for flip-flopping on it.

I hope that when the new city council is seated, someone will bring it back up and this time it could get the majority votes to pass.

And speaking of the city council race, I have read with interest the article in a recent I-T that included the candidate’s backgrounds and summarized their positions on some issues.

I am skeptical about those who say we should do something about this or that, but are short on the how we might do this or that.

Take the question of wine tasting rooms on the Plaza and how many is too many. My opinion is there are already too many. But I wasn’t in favor of a ban on them. I’m still not.

Banning one type of business or another doesn’t help if there are not enough other types of business to fill those retail space vacancies. Is a tasting room better than a vacant store front? You bet.

In case you haven’t noticed, small-town retailing is in trouble. Online shopping, large out of town malls and outlet complexes have made it very difficult for small, independent retailers to compete. We can say we don’t want chain stores here and we don’t want any more tasting rooms, or real estate offices, but how then do we avoid dead retail blocks with no commerce of any kind?

City government does not appear to be structured to help businesses establish here. It grants permits, enforces building codes, and regulates businesses, but taking on the job of finding just the right business for every space is well beyond its reach. I’m wary of a candidate who suggests that is possible through more regulations.

Sonoma is fortunate to have a healthy economy primarily because of tourism and the wine industry. Thanks to this business, local residents have more fine restaurants from which to choose than most towns twice our size. We have lots of interesting cultural activities and entertainment opportunities. Those tourist dollars turn many times and support many jobs and nonprofit organizations before they leave town.

We don’t want to throw out the good with the bad.

When I consider candidates for our town council, I tend to look for a well-grounded and well-rounded pragmatist with a heart – someone with love for our community but enough good sense to not love it to death.

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