Rotary membership divided over contract with Mattson venue

Rotary of Sonoma Valley has for years been one of the Valley’s biggest community uniters.

During the 2017 fires, the local service club would provide more than 1,000 hot meals to evacuees and first responders in a single day. Its annual Applause fundraisers have in years past raised more than $100,000 in funds for youth projects.

But this week Rotary hit a benchmark it never intended: About 20 members have resigned in protest over where the club would hold its weekly lunch meetings.

Members come and go every year, but for a single club that boasted 92 members as of June 13, the sudden resignations have been troubling. Following the flow of resignations, Rotary of Sonoma Valley membership is now at 70, according to Therese Nugent, the newly installed club president for 2021.

At issue, according to some of the former members who have contacted the Index-Tribune, is the continued use of the club’s longtime Wednesday lunch-meeting space, Seven Branches Venue and Inn at 450 W. Spain St.

Known as Ramekins under its previous Kenwood Investments ownership, Seven Branches is the new name of the venue purchased in January 2019 by LeFever Mattson, a North Bay property management and investment company co-owned by Ken Mattson and Tim LeFever. It is one of approximately 50 Sonoma Valley properties purchased by Mattson in the past five years, according to real estate records.

Several members of Sonoma Valley Rotary Club remain troubled by rhetoric that surfaced in 2019 from old social media posts by Mattson’s wife, Stacy Mattson, which warned of a “gay agenda” and expressed “disgust” that the 2013 Rose Bowl Parade involved the “promotion of sin by (viewers) being forced to watch a gay marriage ceremony.”

Rotary continued to hold its weekly lunches at the Mattsons’ venue for the year following the surfacing of the posts. But after a year away from the venue due to the pandemic – when weekly meetings were relegated to Zoom – Rotary is now returning to in-person get-togethers. Members critical of the Seven Branches ownership have lobbied for club leaders to find a new place for the group to socialize and plan its community service efforts.

But up until now, those members — soured at the prospect of spending their lunch money at Seven Branches — say their qualms have fallen on deaf ears of Rotary’s leadership, headed by this year’s president Nugent.

Nugent told the Index-Tribune this week that about six weeks before assuming her role as president, she received the OK from the club’s Past Presidents Council to secure a venue for the group’s return to in-person lunches for the year ahead. Noting that two past presidents had continued contracting with the Mattsons’ venue, she didn’t question the partnership.

However, she said, in the waning weeks of 2020 club President Mara Kahn’s tenure, some members began voicing their concerns about spending their money at a Mattson property. Each member pays the venue $30 for lunch, which adds up to around $70,000 for the year for Seven Branches, assuming an average of 60 Rotarians across 40 lunches in the year.

Nugent believes that with Rotary being a nonpartisan group, the venue owners’ politics shouldn’t be a factor in club decisions.

“It’s not my place to base a business decision on where we would meet for lunch on someone’s political views,” she said. “It’s not what we do in Rotary.”

Nugent and her husband Mike sold their home to the Mattsons in 2018, but she said she has no personal affiliation with the family that would affect a decision on the Rotary lunch venue.

She did concede having a certain affection for Ramekins. “I helped start that cooking school and taught there for many years,” she said. (Note: Nugent writes a monthly food column for the Index-Tribune highlighting seasonal recipes and other cuisines.)

Nugent eventually did negotiate a contract with Seven Branches; she declined to disclose the terms.

Calls for comment from the Mattsons’ spokesperson were not returned by press time.

While multiple members of Rotary have reached out to the Index-Tribune about the internal strife, they’ve asked not to be named for fear of being socially marginalized by longtime associates in the club. One former member described a concern over being bullied if they were quoted in the press.

According to one longtime Rotary member, who had held leadership positions in the club prior to resigning, of the approximately 20 who have left, at least 15 have expressed their disapproval of the Seven Branches venue. Ten of those 15 are women.

Among those who have resigned, Gary DeSmet was more disappointed with the handling of the situation – and at times poor treatment of fellow members with differing viewpoints – than anything else.

Still, he hopes it results “in a genuine effort at reconciliation.”

An alternative option, DeSmet pointed out, is for disenfranchised members to form a “satellite club,” which would need affiliation with a nearby existing club, essentially becoming its sponsor. Eventually, the satellite club could grow above 20 members and apply for its own charter. A similar effort took place in 2018 when members who couldn’t meet for lunch in the middle of the day formed a Sunrise Rotary, which holds its meetings on Friday mornings.

In a renewed effort to calm the storm, Nugent and other members of the Rotary leadership team met this week to consider a solution to the discontent. “It was an incredibly productive (meeting),” said Nugent of the July 14 meeting.

Rotary leadership will open up a new search for an alternative venue, she said. The next step will be to put a search committee together. Among the main criteria for the venue is that it has to be able to accommodate the size of the membership, that it can guarantee a place for the meetings every Wednesday at noon, and that its serving crew is large enough to handle the club.

Additional needs include being conducive to allowing guest-speaker media presentations, the ability to dine indoors and, if weather accommodates, outdoors, and the ability for the venue to cater at other locations for Rotary special events.

She said she’d previously looked at about 15 alternative venues, but none met as many criteria as Seven Branches. The search committee will renew the effort, she said.

Whether the club would be able to break its contract with Seven Branches, Nugent isn’t sure.

“It’s just premature at this time” to know, said Nugent, since the new search for an alternative venue hasn’t begun. She said it’s something the search committee will look into.

The last time Rotary moved venues, said Nugent, was in 2015 when it outgrew the Lodge at Sonoma, where meetings had been held prior to Ramekins.

“As president I am going forward positively. My intention is to grow the club and get back to doing all the good works we do in the community,” said Nugent. “We want to get back to selling hot dogs.”

Email Jason at Jason.walsh@sonomanews.com.