Valley Forum: Welcome to Sonoma County: Here’s what you should know

News item: The North Bay has seen an influx of new residents decamping San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose in the past year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Welcome! Welcome to your new home in the North Bay! As you get acclimated to your new community, here is a quick introduction to life in the North Bay:

Business introductions: Sooner or later you will be at a business meeting and people will introduce themselves. Halfway around the table someone will casually throw in that their family has been here for three generations, first farming hops, then prunes and now grapes.

Next someone will up the ante saying their family has been here for five generations, starting with cutting down all the trees, then running cattle, then hops, then prunes then grapes.

This is perfectly normal and no reason to be alarmed.

If you want to stand out, tell them you plan to start a new kind of farm and plant stucco housing, like they did in San Jose. They’ll remember you.

Demographics: The Sonoma Valley - and the North Bay in general - isn’t as ethnically diverse as the rest of the Bay Area, but that’s changing.

We tend to lag behind the lower Bay Area by about 30 years in many things. If you are looking around and not everyone looks like where you left — well, we are glad you are here, and we hope you find a good welcoming home.

Housing: There are many theories about how to best build housing in Sonoma County. Some proponents think we should build along transportation corridors, others think we should also build higher density in walkable towns with urban growth boundaries, while some make good points about market-rate, low-income and affordable housing.

Still others advocate for loosening restrictions and letting the market figure it out. With all these great theories about housing it makes sense why all of that new housing remains theoretical.

Important papers: In the North Bay we keep things like our mortgage documents, birth certificates, passports and all the password Post-It notes in a box by the front door. This is in case you have to evacuate suddenly or just to offer visitors the impulse to commit identify theft.

From November to April we also keep them above the last high-water mark. To find the high water mark in your area remove that patch of new drywall in your house. You’ll see it.

Media: Everything not owned by Sonoma Media Investments is usually owned by rival Sonoma Media Group, which shows the trend of media consolidation is so strong that we also consolidated 66 percent of their names. Please subscribe to the local newspapers and support your media outlets. If you are going to be a contributing member of Sonoma County we need you to be informed. At least more informed than that guy in the comments section who couldn’t be bothered to actually read the article.

Politics: We have both major California parties here in Sonoma County — the left and the lefter. Often times our policy debates will devolve into bitter battles over whether all farmers market bags should be sustainably grown — or the more stringent biodynamically grown-and-100-percent-post-consumer-waste hemp.

There are reports of a rare Republican wandering into our area, the classic kind that existed on “Firing Line.” They are so rarely found in the wild here that political scientists will trap them using old copies of National Review, then tag them and release them back into the Mayacamas, in the hopes they may find a suitable mate.

SMART train: Remember BART and MUNI and whatever they call the light rail in the South Bay?

Here in Sonoma County we have SMART, which stretches all the way from Petaluma to Santa Rosa. It also goes to Marin, but since they kept voting against it, we still hold that grudge. Whereas BART and MUNI may have been an adventure in riding them, SMART is a great train with clean cars and friendly conductors.

It’s also convenient if you are planning to go from, say, a mile away from the Sonoma County airport to a mile away from downtown Petaluma. Eventually it will connect Larkspur in the south (extended in late 2019 to near the ferry terminal) to Cloverdale in the north (has depot but no service). That will happen, said another way, “when your grandkids have great-grandkids.”

Tourism and hospitality: One of our major industries, but by no means the largest. (That honor goes to government in all its iterations.)

Sonoma County has a tenuous relationship to tourism, as it’s only been part of the economy since the 1870s and may not catch on.

Many locals will happily propound about the problems of having people come visit and spend money in locally owned businesses while also extolling the wonders of their mind-opening trip to South Asia while Tibetan prayer flags flutter from their porch, which were purchased at Anthropologie.

Wine: Sonoma’s main claim to fame. While it may seem like we are surrounded by vineyards, they are actually only 6 percent of our total land use in Sonoma County, roughly the same as the amount we require for parking at WalMart.

Sonoma County is the first wine region dedicated to being 100 percent sustainably certified, an admirable goal and one that shows the majority of the farmers are interested in good stewardship.

For the next few months, you’re going to hear from the vineyards — quite literally when the wind machines kick in at 3 a.m. These serve to keep the frost from settling on the tender buds of the grapevines while also reminding you of your old apartment under final approach at SFO.

Later you might be alarmed to see vineyard workers in coverall suits spraying the vines. They’re just applying purple paint to the grapes — perfectly normal.

Further reading: If you are looking for more information about your new home please visit your local visitors center. We are friendly people with maps and details on where to hike, restaurants to try and safety tips for visiting wild places like “The River” and the coast. Welcome home!

Tim Zahner is the executive director of Sonoma Valley Visitors Bureau.