No Trade Off on Big Hotel vs. Living Wages

Editor:
Labor advocates were brilliant in leveraging support for Preserving Sonoma’s Hotel Limitation Measure to win promises of living wages for certain hotel workers from Kenwood Investments. Now I hope they’ll join forces to pass a city ordinance that would extend the salary scale to all lodging and maybe wine bars, too. In any case, supporting livable wages doesn’t mean that we must sign off on oversized hotels.

I’m collecting signatures to put the 25-room-limit hotel initiative on the city ballot. As a 25-year resident of Sonoma, I joined the campaign because I don’t want our town turned into a playground for the 1 percent. With new monied interests and wine-and-cheese elites growing in influence, it’s time for the rest of us who live, work, play and pray here to stand up and say enough is enough. That’s how we stopped Rosewood and the giant hospital/spa, and gained our Urban Growth Boundary. Democracy in action!

Most locals I’ve met say they favor limiting hotels to 25 rooms or less. Visitors, too. Even those who don’t like the measure have mostly been pleasant. We can do this civily! And have some fun, too.

Teri Shore
Sonoma