The new mayor of Sonoma, Joanne Sanders, announced earlier this week that she will keep a regular “office” hour at City Hall, where Sonoma residents and other interested persons can meet with her individually.
We applaud the initiative to try something new, and hope that fellow citizens do take advantage of this opportunity. Not that council members have been particularly difficult to contact, but this will make it even easier to have “the ear” of someone high up in local government.
Not surprisingly, we at the Sun tend to monitor local government more closely than most, and part of the pleasure we have is watching how different leaders conduct the affairs of the council, as mayor, and similarly how the presidents of the school board and the hospital board run those other noteworthy organizations. The variation from year to year is a healthy attribute of this form of governance, where day-to-day matters are handled by a manager/superintendent/chief executive that is hired rather than elected.
At Tuesday’s school board meeting, outgoing president Nicole Abaté Ducarroz made the keen observation that “the pace of the pack is determined by its leader.” We see firsthand that how the meetings are organized, and how they are run, can indeed affect the pace, content, and in some cases even the outcome of the discussion. (Congratulations, by the way, to Camerino Hawing, the new school board president, who looked competent and confident wielding the gavel.)
So go meet Mayor Sanders, on some Monday between 3 and 4 p.m., upstairs at City Hall, in the Plaza. We’re sure she’d be pleased. No appointment is necessary.
Just how to access that space and the planned hiking trails has been the latest “hot” topic, and likely will be until the hospital board is ready to release cost figures for its new, staged proposal or polling data on what level of capital cost the community is willing to support.
In the meantime, many residents are taking sides on the issue of access to Montini from Fifth Street West over the question of whether the cows will remain in the lower pasture, as reportedly dairy cows (the kind there now) aren’t suited for direct contact with the general public. We like cows, too; their presence is a sure sign that Sonoma is a country town, and provides a good indication that we, as a community, are still preserving our rural heritage.
We agree with the council’s consensus that the problem goes away if the California State Parks will accommodate access to the Montini open space through its Vallejo Home property. Apparently, though, that’s a political issue over “turf,” literally. We trust there’s a compromise that keeps cows and councils happy, and we hope it happens soon.
