Hospital votes unanimously to seek $45 million bond

The Dragon boys won an away contest that was no beauty, beating the Healdsburg Hounds 30-24 on Thursday evening and bringing Sonoma’s league record to a respectable 2-2.

On Thursday evening, for the second time in a week, the hospital board and a room full of community members gathered in the Community Center to decide whether to ask the community for $140 million or $45 million.
The meeting opened with a formal appreciation from board president Dick Kirk, who quoted Thomas Jefferson’s idea that politics is a conversation. “We’ve had conversations about this for about 10 years, and I’m sure the community is pretty tired of this,” he said. But, the time has come to get on with it. “We need to move past the acrimony to collaborate as a community,” he said, “and despite the differences that we have, I believe you’ll see a board that is cooperating.” And cooperate, they did, for no one would deny the current crisis.
Each side of the issue argued its point based on uncertainty. Proponents of the smaller figure held that what is needed now is to move toward stability, build community confidence, and ask for a figure they had confidence the community would support, with the stated expectation that they will ask for more in a couple of years. Proponents of the larger figure, which by last night had become limited to Bill Boerum, argued that a poll had shown the community would support a larger figure, and that in these uncertain times, with rising costs of everything, if they had to come back to the community for yet another bond, the cost, by then, could be even more. But, given the gravity of the situation, he said, as did the others, that he would go along with the majority vote, whatever that would be.
The bottom line was best summed up by Sam McCandless, of nearby Village Green, who said, when the public was invited to comment, “If we don’t get some bond in April I think that might be it. I don’t think we ought to take any avoidable risk. Go for the $45 million, then go for the other later. If we don’t get the $45 in April, I think we’re dead.”