Who will decide Springs’ destiny?

by Gina Cuclis

The editorial in the August 28 Sonoma Valley Sun, “The City of Boyes Hot Springs?,” touched on what has become a topic of discussion at Springs Community Alliance meetings and among residents concerned about how decisions impacting our community are made.

The topic has been “local governance.” That sounds bureaucratic, but what it means is the ability of people who live within a designated area to have the authority to make decisions about what happens in their community. As it stands now in the Springs, residents have little to no decision-making power over what happens in our community. An exception is the Valley of the Moon Water District, which is governed by a five member elected board and makes sure the water to our taps keeps flowing.

Decisions impacting the Springs are made by the five-member County Board of Supervisors, none of whom lives in the Springs. Contrast our situation with the residents of the City of Sonoma. They have the ability to vote for all five of their councilmembers, and those councilmembers, as city residents, are personally impacted by the decisions they make.

Let’s take vacation rentals as an example. The Sonoma City Council in 1999 enacted strict limitations on where vacation rentals could be located. That’s because the councilmembers could foresee what would happen in their own neighborhoods if they allowed the unlimited conversion of the city’s single family homes to vacation rentals. When the county supervisors passed a vacation rental ordinance in 2010, First District Supervisor Valerie Brown, then a Kenwood resident, was the only supervisor who had experience living in a neighborhood with vacation rentals. Therefore, little consideration was given to impact on neighborhoods. That’s why today residents throughout unincorporated Sonoma Valley are complaining about noise, traffic and the loss of community caused by vacation rentals in our neighborhoods.

The issue of local decision-making has also come up in recent discussions about the land use planning process the Springs will soon undergo. The County has received a $450,000 federal transportation grant to create a development plan for the Springs. The grant was awarded because several years ago the Board of Supervisors identified the Springs as where the county would locate transit-oriented development. The board did this as part of a nine Bay Area counties regional planning process, whereby each county and the major cities had to identify where they would locate transit oriented development. That means locating housing and commercial development by each other so that alternatives to traveling by car would be encouraged.

The local governance question is: Who gets to decide what goes into the Springs’ plan? Community input to provide ideas is one thing. Having a local panel of residents with the authority to decide what gets included in the plan is something else entirely. The grant requires the process to include a community advisory committee. But exactly what the authority of that committee will be is unclear.

I believe if this is truly to be a development plan that comes from the people of the Springs, then the committee should have more authority than just advice. It should be able to approve a recommended draft plan that would go to the Board of Supervisors for adoption. The process should include the committee having regularly scheduled public meetings, where public input is encouraged at each step. The committee should also guide the wider community engagement process and ensure that all information gathered through that process is discussed in public.

If the Springs were a city, there would be little question that the above would happen. The city’s planning commission, made up of city residents, would work with city staff and consultants at public meetings to draft a recommended plan, which would go to the city council for adoption.

Which brings me back to the “The City of Boyes Hot Springs?” editorial. Ultimately, the only way to have control over our destiny is to become a city. This was last explored in the mid-1980s by a group of Springs businesspeople and property owners. The economic study at the time determined there wasn’t enough commercial tax revenue from the area to support a city. Since then, the Sonoma Mission Inn has grown into a major destination resort and there are more businesses. While it may be that we aren’t financially ready yet, becoming a city is an idea worth exploring.