On October 8, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors approved the Mitigated Negative Declaration for the Arnold Drive Bike Lane Project. That was cause for celebration.
The project will include bike lanes that are five-feet wide on each side of Arnold Drive, with a painted buffer, from Country Club Drive to Madrone Road. These are the narrowest sections of Arnold Drive, extending past either side of the roundabout at Agua Caliente Road. In the coming months, next steps will include putting together the final design, and a competitive bidding process for the construction contract. But our action on October 8 was a major step forward. I am so grateful to our Department of Public Infrastructure for their creativity and problem solving, and I could not be more excited to be moving forward.
Those who have read my column over the years are well aware that this milestone has been a long time coming. The project, which we expect to be underway in 2025, will provide much-needed safety improvements for cyclists who use Arnold Drive to get to and from work and school, as well as for recreation, and as an alternative to vehicular traffic on our busy Sonoma Valley roads. I can safely say that I have been working on this for nearly my entire tenure as Supervisor, and as my final months as First District Supervisor wind down, I could not think of a greater bookend to my time in office – even if I still have to wait a little bit longer to use the bike lanes myself.
In my retirement, I have decided that I want to continue to use my accumulated experience, patience and perseverance to volunteer my time to help move additional bike lane and bike path projects forward. Among the projects I plan to work on in retirement are the Sonoma Valley Trail, a 13-mile planned multi-use trail from Santa Rosa city limits to the Springs area, and the Sonoma–Schellville Trail, both long in the works bike path projects still in their early stages. At the October 15 meeting of the North Sonoma Valley Municipal Advisory Council (MAC), I asked representatives from Sonoma County Regional Parks to join me to provide an update on these bike path projects, a conversation I supplemented with some thoughts on the often challenging and time-consuming process of advocating for bike projects in Sonoma County. The amount of years it takes to get a project off the ground, the number of agencies required to coordinate a bike project, the cobbling together of funding sources – it is daunting, to say the least.
Our Regional Parks staff joined me at the meeting and shared some exciting updates on these Sonoma Valley projects. In addition to the aforementioned bike paths, Regional Parks also shared information on Hood Mountain, Calabazas Creek, Taylor Mountain, and Mark West Creek Regional Parks and Open Space Preserves, detailing their existing and planned multi-use paths that can be utilized by cyclists. It was a great opportunity to appreciate all the resources we currently have in the First District, and reinvigorating to think about all the projects and improvements we are planning for the future.
As all of these projects chug along, I want to encourage folks to stay engaged in their communities, and let you know that you can make a difference in advocating for the bike paths and bike lanes, even if it involves just talking with your neighbors, or working together to write a letter of support. In my final months in office and in retirement, I’ll be there right along side you. And to close, thank you to former Supervisor Valerie Brown for her initial work on widening Arnold Drive. This will complete the road widening, preparing for future development at the Hanna Center and Sonoma Developmental Center in the years to come.
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