The Sonoma City Council will be conducting its yearly goal setting session on January 30. This public meeting will not be held in the usual City Council Meeting room on 1st Street West, but at the Lodge in Sonoma on Broadway.
This will be an opportunity for the residents of Sonoma to share their ideas about how the city should focus its attention during the next year, and for our elected leaders to share their goals too. Sharing aspirations is fine, but we hope to hear some measurable, practical ideas about improving our community that can actually be accomplished.
A lofty goal like creating additional affordable housing is admirable, but is mere virtue signaling if not connected to specific policies and implementation measures that make it not only possible, but probable. And unless the City of Sonoma can make major financial gains, not much of anything can happen, and certainly not something bold.
No city can just snap its fingers to make big things happen; planning for change is a process, not an event. Improving the city’s finances requires a plan, and that plan must include a realistic appraisal of the time, resources and talent that can be brought to bear on crafting it. When it comes to talent, we have an enormous pool of it right here among our residents, but too often it’s neglected. If ever, now’s the time to tap into it.
Bold initiatives and projects were undertaken by the city in the past, but it’s been a long time since anything like that happened. Class One bike paths, acquisition and preservation of hillside open space, substantial affordable housing developments; these all happened long ago. Has the opportunity for bold actions passed us by? Is it the fate of Sonoma to simply tread water going forward? We hope not, but it’s probable unless we begin to think differently.
The recent sales tax increase will do little more than fill the hole in our General Fund budget. A complete forensic analysis and realignment of our financial structure has to happen for anything to change in a major way. The world around us is changing rapidly, but we are not keeping up. Why?
Part of the answer is that local government has no competition, and accordingly there’s less pressure to change. The practices of efficiency, productivity and responsiveness that keep business enterprises sharp and successful are not as high a priority for government. Government is slow, sometimes downright glacial in its rate of change, but not the rest of the world; technology is rapidly bringing waves of transformation to nearly every sector of life.
If there is one certainty, it’s environmental change. In her recent interview in this paper we were pleased to read that our new Mayor Patricia Farrar-Rivas believes making the environment central to planning for the future will boost our fortunes – economically, culturally, and recreationally. Unless we can protect this Valley’s natural beauty and health, and improve resiliency, all is lost. We look forward to learning about the City Council’s specifics.
This brings us back to money. Without enough money, there’s little the city can accomplish. If it were up to us, the five top goals for the City of Sonoma for the next year would be money, money, money, money, and money. We’d like to invite a public dialog about how we can generate more of it, and spend existing funds more creatively.
Sonoma Valley Sun Editorial Board
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