“Sonoma 95476”

In case you hadn’t heard it before, this is the slogan coined by Sonoma Mayor Joanne Sanders to capture her feeling that Sonoma Valley is a single, cohesive community. Well, at least a contiguous community – we’ll see with the hospital’s Measure F just how cohesive we really are.
We’ve heard Sanders speak on this issue, and her logic is persuasive that we all view ourselves as Sonoma residents, whether we live actually inside the city limits or outside. While at one time the Sonoma city limits circumscribed a unique, geographically separate community, those boundaries are now arbitrary.
Both the school district and the health care district serve the adjoining areas of Schellville, Vineburg, Sonoma (city), El Verano, Boyes, Fetters and Agua Caliente. The zip code 95476 stops at Madrone Road, though the two districts continue north to include Eldridge and Glen Ellen.
But the water services are different between city and county, garbage service is different, and so is public works maintenance. Police jurisdiction is different, as are fire services, ambulance services, building permits, and dog licenses. Some of these differences have started to blur, now that the city contracts with the Sonoma County Sheriff for law enforcement, and now that the city’s ambulances serve the whole valley.
There remain, however, fundamental differences, chief among them being local government. The city has an established structure of an elected city council, a hired city manager and a half-dozen committees and commissions, all local. All city meetings are readily accessible, and the council meetings are even carried live on the local cable channel. For those who live outside city limits, “government” is in Santa Rosa, to whom Sonoma Valley is just one of numerous communities in a sprawling county whose major city alone has four times the population of the entire Sonoma Valley.
There are, as they say, two elephants in the room, so let’s acknowledge them. First is the Springs redevelopment agency, expecting an infusion of cash from action next month by the county supervisors. That’s good, and long overdue, and not a reason to deny local government to the area, since oversight for the new funding can be expected to shift to whatever local agency arises, whether it’s the City of Sonoma or a new city.
The bigger elephant is the Transit Occupancy Tax revenue generated by the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa. Some have suggested that it could never be pried from the county’s control, or coffers. Maybe. While the foremost issue for us is the potential for the Springs to benefit from having local government, the resort’s hotel tax could be the economic engine driving neighborhood renewal.
We think the time has come for all of “Sonoma” to have local government. We admire Sanders for her willingness use the mayoral mantle to push that issue. As the discussion continues over the coming months, we’ll raise concerns about certain aspects, but for now, we add our voice to the calls for the issue to be discussed. The time has come.
Unveiled and Unlabeled
A letter to the editor this week (printed nearby) suggests that the Sun might be “a veiled liberal rag,” based on our editorial comment two weeks ago, in observing the uniformity of Democrat sentiment among local high school students, that “Maybe it’s the idealism of youth that is attracted to the promises more often heard among Democrats that government can and should solve society’s problems.”
What was left unsaid, though we had thought it was implied, is that government cannot solve such problems nor should it try. Readers of this column know our consistent position that government intrudes into personal lives and economic transactions in ways that might make our Founding Fathers revolt anew. Hillary Clinton’s proposal to garnishee workers’ wages to pay for mandatory health insurance is merely the latest example.
We had posed the key question in our editorial’s title, “What are they learning?” The letter writer makes the answer explicit: “liberal ideology.” Thank you.