Coalition presents and explains

At what was billed as its last public presentation, the Sonoma Valley Health Care Coalition attracted some 50 local residents to Burlingame Hall on Monday evening. About half of those in attendance had served on the coalition’s steering or options committees, with the rest of the audience apparently having followed the hospital issue since last year.
Bruce Stephens, who had assembled the original “Broadway” site, asked frankly whether the coalition had failed by not finally picking a specific site. Steering committee co-chair Bob Edwards summarized the coalition’s rationale, saying, “Neither site had the votes in the Valley to win approval, according to [coalition polling expert] Chuck Rund, so we couldn’t recommend either one in its present form.” The coalition’s recommendation, therefore, was simply to tell the hospital board that it should pursue changes in both sites, to make them more likely to win voter approval. If the board finds that one of the sites can be improved in that way, presumably that would be the proposal put before the voters.
The change contemplated for the “in-town” option is to utilize the Carinalli property (earlier known as the Cuneo site), instead of the Perkins Street office complex, in order to make the building areas more accessible. In response to a question, steering committee member Peter Haywood said that the first meeting with a lawyer for Carinalli was scheduled to take place on Wednesday.
At the Broadway site, the change would be to add parcels to the north, so that all the buildings can be constructed within the city’s urban growth boundary. Steering committee member Gary Nelson addressed the question of how the Serafinis and other parcel owners would be “co-developers” by saying that those relationships remained to be negotiated and could take any number of forms.
Peggy Bair, a member of the options committee, questioned why the steering committee had rejected her committee’s final selection of the Broadway site by a reported vote of 22-7-1, which would represent a 73 percent approval. Since they are self-selected groups, there was some question as to which coalition committee, if either, was truly representative of ultimate voter sentiment.
The coalition was due to present its recommendation to the hospital’s strategic planning committee on Wednesday and then to the full hospital board on May 30.