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What’s Happening
Local Sonoma Valley News

Hospital Hires Consultant as New CEO

At a lightly attended meeting Tuesday evening, the Sonoma Valley Hospital board selected Carl Gerlach as its new Chief Executive Officer. While his actual title is "interim CEO," Gerlach was frank about wanting the position to be "interim" for as short a time as possible.... Continue

Foster Dogs

The Humane Society & SPCA of Sonoma County is launching a foster dog program to place current canine residents of the Humane Society into loving and highly trained foster homes. The program was created for those dogs that have special-training needs and that require one-on-one... Continue

Hospital CEO Kowal, boardmember MacConaghy step down

Hoping to improve the odds that voters will approve a hospital parcel tax, Robert Kowal, the CEO of the Sonoma Valley Hospital, and John MacConaghy, a hospital board member, this week resigned from their posts. At presstime, Kowal’s resignation wasn’t official. The hospital board was... Continue

Council takes disability awareness tour

On Friday afternoon, the Sonoma City Council toured portions of the plaza and wheeled down Broadway as far as the Sonoma Post Office propelled by their own arm muscles. Each councilmember was in a wheelchair as part of a disability-barrier awareness tour. The city council,... Continue

Home-grown, 62-year-old insurance company beats the odds

When a longtime client of North Bay Insurance received a form from the government that she couldn’t understand, she stuck it in her purse and walked the few blocks from the Post Office on Broadway to the insurance company’s offices on McDonell Street and knocked... Continue

More Personnel Changes Soon at Hospital?

California law requires that government bodies post agendas before their meetings, in order for the public to have advance notice of what will be discussed. Often, one has to read between the lines to guess at what to expect, particularly for closed sessions, where personnel... Continue

Hospital saga continues

The effort to build a new, earthquake-safe Sonoma Valley Hospital took various twists and turns during the past eight days. Hospital board member John MacConaghy questioned what he called the "rather scandalous financial history" of Henry Grause, the man who initiated the proposal for Cirrus... Continue

Blotter

Hot water At 11:15 p.m., deputies were dispatched to the Lodge at Sonoma on Broadway and Leveroni to investigate a gentleman who decided to enjoy the resort’s hot tub facilities without being a paying guest. When asked by police if he was a guest at... Continue

Off-Broadway Cleaners

They survived the wash-'n'-wear polyester years, struggled through hard times when the denim-wearing folks of Sonoma Valley thought dry cleaning was only for affluent city people. She sweet-talked bill collectors while he made deliveries. They worked six days a week, and on the seventh, he... Continue

Taser protest scheduled today on Plaza

A Sonoma woman is organizing a protest at 4 p.m. today (Thursday) on Sonoma’s Plaza calling for a “Taser-free Sonoma” because an officer used the electric stun-gun to zap her 15-year-old son on Dec. 20. “We have a trigger-happy police force with dangerous weapons that... Continue