Let the people decide

Some proponents of more new large hotels advocate Sonoma growing bigger and faster in order to capture tourist dollars. I see it just the opposite. I say slow Sonoma down a little, and maintain that cool small-town feel and even more tourists will want to come here because they like our town the way it is, not developers’ visions of how it should be. 

Current hotels complain of only 64% annual occupancy, but say that the 80% occupancy rate called for in the ballot initiative before new hotels larger than 25 rooms are built is unrealistic. Then they say they have to have the right to expand, and to have more large hotels built. So on the one hand they want to fill empty rooms, but add to that more empty rooms. What sense does that make? 

The owners of Sonoma’s larger hotels came begging to the City last year, hats in hands, for a big fat handout so they could improve their yearly occupancy rates. Okay, said the city council, we’ll tack on a 2% increase to the TOT – Transient Occupancy Tax – and give that money to you guys to improve your occupancy rate. We’ll call this tax increase a Tourist Improvement District (TID) and you hotel folks can use the money however you see fit to goose up your occupancy. This tidy little handout came to about $450,000 last year! Nice deal, if you ask me. 

Now (some on) the city council tell us to let the process in place work. They say trust us to make the right decisions regarding hotel and other commercial development. We know best, say these city fathers ands mothers. 

Well I’m not so sure. Had we listened to the city council of the time, the Chamber of Commerce, prevailing realtors, the wine industry and the Index-Tribune we’d never have an Urban Growth Boundary and Sonoma would be built-out from Schellville to Boyes Springs. We would have gone into bond debt for decades building a new hospital and taking the land for it by eminent domain, and the hillside backdrop bequeathed to Sonoma by M. Vallejo would be the off limits private property domain of a luxury resort/hotel. And our historic Plaza would be chock-a-block with every corporate franchise just like every carbon-copy  downtown mall across the country. 

There comes a time when the citizenry of a place has to remind its chosen electeds that its capable of thinking and acting on its own accord, and will decide for itself what kind of a place it wants to be. That’s a decision for the people to make, not the city council or its appointed agencies, not the city manager, not hotel developers and their investors and not a newspaper that’s owned by a hotel developer. 

Come on, Sonoma, sign the petition to bring this issue to a ballot vote, and don’t lose sight of the reasons why you live here.