As most folks living in or around Sonoma know by now, unless they’ve been distracted by Syria, Egypt, devastating wildfires or nuclear radiation on its way from Fukushima, the hotel issue has been given an official name with capital letters, Measure B, and will go to a vote on November 19.
Just to recap for the unaware or uninterested, the Measure if passed will limit the size of new hotels in the City to 25-rooms until the current hotel annual occupancy rate significantly increases. The details of all this has generated a good deal of newspaper ink, online cyberspace, and interpersonal palaver of a seemingly endless stream of opinions available for all to see.
Not unusually, and as such land-use issues have in the past, lines of divide have formed based on feelings pro or con, feelings have been hurt by allegations, innuendo and personal attacks, and a political/economic/quality-of-life issue has deteriorated into name-calling, schoolyard bullying and character condemnation.
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This is both unfortunate and par for the course.
It brings to mind a very similar – with some variances – community divide over the proposed development of Sonoma’s signature hillside backdrop in 2000. In that case the dispute was whether that land, which now boasts the Overlook Trail, should be used for a high-end hotel and resort known as Rosewood, or if it was to remain as open space for the visual and hiking enjoyment of the public free of any commercial development. Then as now opinions divided, battle lines were drawn and sometimes tempers flared and invectives hurled. Same old, same old.
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Anyway, it finally came to a vote, public open space was chosen, and people went back to their lives and an impending war in the Middle East and a future economic crisis of major import.
Like then the current Hotel Limitation Measure will be decided by the townsfolk, seems only fitting, and hopefully lives will go back to busy or mundane, and strained interpersonal relationships will be repaired and reconstructed.
As we well know, democracy is messy and politics, at any level, is even messier and at its core disruptive.
The point of this blog is to ask all parties engaged in this current issue, pro and con, myself included, to ease on the inflammatory rhetoric and bad-mouthing of the “other” side, stick to the facts or even the personal interpretations of the matter before us, and let the issue be resolved by a vote of the people.
Like the boxing ref says: Let’s have a good, clean fight. No hitting below the belt, no rabbit punches, and no head butting in the clinches.
