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Health & Fitness

Visions of the Future

Maybe it comes down to how one wants the town to develop – what it looks like and how it feels – as we slide into the future. As to the look of it, that’s an easy concept to grasp. We can look around at other towns similar in size and setting to ours and see what we like about them or not. We can look around our own burg and see what we like or not about it: too many of these kinds of businesses, not enough of those; too many tourists, not enough tourists; more city and less country or vice versa. You get the idea.  

The people who support Preserving Sonoma and the Initiative to limit the size of new hotels want to keep the town small, easy-going in pace and atmosphere, and commercial development on a scale with its historical character and charm. It’s these qualities that brought many of us to settle here, raise families and become part of a vibrant, engaged and caring community.  We are not remotely opposed to change, or anti business, or opposed to hotels as such, as had been suggested. That’s utter nonsense certain development interests would have people believe. Preserving Sonoma is comprised of active or former business people and professionals.  

We are, however, for change that enhances the experience of living here. We choose to live here for the quality of life benefits one can still enjoy here. Sonoma blends a good mix of rural, semi-rural, and small city with enough cosmopolitan diversity and sophistication to make it interesting. Some of us value the horse pastures close to town, vineyards that butt up to the city proper, surrounding hillsides pretty free of houses and the eccentric people that make this a more interesting place. Why are some so hell bent on changing that which makes us unique in our cookie-cutter corporate world, and a desired destination for those very reasons?  

Some are out there banging the drum for more luxury hotels, more restaurants, more tasting rooms, more, more and more. Do they really think that will improve the quality of their lives? Is there ever a point at which such thinking says, “Well, that seems to be quite enough”? I don’t think so. I think these folks are never satisfied, and like sharks have to keep moving, so it’s said, there are those who can never rest in the notion of enough. They want constant change and they want more (of everything), and this drive is never satisfied, nor is it sustainable locally or on a larger scale.  

This is not progress and will inevitably lead to a collapse under its own weight. More hotels with more empty rooms – 35% annual vacancy rates – is not a sustainable or viable economic policy. The larger hotels in Sonoma are being subsidized through an additional tax, amounting to about $450,000 in 2012, so they can improve occupancy rates. Okay, improve these rates to 80% occupancy to justify the City-bestowed subsidy, or build smaller hotels of 25 rooms or less. And, yes, the smaller hotels, and B & Bs, and inns, etc., are all surviving quite well, so please no crocodile tears that hotels have to be 60 or 100 rooms to be economically feasible. Reality paints a different picture. Greed, on the other hand, creates a reality distortion field.  

So there are different and differing visions of how we see Sonoma, and that brings us to how all this is being played out in our little town’s court of public opinion.  

As a founding member of Preserving Sonoma I can say unequivocally that it was our objective and agreed mandate that we would be truthful and accurate about what we espoused and why in all public pronouncements and in private dealings with all others. I can state with certainty that we have remained true to this course. And, no, this does not mean we can control everything that is said, including misinterpretations or even misleading information voiced publicly or privately. There are Preserving Sonoma supporters – not members of the founding Committee – who have not adhered to our policy of strictly truthful and accurate information, or even conducted themselves in ways we might find objectionable, but that’s the way of contemporary politics (maybe has always been), and there’s little to nothing that can be done about it.  

However, there has been deliberate obfuscation and downright false information disseminated by some factions that oppose Preserving Sonoma’s basic position and premise for bringing the hotel issue to a ballot initiative to be voted on by Sonoma residents. First there was a phony-baloney “survey/poll” using leading questions and blatantly biased wording about the issue, paid for by a hotel developer. Then a phony “grass-roots” group advocating unlimited hotels popped up, also paid for by the same hotel developer, spreading yards of fertilizer masquerading as “facts,” which subsequently they’ve retracted. Note to phony group: Opinions are not facts. Third grade English Language students know that.  

None of these kinds of machinations are new to politics, here or elsewhere, but it’s tiresome and insulting to the intelligence of Sonoma voters, and furthermore it’s underhanded and dishonest. What isn’t insulting are the facts of the matter, and those can be found at www.preservingsonoma.com.  

Sonoma can’t fill the hotel rooms it has now, and it makes absolutely no sense to add more hotels and empty rooms until the circumstances warrant it. And the fact of the matter is unless it’s written into the General Plan there is nothing to prevent more new larger hotels, and more and more as space opens up. I’m betting most people will see that rather simple equation.

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