by Brett Wilkison, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
A Sonoma County judge has struck down the approval for a controversial rock quarry west of Cotati, saying key parts of the environmental impact report were inadequate. The final ruling, issued Thursday by Judge Elliot Daum, could derail the project by requiring the county and quarry developer John Barella to conduct a new environmental report, or overhaul large parts of the existing one.
via Sonoma County judge strikes down Roblar Road quarry OK | PressDemocrat.com.
Category: Land Use
County panel denies Hop Kiln Winery's expansion bid
by Bob Norberg, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Hop Kiln Winery’s proposal for a major expansion was denied by Sonoma County officials Thursday as being out of scale with the rural Westside Road.
Westside Grapes, the owner of Hop Kiln, was also told by the Board of Zoning Adjustments that it needs to resolve lingering illegal uses on the property and come back with a proposal for a new production facility.
via County panel denies Hop Kiln Winery’s expansion bid | PressDemocrat.com.
Opponents of Roblar Road quarry win round in court
by Brett Wilkison, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
A Sonoma County judge has sided with key points in a lawsuit challenging approval of the controversial Roblar Road rock quarry, a move that could derail the project west of Cotati.
A split county Board of Supervisors approved the 70-acre project in late 2010 over the objections of a group of neighbors and others concerned about environmental impacts.
via Opponents of Roblar Road quarry win round in court | Petaluma360.
Guerneville Road SMART Station Plan goes to the Planning Commission
Santa Rosa Planning Commission: Thursday, May 24, 4:00 pm
Santa Rosa City Council Chambers, 100 Santa Rosa Avenue, Santa Rosa
After months of public meetings and workshops, the Guerneville Road SMART Station Area Plan will be up for a vote at the Santa Rosa Planning Commission on Thursday. One important piece currently included in the plan is the bike/pedestrian bridge over Hwy 101 connecting the Santa Rosa Junior College on the east to Coddingtown and the SMART station on the west. For information about other issues and comments on the Plan see the following evaluation by Greenbelt Alliance.
http://www.greenbelt.org/general/santa-rosa-planning-commission-to-vet-the-plan-for-smart-station-at-guerneville-road/
Public meetings regarding keeping State Parks open
Press Release: Stewards of the Coast and Redwoods
Responding to further State Parks cut-backs, Stewards of the Coast and Redwoods (Stewards) announces two public meetings. Over the past two years, campgrounds and coastal access sites have been closed and further closures may be coming. Working with local State Park staff, Stewards is considering ways to offset the closures. The public is invited to hear about plans to keep Austin Creek State Recreation Area and Sonoma Coast State Park open and share your ideas as well.
The meetings will be held in Bodega Bay and Monte Rio:
Bodega Bay Meeting
Wednesday, June 6, 2012, 6-7:30
Bodega Bay Grange
1370 Bodega Ave. Bodega Bay
Monte Rio Meeting
Monday, June 11, 2012, 6-7:30
Monte Rio Community Center
20488 Highway 116, Monte Rio
For more information: http://www.stewardsofthecoastandredwoods.org/news/2012/news20120515.htm
Fall of the redwood empire
Alastair Bland, NORTH BAY BOHEMIAN
Clearcutting for vineyards is nothing new in wine country. Can it be stopped?
This past Oct. 11, in a rare instance of a local politician speaking out publicly against a member of the North Bay’s influential winemaking community, Sonoma County supervisor Efren Carrillo lambasted winemaker Paul Hobbs for uprooting hundreds of trees in Sebastopol and adding one more open wound to a Russian River watershed already impacted by erosion and sediment.
Carrillo called Hobbs "one bad apple," and noted that the globally renowned maker of high-end wines hadn’t bothered to acquire a permit to remove the trees, part of the old Davis Christmas Tree farm, which Hobbs is planning to buy and convert to vines. It was one of three instances this year in which Hobbs has cut down trees to the dismay of onlookers; he leveled 10 acres in Pocket Canyon just east of Guerneville, and eight acres of redwood trees along Highway 116 on land acquired in a court settlement from his neighbor John Jenkel.
"Paul Hobbs has shown a blatant disregard for Sonoma County, its resources, his fellow vintners and community sentiment," Carrillo declared in his editorial, printed in the Sonoma County Gazette.
But local environmentalists feel Carrillo’s outburst needs to be echoed a hundred times over. To Jim Doerksen, who has lived in the Mayacamas Mountains for 44 years and has watched local streams sucked dry as wineries near his property have been built, Carrillo’s words on Hobbs only amplify the silence that nearly all officials have kept toward the local wine industry through years of alleged environmental abuse.
"Efren said Hobbs is ‘one bad apple,’" Doerksen says, "but all we have are bad apples."
Doerksen points straight to his neighbors, whom he charges with illegally cutting down about 60 acres of conifers to plant vineyards. This activity, along with overuse of the area’s groundwater, has virtually destroyed Mark West Creek, a story covered in January in the Bohemian.
via Fall of the Redwood Empire | Features | North Bay Bohemian.
How wine rules
Darwin Bond-Graham and Will Parrish, ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER
If you’ve followed the Anderson Valley Advertiser for any length of time, you’re no doubt aware that the wine industry wields inordinate political power, not only here on the North Coast, but at the state-wide level also. Whether they’re fighting to prevent regulation of their enormous appetite for water, or greasing the political gears for a big forest-to-vineyard conversion, the wine industry’s major players are deeply involved in politics. As case after case has shown, the wine industry tends to get its way with respect to water, zoning, labor laws, subsidies, and more. But what is it, specifically, that makes the grape-based booze industry so powerful?
For one thing, there’s the cultural stature of the beverage itself. To appreciate fine wine is to signify membership in a learned, privileged order. No other luxury item is as capable of serving as an expression of ruling class solidarity as premium wine. And, it should be noted — if only for the purposes of this particular article – that California’s ruling class certainly includes most of its elected officials and many of its would-be regulators.
Every bit as important is the fact that the wine business has become a juggernaut of free market capitalism (although underwritten partly by taxpayers, as per the socialism-for-the-rich structure of the larger economy). The California wine industry annually reaps about $20 billion in revenue, much of it through exports to Europe, Canada, and Asia. The industry has become so profitable that most of the North Coast’s officials, from county supervisors to members of Congress have internalized the notion that, perforce, their role is to do virtually everything they can to facilitate the industry’s continued growth.
That’s especially the case owing to the wine industry’s thorough integration with Northern California’s all-important real estate sector. More than any other artifact or image, it is the vineyard and wine glass that have come to epitomize the “good life” of Northern California for a global market of real estate investors, vacation-takers, and home buyers. Crushed grapes and autumnal vineyards became a symbol, and an important economic component, of the region’s land boom in the 1990s and 2000s. The grape-alcohol plantations, fetishized as “family estates,” or “small farm vineyards” served, through a peculiar symbiosis, to both “preserve” the pastoral countryside, while simultaneously increasing land values, thereby creating a market for both McMansions and tract housing, and all the attendant gentrification and sprawl that was the basis of economic growth between San Francisco and the Oregon border until 2008.
Goldeneye: Anderson Valley’s Mercenary Vineyard?
Will Parrish, ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER
If you want to mark a point-of-no-return in the Anderson Valley’s transformation into a full-on satellite of the Napa-Sonoma industrial viticulture complex, as good a choice as any is Duckhorn Vineyards’ takeover of three properties outside of Philo and Boonville in the late-’90s. Founded by a Napa investment banker named David Duckhorn in the 1970s, Duckhorn had by then established itself as one of St. Helena’s most successful vintibusinesses. Wine Spectator put it thusly: “Duckhorn Vineyards’ arrival in Mendocino County… caps the emergence of the Anderson Valley as a prime, Pinot noir appellation.”
In one of the wine industry’s characteristic superficial nods to local cultural artifacts and the natural environment, Duckhorn named its local wine label Goldeneye, after the black and white seaduck whose northward migratory pathway includes the Anderson Valley.
via Goldeneye: Anderson Valley’s Mercenary Vineyard? | Anderson Valley Advertiser.
When They Came For The Navarro
Will Parrish, ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER
The North Coast wine industry has long acted out a pathological conviction that it is entitled to virtually every single drop of water in every watershed it touches. As in the case of Sonoma County’s recent frost protection ordinance, which I detailed in the December 14 Anderson Valley Advertiser, the industry routinely rises up as one — along with their local government allies — to quash any restrictions on its ability to draw water with accustomed impunity, though that particular ordinance is now threatened by disagreements, it seems, about the degree of non-regulation the big corporate growers find acceptable. Yet, there are few industries more in need of restrictions on their water use.
In the past 20 years, the North Coast’s alcohol farmers have dried up countless creeks and streams, while choking off rivers and filling in their spawning pools with monumental amounts of sediment (entire hillsides worth). They have, moreover, poisoned what water remains with the full menu of chemical fertilizers, soil fumigants, growth hormones, herbicides, defoliants, fungicides, pesticides, and systemic poisons most growers use to ensure the bounty and sterility of their crops.
via When They Came For The Navarro | Anderson Valley Advertiser.
Anderson Valley, Tentacle Of The Wine Grape Octopus
Will Parrish, ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER
“When at last the land, worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else; by then they would have all made fortunes.”
— Frank Norris, The Octopus, 1901
One of California agribusiness’ oldest traditions is clearing huge swaths of land to plant orchards and vineyards. On the western slopes of the Santa Clara Valley, the newly-arrived class of prospector capitalists felled the dense chaparral and oak savannah to make way for the state’s first commercial vineyard in 1850, as well as the apple, date, prune, and apricot trees. The valley was the west coast’s banner fruit-producing region up to the 1960s. In the 1870s, out-of-towners arrived on the newly-constructed Southern Pacific rail line in the hamlet of Los Angeles, where they cleared the abundant native grasslands and chaparral of the San Gabriel foothills. For many years thereafter, that future megalopolis was the US’ primary citrus growing area.
Massive water diversions have always followed soon after the land clearances. Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire and Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert most famously chronicled California’s damming and moving of prodigious amounts of water, primarily to meet the demands of the state’s much-vaunted industrial farmers.
via Anderson Valley, Tentacle Of The Wine Grape Octopus | Anderson Valley Advertiser.