Tolay or not Tolay?

#147, August 4, 2004

 

Some people got some ‘splainin’ to do.

 

Starting with Clark Thompson. Last January, I wrote here in support of Councilmember Keith Canevaro’s appointment of Clark to serve during Keith’s military leave. I believed Clark had no political ax to grind; that he would pursue the assignment with integrity. I was pleased, several months ago, when he voted for Councilmember Healy’s Sonoma Mountain Parks resolution. That advisory measure simply “encourages (State and) local government officials to work together to create a park and trail system of regional significance on Sonoma Mountain.” After the vote, Thompson said he wanted to bring the resolution back for a reconsideration vote, to add a provision for public participation in the process. Good idea, I thought.

 

Supporters of the resolution found out the day before the second vote that “reconsideration” had been changed to “repeal.” And sure enough, it was repealed, with swing vote Thompson swinging in line with Sonoma Mountain privatizers Peter Pfendler and friends. What’s more, the resolution, which had been approved before a large public audience in an evening session, was killed in a sparsely attended afternoon session. Clark explained that he had some (private) conversations with State officials and (privately) reached the conclusion that the state wasn’t interested.

 

But the point of the resolution was to *get* the State interested. Clark, when you led the successful lobbying effort to get Federal money to finish Petaluma’s flood fix, you didn’t turn and run the first time some bureaucrat said no. Why did you so easily give up on Sonoma Mountain? Why wouldn’t you insist that our State Senator John Burton and the Directors of State Parks and Coastal Conservancy at the very least come tour the mountain with you? Why the “stealth” repeal, the kind of sneaky Council tactics that in 1996 led 6000 Petalumans to sign the “Keep Lafferty” initiative?

 

Council Member Moynihan: why did you support a similar resolution before the Parks Commission last year, and then vote against it this year? Why does your website call for a “compromise” on Lafferty that’s identical to Peter Pfendler’s plan, embodied in a 1996 initiative that gathered around 4000 signatures, over 3000 of them forgeries?

 

Supervisor Kerns has the right approach. He got the County Road Department to back off the demand for AASHTO standards on the access road, now requiring that it meet only County “Fire Safety Standards.” He’s not considering the fire risk to be a showstopper; nor does he say the presence of sensitive flora and fauna should restrict visits to docent-led tours; nor does he seem worried about the impact of a high volume of park visitors on the surrounding farms and ranches. He knows that offers from willing landowners need to be jumped on, so, despite the budget crisis at all levels of government, he is aggressively lobbying for funding.

 

But Mr. Kerns: why are you applying these standards only to the Cardoza’s Tolay Lake Ranch, and not to Sonoma Mountain? Marv and Rita Cardoza gave me a nice hayride tour of their property a few weeks ago. Its broad valley, future lake, and open meadows would make a nice complement to the high peaks, streams, and woodlands of Lafferty Park and the Mitsui Trail to Jack London Park. If you applied the Tolay standards equally to Tolay and Sonoma Mountain, we might soon be enjoying parklands in both locations. That would be great! We deserve both. But if you continue to apply an unprecedented standard to Sonoma Mountain, you are not just foregoing a unique opportunity to create inexpensive mountain top parkland (Mitsui’s trail is free, and Lafferty is already publicly owned, needed only a tiny fraction of the Tolay outlay for a Pfendler defense fund.) You are inviting other affluent privacy extremists to “Laffertize” Tolay or some other park project you support. You – and we -- will be left with nothing.

 

Council Members Thompson and Moynihan, and SUpervisor Kerns: Who is directing our open space parks policy Sonoma Mountain? When are you going to reject this expensive and dangerous double standard?