Penciling Out Redevelopment at the SDC by Tracy Salcedo

Apr 082024
 

Penciling Out Redevelopment at the SDC

On March 10, Sonoma Mountain Preservation (SMP) joined about 250 community members to protest plans for intensive, out-of-scale redevelopment of the former Sonoma Developmental Center campus. SMP’s vice chair, Tracy Salcedo, was the keynote speaker and delivered a heartfelt and informative speech, posted below:

I want to start by acknowledging that we all stand on the ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok, Pomo, and Wappo peoples, who are still here and still tending this place. Your wisdom and spirit are my inspiration.

I’d like you all to look up and out to the west.

That’s Sonoma Mountain, part of a range that stretches north to Taylor Mountain, on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, and south to Cougar Mountain, near the Sonoma Baylands.

The Sonoma Mountain Range is the focus of Sonoma Mountain Preservation, or SMP. I’m SMP’s vice chair. We’ve been advocating for open space preservation and access on the mountain since 1993, in partnership with many others around the county.

It’s helpful to think about how important this mountain and range are to everyone who lives near it by thinking about its watersheds and viewsheds.

Sonoma Mountain is the backdrop for Sears Point, Petaluma, Cotati, Rohnert Park, Santa Rosa, Sonoma, and unincorporated villages throughout the Sonoma Valley and beyond.

Sonoma Mountain’s creeks feed the Petaluma River watershed, the Russian River watershed, and the Sonoma Creek watershed.

Sonoma Mountain is in us. Sonoma Mountain nurtures us.

Now, I’d like you to follow the western slopes of Sonoma Mountain down to Sonoma Creek, across Sonoma Valley Regional Park, across Lake Suttonfield, and up into the Mayacamas Range. 

The mountain, and the land connected to it, are part of a wildlife corridor that stretches from the coast to Berryessa-Snow Mountain National Monument and beyond.

We humans aren’t the only ones who rely on this mountain for our health and well-being. So do bear and puma and salmon and newts and hawks and thrushes and snakes and raccoons. 

So do oaks and manzanita and redwoods and bunchgrasses and mushrooms and fiddlenecks and lupines and poppies. 

As many of you know, I’m a walker. In these days, I’ve been walking our newest state park lands with relief and gratitude. Together, we have set aside 650 acres of former SDC open space as a park.

A park.

That makes my heart sing.

But here’s the thing. We’ve got new parkland, but we’ve also got a development plan for this campus that presents a major threat to the viability and the promise of that park.

Consider the wildlife corridor.

As it stands, in this moment, the developer plans to erect a four-story resort hotel on a knoll within that corridor.

There would be demolition. There would be construction. Then this, which I can vouch for with recent experience, having just spent week in a resort hotel in San Francisco at the Public Lands Alliance conference.

The lights will be on all day and all night. People will come and go all day and all night. It will be a human corridor, not a wildlife corridor. A hotel in that place will put a crimp in a pinch point that is already delicate and tenuous.

Consider the impact on the open space surrounding the development.

One of the major themes of the Public Lands Alliance conference was the incredible growth in the number of people visiting parks in the last few years.

This has turned out to be a double-edged sword. To avoid overuse — to keep from loving the places to death — people need more open space. Acres and acres of open space.

This need has been studied and proven and is universal.

The 100 acres of open space that have been removed from redevelopment plans matter.

Now, consider the community voice.

We were promised a community-driven plan for this place. In that community-driven plan, preservation of open space was prioritized.

The plan presented by the developer, and the recent transfer of 50 acres of open space for construction of a separate CalFire campus, diminishes that open space not only in the number of acres, but also the density and placement of development. 

It doesn’t matter what local community you associate with. You could be labeled with any number of derogatory or local or progressive agendas.

But what we see here, in these newly revealed plans for the SDC, is not community-driven.

What we see here does not prioritize what the community knows is important.

What we see here is the imposition of narrow agendas conjured by bureaucrats that benefit a developer, not the community.

I am a storyteller. I’ve been telling the story of the SDC, and its redevelopment, in various venues and various ways over the last eight years, starting on the day I first visited the Glen Oaks Ranch and met the Sonoma Land Trust’s John McCaull, a diligent champion for this place.

We sat in his kitchen and considered the options, and that’s when he mentioned the Presidio Trust model — a model that has successfully integrated commercial enterprise and housing with preservation of critical open space.

With my collaborators — my Get it Right in My Backyard community (get it, GRIMBY)— I seek solutions. The Presidio Trust model was a solution. Unfortunately, that model fell off the table early, nixed by bureaucrats and politicians. 

But it still applies. Scaled down to SDC size, it models a solution. It may be challenging, but building a public-private partnership for this place, remains a possible and hopeful solution.

We stand here today on a campus. A campus is housing and education and enterprise. So let’s consider.

CalFire — bless them forever — wants to relocate and expand its headquarters here in the Sonoma Valley. The campus can accommodate that goal.

The Coastal Conservancy envisions a climate resiliency center. The campus can accommodate that goal.

The community envisions housing that people can afford — people like schoolteachers, medical professionals, public safety professionals, and essential workers. The campus can accommodate that goal.

Open space advocates envision redevelopment that supports a critical wildlife corridor and a vibrant park. A campus with scaled-down, environmentally sensitive redevelopment can accommodate that goal.

The developer envisions a project that will pencil out.

Pencil out. I still have no idea what that means.

But I do know that, in the trust model, everyone gets their pencils out. The designer, the park manager, the homebuilder, the home buyer, the advocate, the politician, the developer — they all get their pencils out.

They take their pencils out in the sunshine, where everyone can see.

They take their pencils out and they run numbers that are real.

They take their pencils out and design a redevelopment enhances lives, not endangers them.

They work together to scale their aspirations to the land.

It’s never too late to take the pencils out. This story isn’t finished. There are letters to write. For the sake of this mountain. For the sake of this place. 

The Urbanization of Sonoma Mountain

Jan 062024
 

The Urbanization of Sonoma Mountain

By Will Shonbrun

A sailor on horseback

“I ride over my beautiful ranch. Between my legs is a beautiful horse. The air is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smolders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreams and mysteries.” —John Barleycorn by Jack London, 1913

In 1905, Jack London, acclaimed author, world traveler, foreign correspondent, farmer, socialist, humanist, and courageous enjoyer of life, found the place that spoke to him on the side of Sonoma Mountain in what was known as the Valley of the Moon. He knew at first sight it was where he would set his roots and live his days with his beloved wife and companion, Charmian, farming and writing and thinking about the things that interested him. 

London didn’t buy what he and Charmian named Beauty Ranch to amass fortune, but to work the land and farm the soil using practices we now call sustainable agriculture by using nature’s innate elements for replenishing and replicating the natural growing cycles. His approach to stewarding the land was built on respect for its vital needs and the bounty it gifted. In this he mirrored and honored the Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the natural world over the thousands of years they’d lived there.

That’s all about to change.

Brief backstory

Most readers, especially residents of Sonoma Valley, know the backstory of the demise of the Sonoma Developmental Center (SDC), officially closed in 2018. The wrap-up comes down to this: The buyer intends to build about 1,000 houses, a 120-room hotel/resort, and provide commercial space for all the businesses needed to serve thousands of new residents and visitors on the 180-acre “core campus.” This plan would create a new town in the midst of a rural and wildlife-friendly region in the heart of Sonoma Valley. 

Urban sprawl on steroids

The state of California and Sonoma County are abandoning years of land-use decisions regarding urban infill and urban growth, decisions intended to prevent sprawl into greenbelts and open space. In so doing, both the state and county are acting contrary to their stated and pledged environmental goals to address the increasing impacts of global warming.

Which begs the question, why is public land, paid for with public money, able to be privatized and commodified without public consent? 

Since 2015, buoyed by persistent state and county promises to incorporate the community’s vision in the outcome at SDC, thousands of Sonoma Valley citizens diligently participated in the planning process to consider how and by whom the land should be used. But in the end, the state’s assurances turned out to be little more than empty words.

Development in rural areas is being driven by a state-imposed mandate to address what is labeled a “housing crisis.” In spite of the fact that the “crisis” is for affordable housing, not market-rate housing, the state-selected developer, Grupe/Rogal, has stated that it does not intend to build more than 10–15% affordable housing. The rest will be out of reach for most Sonoma County citizens. 

To make matters worse, in addition to the proposed housing and commercial development at SDC are plans to develop more than 60 acres on the nearby Hanna Center property for, as you might have guessed, housing, plus a hotel and businesses. How many people and their daily vehicle miles traveled this additional development on rural land adds up to can only be guessed. 

This is an environmental issue

In my view, the disposition of the former SDC land is not a housing issue, or a sell the land and make it profitable for state and county issue. It’s matter of preserving and protecting an ancient, biologically diverse, self-sustaining ecosystem. It has intrinsic value as habitat as well as for the enjoyment and knowledge it bestows on our human citizens. This ecosystem, with a wildlife corridor running through it, cannot remain viable side by side with the urban development being planned next door.

Humans are not entitled to live anywhere and everywhere. Just as we need to honor and preserve the remaining wilderness areas, we must recognize the importance of rural landscapes and green buffer zones so that urban regions have access and connection to the natural world. We have much to learn and time is surely running out.  

Building a new town in the heart of Sonoma Valley at the base of Sonoma Mountain threatens to destroy our rural wildlands and wildlife. Taking the example of the other places, it may start small, but will not stay so. We have seen this pattern played out here in Sonoma County and elsewhere in our state.

Back to Jack

Writing about his property next to SDC in 1905, London said, “There are 130 acres in the place, and they are 130 acres of the most beautiful, primitive land to be found in California. There are great redwoods on it, some of them thousands of years old … in fact, the redwoods are as fine and magnificent as any to be found anywhere outside the tourist groves. Also, there are great firs, tanbark oaks, maples, live-oaks, white-oaks, black-oaks, madrone and manzanita galore. There are canyons, several streams of water, many springs … I have been riding all over these hills, looking for just such a place, and I must say that I have never seen anything like it.”

Jack London knew what he was talking about, and he knew when he saw it that it was a treasure to protect and preserve. He left it as a legacy for us and all others who would understand its innate value. If we let the SDC go on the auction bloc for a quick profit for government functionaries and the business merchants who influence them, we will have sold another of nature’s gifts for a handful of silver.

Will Shonbrun is a Sonoma Valley resident and community activist.

Walks and Talks on Sonoma Mountain

Nov 082023
 

Walks and Talks on Sonoma Mountain

In October SMP hosted two walks in the Sonoma Developmental Center (SDC), the beloved and beleaguered institution in Glen Ellen that’s slated to be sold to a developer whose current plans call for leveling much of what’s beautiful, historic, and unusual on the campus.

The first event, a reprise of SMP’s popular “History, Horticulture, and Future of the SDC” hike, was led by California Naturalist Carolyn Greene and featured an impromptu presentation by photographer Christian Pease, a former SDC employee and a leading member of the Eldridge Cemetery Memorial Committee. At the newly completed cemetery memorial, which overlooks the unmarked graves of nearly 2,000 SDC residents, Pease described the memorial’s components, the forgotten history that prompted its creation, and the political and administrative process that got the project done. The names of everyone buried in the cemetery have been etched in granite slabs on the ADA-accessible viewing platform, which can be reached via a short walk uphill from the campus via Orchard Road.

Carolyn contemplating a tree.
Christian Pease at the memorial platform.

The second hike, “Fall Birds and Migratory Words on Sonoma Mountain,” was led by author, scientist, and avid bird-watcher Rebecca Lawton, who guided a half-dozen hardy participants through intermittent downpours to secret spots on the campus and along the trail to Fern Lake where the birds — in surprising numbers and variety — were hanging out. Among the species seen or heard were a tree-full of bushtits yelling “head’s up” as a Cooper’s hawk swooped overhead, a couple of ruby-crowned kinglets, more than a dozen dark-eyed juncos and lesser goldfinches, a few northern flickers, a Hutton’s vireo, a hermit thrush … two dozen species and seventy-four birds in all. Lawton also shared poetry with the soggy but happy participants, including a work by our national poet laureate Ada LimĂłn, who was raised in Glen Ellen. You can read Lawton’s SDC-inspired poem, “The Night the County Supervisors Met to Sell the Mountain,” here.

A new slate of guided walks on the SDC and elsewhere on Sonoma Mountain is currently in the works. We’re hopeful these two wonderful guides will be back to lead again, and that they will be joined colleagues who can share their special connections to the mountain with fellow mountain lovers.


~ Tracy Salcedo, SMP vice chair and “sweep”

Participants at the memorial platform at Sonoma Developmental Center.
Participants at the memorial platform at Sonoma Developmental Center.

The Night the County Supervisors Met to Sell the Mountain

Nov 082023
 

The Night the County Supervisors Met
to Sell the Mountain

by Rebecca Lawton


I arrive late to a dream where ushers fold arms across their chests at theater doors. A man,
linebacker big, waves a county pass, rushes by the box office, parts the ushers like the Red Sea.

You’re too late, says an office clerk, though he can sell me tickets to A Charlie Brown Christmas.
It’s the one where Charlie finds the last real tree on the lot. He gets back to town with his dying
fir or spruce, only to be mocked by children with black holes for mouths.

Of course Charlie is depressed.

I shake off the dream and the clerk’s hungry eyes. Wide awake, I follow the mountain’s middle
path, empty of hikers and cyclists and dogs, who are all at the real-life meeting. I climb on, as
chickadees buzz in oak branches. Jays scold. Red-tailed hawks scream.

The meeting will go past midnight. Citizens will pour out their hearts, some to keep the mountain
wild, some to sell it and clear forests and fields for a town. Everyone’s dogs will grin with hope.
The supes will handshake folks on both sides of the room, pat poodles and retrievers alike.

Meanwhile I will walk the wooded mountain that saved my life twenty years ago.

Back then, nursing a bruised heart not far from here, I raised my daughter alone. I rose at dawn
to work long days in the woods, gauged the mountain’s creeks and springs, stood knee-deep with staff and stopwatch in chilly flow. Owls called, resting in shadows. Muddy deer trails bore lion prints the size of tea-plates, mixed with hieroglyphic scrawls of turkey and heron.

Ducks flew up from Mexico to winter here. Gulls strayed in from the coast. One hot day, a baby
vulture hid in a stump while raucous woodpeckers relayed along a shaded creek. Wild lilies, shell
fungi, orchids no bigger than dandelions pushed up through leaf litter. I took my girl to see them.

It was all there. It is up there still, though the meeting went the way such meetings go.

My friends say they’ll chain themselves naked to trees and rocks when the backhoes come, when the supes sell the mountain to a high bidder, as they’ll do. Like that clerk, they’ve got to hawk it, get tickets moving for a show we’ve all seen many times, about a boy who longs for nothing more than a full and living tree.

Sonoma Mountain Aerial view at SDC

Becca Lawton
First published in Deep Wild Journal
Winter 2022-2023