State of the City, Sonoma

Sonoma is a resort town with the Plaza overlay zone being the honeypot tourist attraction. Hotels, bed and breakfast venues combined with the Plaza and surrounding pastoral vineyard landscapes constitute the prime attraction. Boutique luxury shops, restaurants, wine tasting, real estate offices, hotels, bed and breakfasts all proliferate at ground zero. All these businesses work on formulary themes about wine and Dionysian/ European pastoral idealism. Historic aspects: buildings, museums, actual history and small town charm add to the attractive ambience.

Wine is the main attraction with corollary organic produce, cheese and other oral consumable themes and venues riding shotgun. ‘Events’ provide a new synergy designed to capture the strong flow of tourist dollars. Real estate is the number one wine partner. As with other tourist towns, Sonoma is popular with wealthy retirees and vacation homebuyers. This popularity drives up land values and also the regional cost of living. The construction and real estate economy goes hand in hand with wine-theme tourism.

Clearly, tourism, vacationing and destination popularity constitute the bulk of the Sonoma economy. It’s nice in Sonoma Valley anyway; it’s not the wine per se; primarily it’s the climate, geography and small town mystique. There was a resort and tourist industry here before Prohibition and the Depression. Adjacent to a major urban area that tends to be foggy and cool, the dry, sunny Sonoma Valley calls to those with the ability to get away.

Today tourism is the prime mover of the economy. Before it was basalt quarries, mixed agriculture and a resort industry based on climate, hot springs and rail access. Tourist bureaus now try hard to maintain continuous entertainment events: art, craft, show, music, food etc, to draw tourists year-round, tourists who will spend, consume and thus provide income and sustenance for business and government. Jobs and occupations revolve around this central axis: wine, vineyards, food, real estate, construction, maintenance and service for all of the above. It appears to be working. The economy is booming.

People ask, what could be wrong here? There’s no problem; all is good. What’s wrong is that tourist towns have known problems; social equity and environmental sustainability are lacking. Service jobs are low paying; housing is unaffordable to the working class; the cost of living and tourist inflation requires workers to drive far from Sonoma to find affordable prices. Health and dental options are limited. What’s wrong is that locals and workers are progressively forced out into 

bedroom communities as is typical of tourist towns like Woodstock VT and Aspen CO.

Environmental sustainability is an issue with groundwater depletion, stream channeling, saltwater intrusion and silting in of waterways. No anadromous fish is the ecological canary in the coalmine. The tension between growth and conservation is shunted aside in the celebration of how great everything is. Short-term thinking rules. A monoculture crop as the basis of wealth generation is inherently vulnerable, and unsustainable. All eggs in one basket is not smart strategy. Somehow past socio-economic collapses don’t apply to the thinking here.

Another issue arising from tourism is the flavor of town culture. Since the economy has obviously tipped to tourism, will culture go that way too? Plaza wine tasting is a symbolic dispute here. Will the center of town be a tourist honeypot with nothing for residents? Will tourism cultural issues even be addressed and articulated by the government and media?

Another thing wrong is disenfranchisement. If workers and former locals cannot afford to live in a tourist town, they cannot vote here either.  How can workers mount any kind of presence if they don’t even live and vote where they work? 

How can a culture and society all about consuming adopt principles of environmental sustainability? A self-reinforcing dynamic develops where top economic players exclude social equity and environmental interests. The tourist economy with a myopic economic bottom line eclipses social and environmental concerns. Thus the state of the valley has serious submerged issues to grapple with and as long as facts about what constitutes sustainability are only seen through an economic lens, the full state of the valley is not likely to be addressed.

It’s clear we have ideological tension, a struggle for power and control. There’s a stalemate between free market principles and a more directed, planned approach. Tourism is seen by many as a sellout to a materialist consumer paradigm at odds with sustainable principles overall. Sonoma is tipped pretty far to being a tourist place and as far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a lot of productive dialogue to include those who prefer something different.

Wine tasting in Sonoma

Here’s how I see it: Measure B and the current wine tasting issue are symbolic of public opinion about an out of proportion economic leg of the public policy stool, where social issues (equity, balance, diversity) and environmental sustainability concerns appear shunted aside.

The issue represents a values and a demographic conflict over the role of and oversight of tourism. Many tourist towns and regions (Aspen, CO, Woodstock, VT, Hawaii) have similar issues as Sonoma. These are known issues. The municipality gets separated from bedroom communities of disenfranchised workers; elites price out the working class in multiple ways, gentrification runs out local homeowners and calculated formula starts to substitute for actual culture. These negative aspects of tourism can be mitigated with conscious, integral oversight.

Allow me to focus these general ideas above on the question at hand, oversight of the Plaza, the heart of town. Both formula and unaffordability run counter to values stated in the city’s own General Plan and public materials. From the city’s Formula business pamphlet, “The Formula Business establishment will promote diversity and variety to assure a balanced mix of commercial uses available to serve both resident and visitor populations”. The Plaza retail overlay zone is the ‘commercial, cultural and civic center of the community”. Note: diversity and balance are values espoused by the city. Serving residents is a value. The Plaza is not only a commercial center but also a cultural and civic center, symbolic of city identity. The General Plan speaks of similar values plus cost equity for workers.

These points are near identical to ones made in Measure B and now, to limit tasting. It’s not hard to see the core issues; and given the city’s own stated values, there should be some common ground to find. We need to get past zero sum thinking and settle into addressing the aggregate issues surrounding the role of tourism in Sonoma.  

Overall tourism has an innate tendency to lean to formula. The Plaza can be some of that, but when does the city stand up for its own stated values of diversity, balance and serving all residents in their own heart of town? The city has publicly stated values besides the economic bottom line. These are the values people are asking to be heard, particularly on the Plaza. To quote economist Robert Eyler, “We not only need to think about being business friendly”, “we also have to think about being resident friendly.”

All people of my stripe are saying to the city: stand up against a wholesale sellout to becoming a tourist façade. Stand for the balance, diversity and social equity values the city already has. Sonoma has obviously tipped far to tourism already. This segment of the economy is incredibly well represented. What we need is to boost the integral bottom line. For public officials: at least try to publicly articulate that questioning tourism is a worthy issue, that concerned citizens are not trapped in a black hole zero sum game.

Practical solution: The use permit is the critical tool and threshold that can limit numbers of real estate offices and wine tasting venues on the Plaza. It would be reasonable to make all wine tasting venues pass a use permit threshold. With the current Planning Commission and city council, use permits for small local tasting would probably pass. At least then there would be a future mechanism to put on the brakes. A use permit for all wine tasting makes that action possible. A permit for all wine drinking venues on the Plaza would be a good compromise. Everyone in this discussion would get something going forward.

Tourism in Sonoma

Before the community is a question of values: how to frame the role of tourism in Sonoma Valley. Managing tourism, or not, has been framed as a zero sum game. We need to get beyond that. It’s not just economic issues isolated from the whole. It’s about the aggregate of the whole and how we see it.

Mass tourism has known negative aspects.  These can be addressed and possibly mitigated. Hawaii, Vermont, ski towns, national park towns all have common issues. A prime cause of these issues is a myopic economic boosterism to the exclusion of other factors. The way to mitigate this is to cast a wider net and consider more community stakeholder’s bottom lines. Below is a partial list of Sonoma and common tourism issues that lie beneath this wine tasting issue. These represent bottom lines that need to be entered to balance our aggregate budget.

Disregard for conservation and resources: unlimited growth, extinction of fish

Consumerism: US highest per capita consumers in the world

Water: Sonoma has highest per capita use of any SCWA contractor, unregulated valley groundwater use, depletion

Monoculture: all eggs in one basket, vulnerable to collapse

Economy: boom or bust, free market approach essentially stands for no planning

Gentrification: real estate unaffordable to middle and working class

Disenfranchisement: demographic of bedroom communities means nobody to vote for worker issues, reduced option or no medical care

Reduced socio-economic diversity: loss of actual character and reduction to formula

Inflation: affordability crisis of food, goods and services; pay wall for all events

Concentration of formula: rents $120,000 a month on Plaza, upward cycle of elite exclusion, real estate/boutique shops/ wine tasting

Mass marketing: the hype is like living inside one big repetitive commercial, authenticity lost, the Plaza honeypot becomes a caricature of itself

In the tourism industry there is a recognized need to apply sustainable principles that essentially boil down to a triple bottom line approach to planning. The destination community needs to be involved in an integral tourism planning discussion to find mutual ways to mitigate the negative aspects of mass tourism. To quote economist Robert Eyler, “We not only need to think about being business friendly”, “we also have to think about being resident friendly.”