LATEST COMMENTARY AND NEWS

The future of Sonoma County's water supplies seems highly uncertain as we head into year 3 of a historic drought. While Sonoma Water and Federal agencies are responding to the acute and immediate water shortages of these last few years, it seems we are still failing to take into account the longer term changes in water availability brought on by climate change. Failure to take these long term changes into account in evaluating future supply skews the picture of how much demand the county can truly sustain in the coming decades.

The residents of Bennett Valley submitted a detailed review of the Cannabis Policy Update Framework.

An open request to the Board of Supervisors: In this 3rd year of a climate-driven drought, instead of hiring new staff to expedite cannabis permitting, the County should focus on completing the required baseline analyses of existing conditions. For water availability, the Baseline should quantify current drought-related water supplies versus existing residential, industrial, and wine industry demands.

The Cannabis Policy Update Framework did a great job of taking stakeholder concerns and requests into account, but in four areas we are concerned the framework is steering the county to a another poor outcome.

The county recently released their Cannabis Ordinance Framework Proposal. We review the 16 proposed elements and highlight where we would like to see the Board of Supervisors take further action to ensure this next version of the ordinance meets the needs of all constituents.