Letter to the editor in the PD by Richard Charter


Thursday’s Letters to the Editor

EDITOR: More than 100 local residents packed standing-room-only into the Timber Cove firehouse on Monday for a lively interaction with Sonoma County planning staff now rewriting our Local Coastal Plan. The plan guides new development, as well as future protection, for our treasured coastal lands.

Opening the Sonoma Coast to large event centers and big wine-tasting venues, or to other industrial-scale activities, lies at the heart of the emerging debate over the plan. County planning staff is proposing to inappropriately transfer lax inland rules from the county’s general plan and, for the first time, put them into a revised Local Coastal Plan. If eventually certified by the California Coastal Commission, this proposed weakening of the coastal plan language would undermine longstanding coastal protections.

Irreversibly ripping out coastal forests ignores our chronic shortage of water, while logging and grading impacts are an obvious threat to erosion-prone soils on unstable hillsides and dump silt into our streams. Our Sonoma Coast needs to have its own protections maintained and shouldn’t be lumped together with inland urban areas.

The deadline to comment on the coastal plan is Sept. 30, and you can send your comments to PRMD-LCP-Update@sonoma-county.org

For more information, visit preserveruralsonomacounty.org

RICHARD CHARTER

You can also submit letters to our new website, www.WineWaterWatch.org. We will go through them and post some of them.