Disaster a chance to re-examine priorities

Residents weigh in, from our local Sonoma County blog, waccobb.net

Our supervisors sold us down the river a while back to these corporate
special interests. The business model base for the wine/tourism industry is
totally rigged to the upper classes. Last week in the PD they interviewed some
of the winery owners affected and very few owned less than 5 vineyards. Can you
afford to own that much property in Sonoma County?

Low paying jobs for the rest of us. Name one economic professional not paid by the
corporate interests that don’t say this is the first biz model that collapses
and the last to come back in tough economic times.
We must rebuild with economic diversity!

This industry claims in our county that 40% of our wineries are owned by
small families. Those families are Kendall Jackson, Gallo etc. It’s like last
year they tried to tell us that we were over 25% organic and biodynamic but when
looked at closer the actual acreage not poisoning us was 2%. It’s time for the
5th highest paid supervisors in the state to get to work and create a more
diverse economic base that doesn’t pander to their donors.

We have sympathy for the real small wineries who are trying to do the best they can. We all support them.
Did anyone see the SF Chronicle article on workers out picking with the smoke and fire? The
same paper had an article in the last month where 95% of our states grape crop
is mechanized except for Napa and Sonoma.

We are really hoping that people who created such a wonderful community do
not flee as the wealthy ownership class buys up more land for those tourists to
come out for the weekend. How high do property values go before we are left
with only upper class folks being able to afford to live here? How many jobs do
families need to support themselves in this very low paying economic model while
the wealth gap here continues to grow? We need better paying jobs or that is
what will be left……another Marin in the making.