Answers from Sonoma County Candidates to SCV Questions

As part of our expanded SCV Government Relations initiatives, we sent a selection of questions developed by our SCV Government Relations Committee to incumbent Sonoma County Supervisor District 4 James Gore and his opponent, Richard Andy Springer, and to incumbent District 2 Supervisor David Rabbitt, and his opponent, Blake Hooper. These questions were developed to actively engage candidates in discussing issues affecting our wine community ahead of the upcoming election on June 7, 2022.

Completed candidate questionnaires were returned to SCV by District 2 Supervisor David Rabbitt, his opponent Blake Hooper, and District 4 Supervisor James Gore. Our questionnaire was not returned to SCV by Richard Andy Springer after multiple attempts to contact him.

It is our goal that these questions and candidate’s responses will assist our wine community to determine which candidate will best support and represent the interests of our Sonoma County wine community.

Responses from James Gore, Candidate for Sonoma County Supervisor District 4

SCV Question
Over the past five years, national representation for our wineries has greatly diminished because of wine wholesale and distribution consolidation, making it even more difficult for local wineries to gain wholesale distribution across the country. Wineries are required to market and fulfill wine sales directly to consumers to survive. It is critical to our wine community’s future that business activities like wine pickup days, winemaker lunches/dinners, trade business visits, and similar activities, be allowed and not arbitrarily limited.

Permit Sonoma is looking at the adoption of a Winery Events Ordinance to apply on new winery use permit applications. What, if any, are important elements that should be included?

Candidate Gore Response
I’ve worked hand in glove with SCV on this issue. I actually hesitate to even call it an issue because it is more about coordination and enforcement than regulation. I have received zero complaints about events in the past 6 years, and the work of the Vintners to work with wineries on their existing permit compliance has achieved gains. We need to look at creating a category for “activities” not just “events” to honor the day to day work that has not offsite impact. Looking forward to weighing in on this later this year.

SCV Question
According to Forbes, California ranks 47 for the cost of doing business and 40 for regulatory environment out of 50 states. The regulatory environment for wineries in Sonoma is particularly challenging. The continuing increase in County government procedures, fees, and reporting requirements are making Sonoma County less business friendly and extremely difficult for small family owned wineries to survive. The wine community is an important part of the economy and source of jobs in our County and a vital part of supporting agriculture.

What will you do to make County departments and commissions more supportive, less bureaucratic and more efficient for our wine community and small business?

Candidate Gore Response
I am proud to have a well-rounded set of voices and perspectives amongst my appointees to county commissions, including representation for those who work in the agricultural sector. Deregulation is unlikely under the current CEQA world – however, there’s no question that regulations, from VESCO to detailed Erosion Control Plans, are more onerous and harder to bear for smaller businesses and wineries. The regulatory challenges at the county are vexing, and sources of conversation dating back to my first campaign for public office. There’s no question, confidence and clarity in the process is essential to making the process more efficient and predictable.

SCV Question
During recent wildfire emergency evacuations, the Sheriff’s Office provided access, when deemed safe, to agricultural operations for emergency activities during the harvest. Do you support continued access in future emergencies when deemed appropriate by public safety professions?

Candidate Gore Response
Yes.

SCV Question
Water and wildfires are key threats for Sonoma County, including the wine community. Lack of water resources poses a serious long-term threat to agriculture. Many of the proposed solutions come with increased costs and government over-regulation. Wildfires and power related outages cause businesses to close, impacting revenue and jobs. Responding to these threats has increased the cost and complexity of doing business here.

What will you do to help be proactive and creative in finding ways to secure water resources and prevent wildfires?

Candidate Gore Response
Sonoma County has been/will be investing more than $100 million in water security and resiliency programs after pursuing and securing federal and state dollars/grants, including recently-secured funds totaling $26 million to benefit Northern Sonoma County, specifically the Alexander Valley, City of Healdsburg and City of Cloverdale. This includes the Alexander Valley Flood-Managed Aquifer Recharge, or “Flood-MAR” ($7 million secured toward a $9.6 million recharge project); the City of Healdsburg ($7 million secured toward a $13.9 million pipeline); and the City of Cloverdale ($3 million secured for system-wide improvements).

The Flood-MAR Initiative in Alexander Valley will create sustainable water resources with benefits to local fisheries, agriculture and communities. The initiative’s primary goal is to replenish the local groundwater system by annually diverting 5,000 acre‐feet of high winter flows from the Russian River through a network of underflow wells and applying those waters to agricultural land when the commercial crops are dormant. Replenishing both shallow and deeper aquifer systems will improve local and downstream late‐season Russian River baseflows beneficial to salmonids, reduce Russian River losses along the Alexander Valley during drier years, and reduce deeper groundwater pumping.

The Healdsburg pipeline project will offset the use of potable water by constructing a 4.5-mile distribution network to deliver disinfected recycled water to the City’s parks, schools, golf courses, athletic fields and cemetery. This use of recycled water is expected to offset approximately 40 million gallons of potable water use and aid the City in mitigating the effects of the drought when water for public consumption is in short supply.

The City of Cloverdale plans to use its funding for four water supply and distribution system projects, including replacing and upgrading approximately 1,700 existing water meters for Advanced Metering Infrastructure radio read capability; expanding the current supervisory control and data acquisition system at the City’s treatment facility to integrate portable water distribution infrastructure at seven remote sites; and replacing two city-owned supply wells. This is particularly important to me given Cloverdale is north of the Lake Sonoma drainage area, relying instead on water supplies from Lake Mendocino and Sonoma County’s upper reaches of the Russian River.

With regard to preventing wildfires, we’ve taken historic action since 2017—when many of us were caught off guard or directly affected by the impending fire siege as emergency alert systems failed our rural residents and we were ill-equipped to handle what was heading our way. In the years since, we’ve responded to the failures of 5 years ago by improving emergency alert and warning systems; placing greater emphasis on reducing fuel loads (more roadside mowing, the creation of a free wood chipping program for rural property owners, and other strategic vegetation management programs); bolstered funding for rural fire districts to create both operational efficiencies and the ability to better staff fire departments with the greatest needs; and put fire prevention on the map throughout the State of California through greater collaboration and partnerships with agencies like CalFire. I tip my hat to those like Marshall Turbeville and North Sonoma County Fire who’ve been change-makers in these critical programs, helping protect life and property.

SCV Question
Lack of affordable housing, especially rental housing, makes it difficult for many workers to live here, especially those in hospitality and agriculture both of which are critical to our economy. What will you do to create more affordable housing?

Candidate Gore Response
I’ve supported investments in workforce and farmworker housing during my tenure on the Board of Supervisors. I voted to approve the construction of bunkhouses for local vineyard workers, providing nearly 100 beds to farmworkers in the Geyserville area, which coupled with another completed farmworker housing project in Larkfield (Ortiz Family Plaza), is providing hard-working agricultural workers with an affordable place to live. Recognizing there are thousands of people working in the hospitality, tourism and wine industries throughout Sonoma County though, more must be done. To those ends, I’m supportive of plans to provide more of the workforce housing we need—my record shows I’ve been an ardent supporter of affordable housing, whether it be for our hospitality, wine industry or agricultural workforce.

SCV Question
Would you agree that the Sonoma County wine community is a major employer and crucial contributor to the Sonoma County economy, while also supporting significant philanthropic activities that include hundreds of the county’s non-profit charitable organizations? If so, how would you personally characterize Sonoma County’s wine community impact on our County, and importance for future County growth and vitality? If not, please specify.

Candidate Gore Response
Yes. Agriculture is one of the main economic drivers of our community and has a deep-rooted history in Sonoma County that has shaped our past and future direction. I have always been supportive of, and will continue to be supportive of, our wine and agricultural communities—which is why I’ve earned the support of numerous vintners and agriculturalists in my first campaign for Supervisor and in my re-election campaign this year. Agriculture has not just helped our economy—they’ve been vital community partners as well. I appreciate the legacy many multi-generational farms or wineries have made for themselves, some of which date back 3, 4 or even 5 generations after being started by their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents – I will support their continued longevity for as long as I’m in office, so that our agricultural community and those multi-generational legacy farms or agricultural lands endure for generations to come.

Responses from David Rabbit, Candidate for Sonoma County Supervisor District 2

Permit Sonoma is looking at the adoption of a Winery Events Ordinance to apply on new winery use permit applications. What, if any, are important elements that should be included?

Candidate Rabbit Response
The primary elements are fairness, equity, and the understanding of the importance of the business sector on our economy in Sonoma County. Any action taken should strengthen businesses and not weaken them. On the heels of losses due to wildfires, smoke exposure, floods, power shutoffs, drought, and pandemic, now is not the time to ratchet regulations arbitrarily. Clear definitions of events are crucial and encouraging continued collaboration and cooperation amongst wineries is key so as not to inadvertently bring a disproportionate burden on one area at any given time. With that said, existing planning processes including those that go with the land are in place and government should not attempt to regulate business practices when they have zero expertise within the arena. Direct sales are an integral part of our wine community’s business and highlighting local agriculture is key to building loyalty and brand recognition and Sonoma will benefit with additional agricultural tourism and setting expectations for all, that we live and work in a county with a deep agricultural heritage that is worth saving. You do that by understanding the financial pressures of the sector and working with that sector to accomplish a shared goal of success, fairness, and equity.

What will you do to make County departments and commissions more supportive, less bureaucratic and more efficient for our wine community and small business?

Candidate Rabbit Response
All too often, regulations and ordinances are akin to “death by a thousand cuts.” The collective impact, no matter how well meaning, results in bureaucracy, rigidity, and an additional cost burden to local businesses. As an architect, I know this firsthand and as an elected official, I have had a commitment to streamline permitting processes and reduce costs and time. Ordinances and regulations are all too often, solutions seeking problems presented by special interest groups or politicians feeling heat from a vocal minority. Stepping back, slowing down, communicating, and identifying the problem one is trying to solve is the first step, should it exist at all. Further, if there is consensus that we can do better, work collaboratively to ensure success on all fronts.

Candidate Rabbit Response
No one should be allowed to enter an unsafe area be they employers, employees, or residents. With that said, in our history of wildfire and flood events, evacuation zones may cover large geographical areas where the safety risk varies greatly. First responders such as our Sheriff or Department of Emergency Management should be the arbiters of what is safe and what is not. We need to implement a process more so than an ordinance or regulation to allow access to maintain vital services and avoid financial ruin. And this is not solely for wineries, the same is said for all agricultural businesses as well as utility workers, etc.

What will you do to help be proactive and creative in finding ways to secure water resources and prevent wildfires?

Candidate Rabbit Response
In 2019, several feet of water flowed through the streets of Guerneville and other communities along the Russian River. In 2022, we are preparing to enter our third consecutive drought year – the worst recorded drought in history. Volatile weather patterns appear to be our fate. I have been instrumental in ensuring water hauling serving agriculture continued in the south county by investing in a dormant well and connecting it to the aqueduct system. Soon, two more wells will be connected. I have been Chair of the North Bay Water Reuse Authority, a collaborative three county agency that has successfully invested nearly $190 million in water recycling infrastructure including supplying vineyards. As the lead on all issues water on the Board of Supervisors, Sonoma Water is investing in building regional water supply resiliency through increased supply, reduced demand, improved operations, and favorably modified policy/regulations. In addition, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) offers another opportunity, for better or worse, our shared aquifers. Periods of drought will always be challenging, it’s how you step up to build resiliency and soften the blow that is critical.

Candidate Rabbit Response
As an architect and with family in housing developments throughout the Bay Area, I am most familiar with the forces at work in the housing industry. We live in a desirable place where we will always battle with the basic economic law of supply and demand. We are also a historically slow-growth county and the combination of those two factors have led to increased housing costs. Realistically, we cannot build ourselves out of the dilemma, but we can continue to provide the most flexibility and widest array of housing products to combat ever-increasing housing costs. Ultimately, the three P’s – production, preservation, and protection are key tools available to local jurisdictions. Since the wildfires of 2017, the County has some of the most innovative, flexible, and generous housing regulations allowed by state law. But the unincorporated county alone cannot provide for the need- that has to be within the cities where utilities and services exist. That takes political will.

Candidate Rabbit Response
I wholeheartedly agree that the Sonoma County wine community is a major employer and crucial contributor to the Sonoma County economy while also supporting significant philanthropic activities within the county. I understand the importance of the wine community’s positive impact on Sonoma County. We are fortunate to live in a place where people from throughout the world want to visit. Imagine the opposite! One in four jobs in this county are related to the wine industry with over 54,000 employees in the industry earning over $3.2 billion in wages annually. In addition, the wine industry attracts and feeds the tourism industry where the average visitor spends more than $165 daily on overnight trips and $59 daily on day trips. The truth is that we have hotels, resorts, and restaurants that could never exist without the intractable interplay of tourism and the wine industry, and we are better for it. Not only is there consistent employment and ancillary businesses that benefit, the combination feeds county tax coffers and provides for programs and services to Sonoma County residents. Further, over $39 million has been raised to date through just the Sonoma County Vintners for local non-profits.

Responses from Blake Hooper, Candidate for Sonoma County Supervisor District 2

Permit Sonoma is looking at the adoption of a Winery Events Ordinance to apply on new winery use permit applications. What, if any, are important elements that should be included?

Candidate Hooper Response
I understand that winery events are an emerging industry trying to get a foothold in Sonoma County, and that Sonoma County wineries are losing business opportunities to our neighboring counties the longer we delay.

That said, Permit Sonoma is already massively backlogged due to our Byzantine zoning code. I believe that a winery events ordinance would be best considered as part of our long-overdue general plan update. Layers upon layers of short-term ﬁxes to our zoning ordinances are the main cause of the bureaucratic logjam at Permit Sonoma, and the county needs to ﬁx this problem at its cause, and not apply yet another band-aid on a canvas of band-aids that is already a mile high. We need to cut red-tape in our planning laws, not add more of it.
That general plan update should also deﬁne residential zoning for our unincorporated areas.

With that in mind, I believe the following aspects are key to a winery event ordinance:

Setbacks from residential properties
Noise restrictions, especially for live music late at night
Trafﬁc management and on-site parking plans — with appropriate enforcement — that ensure that roads remain safe, and residential properties remain accessible

What will you do to make County departments and commissions more supportive, less bureaucratic and more efficient for our wine community and small business?

Candidate Hooper Response
The current Sonoma County General Plan dates to 1986. Permit Sonoma has ground to a halt under a massive backlog of applications, because our 36-year-old Zoning Map consists of layer upon layer of carve-outs and contradictions that mean applications take years of individualized research to resolve.

The next four years are a chance to update our General Plan so that communities can grow in places that will remain a desirable place to live, and that our businesses — especially wine businesses — have certainty about what they can invest in. Fixing our General Plan will free up time and resources in Permitting, Planning, and the Board of Supervisors itself.

We need to do the work urgently, not delay it.

As our general plan is updated, I will work to ensure that Permit Sonoma is staffed appropriately to work through its permitting backlog, and adopt short-term ordinances allowing for streamlined approval of more small-scale residential improvement projects.

Candidate Hooper Response
Yes, with some caveats.

Properties must be accessible with truly ﬁre-safe roads, as deﬁned by the Californian standard (not anything weaker). Properties must have well-deﬁned evacuation plans that have been vetted by public safety professionals in advance of ﬁre season. Sufﬁcient vehicles to evacuate all workers must be on-hand. If an evacuation route is under threat of ﬁre, then there must be an alternative vetted route, otherwise, access should not be granted.

Finally, this should only be allowed when the viability of a harvest is truly at risk, and the long-term health of workers is not at risk. The lives and livelihoods of both vineyard workers and our ﬁrst responders should not be put at risk unnecessarily.

What will you do to help be proactive and creative in finding ways to secure water resources and prevent wildfires?

Candidate Hooper Response
In preventing wildﬁres, we need to address the top cause of wildﬁres in harvest season: downed powerlines from PG&E’s ageing grid. I have a detailed policy for increasing incentives for residential solar, and encouraging Sonoma Clean Power to build community-scale batteries so that we can store and re-deploy more of that energy. My policy also covers ﬁnancing for commercial and rental residential properties. With increased amounts of locally-produced renewable energy, we can reduce our dependence on PG&E’s transmission grid, and be more resilient to public safety power shutoffs.

Beyond that, I’ll work to increase programs for vegetation and fuel load management, and add increased standards for home and property hardening so that more properties are able to survive wildﬁres and avoid contributing to their spread. I’ll also work to ensure that local ﬁre departments have more resources to conduct fuel reduction activities in the less risky months.

On the subject of water, we need to start taking groundwater management seriously. At the moment, our groundwater management agencies don’t have sufﬁcient data to know where water is being used, let alone how to conserve it. So, let’s start by getting the data around levels in our wells. Once that’s in place, we can start looking at policies to conserve water and cut out actual waste.

Candidate Hooper Response
While we ﬁx our 36-year-old general plan to make it clear where housing is welcome in unincorporated Sonoma County, we can work quickly to build dense housing in inﬁll sites. On the Petaluma Planning Commission, I have prioritized transforming former industrial sites next to our railway line into transit-oriented housing with mixed-use zoning so entrepreneurs can start businesses to serve these new neighborhoods.

Now that Roseland is part of the City of Santa Rosa, the number of well-connected, convenient locations where the County can build for transit in unincorporated land is effectively zero. We need to turn to our cities to build desirable housing that meets our needs.

With a supervisor on the board who prioritizes real partnership with cities, we can prioritize and incentivize these dense, inﬁll, transit-oriented projects inside city limits. Distributing Sonoma County’s RHNA affordable housing numbers among our cities through RHNA swaps — with consent, appropriate support and funding — would represent only a modest increase in the number of affordable housing units our cities need to build per project, would free up County resources to address permitting backlogs, and would get housing where it’s really needed.

Failing to work with our cities will lead the County to continue on its current unsustainable and unpopular path of contributing to sprawl and encroachment by developing our remote and historically agricultural areas.

Prioritizing transit-oriented projects will also unlock millions of dollars in state grants that our County is not currently in a position to receive and our cities are currently under-resourced to exploit. We can signiﬁcantly increase our countywide affordable housing budget without increasing taxes one cent, but only if we prioritize being a real partner for our cities.

Candidate Hooper Response
Yes. Sonoma County is recognized as a mark of quality products, nationally and internationally, Sonoma County wine included. The Sonoma County designation on wine labels promotes our region as one of great natural resources and beauty, and one that produces great quality agricultural products. The industry, as well as employing a large number of people also directly contributes to our tourism and services sector.

I believe that a healthy wine industry that employs workers who can afford to live in Sonoma County is vital to Sonoma County’s future.

Answers from Sonoma County Candidates to SCV Questions

Responses from James Gore, Candidate for Sonoma County Supervisor District 4

Responses from David Rabbit, Candidate for Sonoma County Supervisor District 2

Responses from Blake Hooper, Candidate for Sonoma County Supervisor District 2

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