Santa Rosa resident Mark Silvia shared this randy scene from his yard on Peterson Lane in late February. “I went to the pig pen a little while ago to feed them and saw this,” he wrote on Nextdoor. “I have no words…”

Note from Simone: This pic originally appeared in the weekly email newsletter I write for the Bohemian, called Wine Country Today. Subscribe here!

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we’re living through a bit of a tumultuous era for both the local wine and cannabis industries. But there’s a new glimmer of hope for the latter, in the form of an alternate business model — recently blessed by state law — that allows people to hang out and smoke and be merry at weed dispensaries. Aka, the lounge model! Now, it’s up to local governments in California’s towns and counties to decide what’s allowed within their bounds. It’s been a big topic of discussion this year down in Santa Cruz County, naturally. And here in Sonoma County, we happen to be on the cutting edge.

A perfectly legal new cannabis lounge just opened at the Mercy Wellness dispensary in Cotati — a stoney sanctuary filled with comfy chairs, chill lighting, trippy visuals projected onto the walls, sports games on the TVs, DJs on the turntables, comfort food popups and a weed menu overflowing with diverse strains. A Press Democrat reporter stopped by the lounge at 7950 Redwood Dr. on opening day, March 27, to survey the scene:

At 3 p.m., when the doors opened to the Mercy Wellness Lounge, Sydney Comora was first in line. A few minutes later, joint in hand, she was sitting in a cozy club chair watching a DJ spin reggae. Psychedelic images swirled and oozed on a giant screen.

Comora, smoke drifting around her head, relaxed into the moment.

“This is the best place ever,” she said. The Santa Rosa resident said she was celebrating her 30th birthday with her sister.

Mercy Wellness is the first Sonoma County cannabis retailer to take advantage of a 2024 state law allowing dispensary owners to prepare and serve hot food and nonalcoholic drinks on site, creating a more club-like atmosphere like those in Amsterdam.

Such venues may be a rare, new bright spot for California’s sagging marijuana industry, plagued in recent years by high tax burdens, expensive permits, strict regulation, and a still-thriving black market.

According to the Mercy Wellness Lounge website, it’s open from 3-10pm on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays “with rotating events, exclusive deals, and a community of good people who love good weed.” Lounge owners add: “Spark One. Stay awhile. Round up the crew, roll through, and find your vibe.”

Note from Simone: This piece originally appeared in the weekly email newsletter I write for the Bohemian, called Wine Country Today. Subscribe here!

If you haven’t heard any of your neighbors talking about the Potter Valley Project up in Humboldt County yet, that may soon change — especially in the Geyserville-Cloverdale area, sometimes called “Healdsburg North,” where the fiercely independent ag ethos is strong and distrust of big government is baked into local culture. Cloverdale Mayor Todd Lands has been trying to warn everybody about this project for a while now, and his fervent opposition to the current plan finally seems to be catching on.

Mayor Lands hosted a lively town hall on March 20 that drew at least 200 people, by my count. Cloverdale’s local veterans building was packed to the gills that Thursday night — to the point of standing-room-only — with community members worried about their future water supply and angry about the Potter Valley plan signed last month by reps from seven different entities with competing interests. (Including state agencies, county governments, tribes and other orgs.)

And while multiple speakers at the Cloverdale event insisted this issue isn’t political, it does feel poised to become the next polarizing local battle between groups with different outlooks, to put it gently.

Before we continue, let me explain what the Potter Valley Project even is! Basically, it’s an old PG&E power plant with two dams along the Eel River — one that PG&E officials have been trying to get rid of for years now, as they claim it’s costing more money than it generates. The complication: This same river apparatus currently diverts waters from the Eel into the Russian River and the Lake Mendocino reservoir — a lifeline for the more than half a million people living downstream in Mendocino, Sonoma and Marin counties who use this water to survive.

This system has been in place for more than a century, and has been a fundamental building block for the society and industry we enjoy today. Here’s more info from the Sonoma Water agency about how the system works.

You might remember that back on Feb. 13, the day before Valentine’s, a coalition of seven orgs and agencies reached what they called a “historic pact” determining the project’s future. They called it the “two-basin solution” — a compromise that allows the Round Valley Indian Tribes, who live nearby, to a) tear out the dams, 2) build a much more low-key diversion system that still sends some water to the Russian during wet months when Eel waters are high, but likely not as much overall, and 3) get paid by downstream agencies for the water they do send, which will fund this new system and ongoing environmental restoration efforts.

No one was more thrilled by the pact than Lynda Hopkins, chair of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, whose district includes the Lower Russian River Area and the Sonoma coast. After the pact was signed, she gushed in her regular newsletter to constituents: “It’s not every day that you get to take part in a historic moment. Last Thursday was one of those days where I had to pinch myself and ask, is this real life? Is this really my day job? … It felt like the arc of the universe bent a little bit more towards justice on that day.” She also told the Press Democrat: “This is truly unprecedented because everyone who is part of it has different interests.”

Supervisor Hopkins’ sentiments seem to exist in a universe entirely separate from the majority of those expressed at the recent Cloverdale town hall. Let’s just say it was a very different crowd, and a very different vibe, than the pact-signing ceremony. Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore, who reps north county, and David Manning, manager of Sonoma Water’s environmental resources arm, had the guts to show up and try to defend the plan, which their agencies helped formulate. All eight of the other panelists — including Mendocino County Supervisor Madeline Cline, the head of the Sonoma County Farm Bureau and more — were full of indignation about the deal, as were most attendees. They framed it as a fundamental threat to their ability to live and thrive in this area, and uphold multigenerational communities formed on the drip of waters from the Russian River and Lake Mendocino.

Things got especially ugly during public comment, when a few different gadflies started hurling personal insults at Gore; he eventually lost his cool and hurled some back. The Press Democrat documented one especially tense moment:

“What would your dad do if they tried to shut his vineyard water off?” Andy Springer asked Gore, whose family has long been in the wine business in Alexander Valley. Springer once ran against Gore for Fourth District supervisor.

“He’d tell you to shut up,” a frustrated Gore replied. “Don’t you talk about my dad.”

At this point, it’s unclear to me how much water we’ll actually lose from the plan on the table — and it seemed unclear to most people at the town hall, too. When I spoke to David Manning from Sonoma Water afterward, he showed me some graphs and argued the amount of water we’ll get from the Round Valley Indians under the new deal won’t be much different than the increasingly smaller trickle of Eel River waters we’ve already been getting the past few years. Still, it seems like things could get pretty dire — aka, bone dry — in future drought years. But that might already be the case, regardless of how the Potter Valley plan progresses. (Which is also why Sonoma Water and other local governments have been looking into alternate local water sources and storage solutions, beyond the status quo. All very up in the air!)

The vague and confusing nature of the Potter Valley plan only fanned the flames at Cloverdale’s town hall. Emotions were high, and ideologies flew around the room like spears. Sonoma County’s larger ag community, including farmers and politicians from way down in Petaluma, showed up ready to fight their next big battle, after winning the Measure J factory-farm battle and losing the Point Reyes elk battle. Indeed, any mention of preserving fish habitats drew sporadic scoffs from the crowd.

Amid the chaos, though, one argument against the current plan stood out to me as crystal clear: Wildfire-plagued Lake County is poised to lose Lake Pillsbury, leaving them without a critical water source to fight nearby fires. Cloverdale’s fire chief, too, is worried about any outcome that leaves us with less water to fight fires here in Sonoma County. Here’s an excerpt from SF Gate’s story on the town hall (bonus points if you can spot me in the lead image):

Lake County Supervisors Eddie Crandell and Bruno Sabatier voiced their constituents’ concerns about the potential draining of Lake Pillsbury, a man-made reservoir created by Scott Dam in Lake County. If the dam is decommissioned, the reservoir is expected to be nearly emptied. The Lake County Board of Supervisors recently appealed to the Trump administration to intervene in the decommissioning, citing an executive order focused on maximizing California’s water storage.

Crandell, who represents the district including Lake Pillsbury and who is a member of the Robinson Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians, called out what he saw as a misleading narrative around tribal collaboration. While the Round Valley Indian Tribes have signed onto the New Eel-Russian Diversion Facility, Crandell argued that other tribes along the Russian River are being ignored. “They’re only talking about the Round Valley Indian Tribes who are on the Eel side,” he said, adding that numerous other regional tribal interests have been “marginalized.” …

Cloverdale Fire Chief Jason Jenkins condemned the proposed water plan as a serious threat to public safety, recalling his deployment to help fight Los Angeles’ devastating Palisades Fire. “Water was the issue,” he said, emphasizing that the lack of available water for responders had allowed the fire to keep burning. He warned that a depleted Russian River could create similar conditions and did not mince words: “Every fire chief in California will be saying the same thing. This is not a plan that protects our community,” adding that it isn’t “just short-sighted. It’s dangerous.”

You can read alternate takes on the meeting in the Press Democrat and the conservative Unwon newsletter. Or if you want to see what your neighbors are saying, there are community threads running on Facebook Groups and Nextdoor. While the deal with the Round Valley Indian Tribes was already signed, there’s still some time before anything actually happens with the Potter Valley Project — PG&E has said the dams won’t come out until at least 2028 — so the deal’s detractors are hoping that enough public outcry could change the course of the project. Next up, PG&E will submit its final decommissioning plan on July 29.

Note from Simone: This piece originally appeared in the weekly email newsletter I write for the Bohemian, called Wine Country Today. Subscribe here!

A series of recent and upcoming budget blows to the Redwood Empire Food Bank here in the North Bay have left “the region’s largest hunger relief organization having to figure out how to make up the difference,” in the words of the Press Democrat. Most notably, Redwood Empire Food Bank officials halted all egg distributions last week — a strategic cost-cutting measure to “better steward economic resources” as their federal and state income shrinks and egg prices remain ridiculous.

Every day of the week, you can find crews from Redwood Empire Food Bank distributing groceries and other essential goods to those in need at hundreds of locations across Sonoma, Lake, Mendocino, Humboldt and Del Norte counties. (A full schedule of distribution times and locations is available on their website.) Trump and Musk’s federal cost-cutting spree first hit Redwood Empire about a week-and-a-half ago, in the form of $750,000, or 155,000 pounds, in suspended food shipments.

At the time, I reached out to the food bank’s head of communications, Rachelle Mesheau, asking how food distribution in our area might be affected by this federal decision. She said the cuts posed a huge obstacle, but seemed confident that Redwood would find ways to make up the difference. Rachelle sent me the following statement:

The federal cuts are indeed a significant challenge, as we were anticipating $700,000 worth of food over the next few months that will no longer be available to us. Despite this setback, we remain committed to providing food to our community in Healdsburg and the surrounding areas. While the cancellation… is disappointing, we are encouraged by the recent announcement of Section 32 bonus buys and are hopeful that the current administration will maintain and create safety net programs for food assistance, especially as more people than ever are seeking help.

This shift means we will need to acquire more food independently to maintain a balanced mix of nutritious offerings. The increased reliance on purchasing food is putting pressure on local markets and raising costs, which will necessitate additional support from donors to meet the growing need. With demand for food assistance rising due to inflation and reduced federal support, the challenge of addressing food insecurity is becoming more acute. Adjustments in our operations and increased fundraising efforts will be necessary to ensure we can continue providing sufficient and nutritious food to those in need, and we remain committed to serving our community effectively despite these challenges.

However! Soon after I spoke to Rachelle, the budget outlook became more dire — this time, thanks to impending state cuts — and food bank officials made the difficult decision to nix eggs, an important source of protein for many of the 140,000-plus locals fed by Redwood Empire.

So why is the state doing this? Here’s an explanation form Stocktonia, a local paper in Stockton: “For several years when the state had a record surplus, it devoted millions of additional dollars to a state program called CalFood that allows food banks to purchase from local farmers or food producers such as tortillerias. Those boosts gave food banks about $60 million a year through CalFood over the past three years; in the budget Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed for the fiscal year that starts in July, that funding would revert to $8 million.” So in other words, post-Covid relief funding has dried up, as it has for so many services.

And things could get worse before they get better. The North Bay Business Journal reports: “Also at risk is CalFresh, which serves as California’s version of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the federal food assistance program for low-income households. SNAP is also in jeopardy, as Congress debates its fate and the next version of the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill.”

To help offset all this gouging, you can donate directly to the Redwood Empire Food Bank (or volunteer your time) via their website.

Note from Simone: This piece originally appeared in the weekly email newsletter I write for the Bohemian, called Wine Country Today. Subscribe here!

It’s hard to remember the last time we saw this many protests popping up across the North Bay! In the three months since Donald Trump became U.S. president and let Tesla CEO Elon Musk loose on the federal budget, locals have increasingly been hitting the streets to air their discontent with early moves from the current administration. (Including sweeping budget cuts, layoffs, deportations, tariffs and other severe policy shifts.) Here in Sonoma and Napa counties, people have been showing up to march and shout in front of local politicians’ town halls, Tesla dealerships, federal buildings and other communal gathering spaces.

For instance, on President’s Day in mid-February, hundreds rallied in both Santa Rosa and Napa for local versions of nationwide the “Not My President’s Day” protests, also called “No Kings Day.” But the turnout that day was nothing compared to yesterday, when thousands of fed-up locals staged demonstrations for a national day of action called “Hands Off!” According to the Associated Press, more than 150 groups staged “Hands Off! rallies” at than 1,200-plus locations in all 50 states.

This was the rally cry from the “Hands Off!” website: “Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. They’re taking everything they can get their hands on, and daring the world to stop them. On Saturday, April 5th, we’re taking to the streets nationwide to fight back with a clear message: Hands off!”

Here in our area, the Indivisible Sonoma County group (and its small-town offshoots, like Indivisible Healdsburg and Indivisible Cloverdale) played a big role in bringing people out. The Press Democrat reports that large rallies were held yesterday in nearly a dozen local towns — Calistoga, Guerneville, Sebastopol, Sonoma (~3,000 protesters), Napa (~1,000 protesters marching over downtown river bridges), etc. — before the big kahuna culminated in Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square from 3-5pm, alongside the farmers market.

The PD estimates around 5,000 people attended the Santa Rosa rally yesterday. From what I’ve heard, while the scene was somewhat chaotic, it was peaceful overall — and the mood was upbeat, even jovial. My mom was in attendance, and told me afterward: “It was such good energy. Everyone was just busting to be able to get out there and say something. You could feel it — so happy.”

So aside from the whole “Hands Off!” thing, the biggest local anti-Trump and anti-Musk movement has come in the form of weekly protests at various Tesla dealerships around here. (Again, the local version of a larger national movement called “Tesla Takedown.”) In Santa Rosa, the regular Saturday protests outside the Tesla showroom on Airway Drive were drawing around 100 people in February, then a few hundred in March — and they’re now reportedly topping 500 protesters per week. A parallel protest at the Tesla outpost in Sebastopol has been pushing 100 each Saturday, too.

For more on the nationwide uprising against Tesla, check out this recent Los Angeles Times story: “Tesla’s steep fall from California’s green darling to hated target of protests, violence, fires.” And our local paper of record, the Press Democrat, has been diving deep into Tesla ownership numbers in the North Bay and how Tesla drivers around here are dealing with the pressure to sell.

Here are some of the zingiest slogans I’ve seen on homemade protest signs so far, at all these various local demonstrations:

• “Ikea has better cabinets”
• “End the Turd Reich”
• “Do not buy a swasti-kar from this fascist clown”
• “Deport Musk”
• “Fire Musk and his Musk-rats”
• “Trumpy makes me grumpy”
• “So much wrong, so little cardboard”
• “Get your little hands off our democracy”
• “Make Amerika a democracy again”
• “Do not obey the dick-tator”
• “Left turn only”
• “DOGE OMG WTF”
• “Greenland for California: Yes please” (referring to this whole debacle)
• “Tax the rich” (oldie but a goodie…)
• “Burn your Tesla” (see below!)

The next big action coming up, aside from the ongoing Tesla Takedown protests, will be an elaborate “End Tax Injustice” caravan and rally spree on Tuesday, April 15 —aka, Tax Day! — at post offices across Sonoma County. (You know, for all of us not scrambling to turn in their taxes last-minute that day.) Looks like this action is being organized by Sonoma County Democratic Party officials. They say on Facebook:

The Federal TAX CODE is corrupt. Too many fail to pay their fair share and ordinary Americans pay the price.

Caravans will form at different points in Sonoma County at Post Offices along the way to Santa Rosa and rally at each one, then head to the next designated Post Office. You can choose to:

• Join a caravan heading to the Santa Rosa Main Post Office (decorate your vehicle!)

• Attend one or all rallies along the caravan route

• Meet up at the end of the day for a final mass rally in SR

Note from Simone: This piece originally appeared in the weekly email newsletter I write for the Bohemian, called Wine Country Today. Subscribe here!