The city is taking applications for a public seat on the Lake County Sanitation District board. Supervisors decide Aug. 18 whether the seat exists — and a doubled sewer bill is waiting behind it.
Month: July 2026
Napa’s tourism economy broke even last year. Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake lost ground
A new Visit Napa Valley study puts the valley first in its competitive set on familiarity, perception and likelihood to visit. State data covering all four North Coast counties shows what that was worth once you subtract inflation.
Santa Rosa man gets 25 to life in wife’s stabbing death
Tunoa Meo got 25 years to life Friday for stabbing his wife to death in Santa Rosa. The district attorney’s office says Proposition 57 credits cut that to about 15 — a claim a state appeals court has rejected for murder.
Sonoma County’s earliest harvest in decades begins
Sonoma County’s 2026 winegrape harvest began July 16, nearly two weeks earlier than any start the county’s growers association has documented. The crop is light, and growers say that is the point.
A fire hydrant struck by a bus sprays water over Main Street in St. Helena. The city released the photo with its July 19 advisory on the resulting discolored water. (Courtesy City of St. Helena)
Grand jury flagged the pipes in St. Helena. Then a bus hit a hydrant
A Napa County civil grand jury said in June that decades of sediment in the St. Helena water mains had never been assessed and had no repair plan. Twenty-four days later, a bus hit a hydrant.
Trees killed by wildfire still stand above the regrowth near Middletown, in the heart of the 2015 Valley Fire burn area. (Roger Coryell, June 7, 2026)
Lake County lost more than a thousand homes to fire. Nobody will say how many came back.
Lake County gained thousands of residents and lost more than a thousand homes since 2010, nearly all in the 2015 Valley Fire. Eleven years on, no agency will say how many burned homes came back.
Petaluma to vote on rejecting all eight grand jury findings
A Sonoma County Civil Grand Jury report says Petaluma let years of animal services failures slide. The city says the jury misread the law. The council votes Monday on a response that disagrees with all eight findings.
Sonoma Developmental Center still out of fire-code compliance
A brush fire this week was the reminder: the state-owned Sonoma Developmental Center campus in Glen Ellen is out of compliance with the county fire code as fire season sets in, and its redevelopment is stuck in court.
The Napa-Sonoma Marshes near American Canyon, on the low-lying Napa County edge of San Pablo Bay. Photo: Melissa McMasters via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
San Pablo Bay floods tonight, and no storm is behind it
A minor coastal flood advisory runs through Thursday. The National Weather Service says 3 to 6 inches of tonight’s high tide is sea level rise — and the North Bay’s water peaks nearly two hours after San Francisco’s.
Golden hills of northern California reflected in the still water of the Nicasio Reservoir in West Marin County.
Sonoma keeps saying yes to Marin’s Russian River pipeline
Sonoma County’s supervisors approved a 15-year water contract with Marin on the consent calendar, with no discussion. The number that mattered — a near-doubling of Marin’s winter draw on the Russian River — was not in the staff report they read.