Santa Rosa City Schools picked its next superintendent from Oakland Unified — a district that spent 22 years under state control before clawing its way out last summer. Santa Rosa is fighting to keep from going in. Monica Thomas, a longtime Oakland administrator, was named June 4 to run Sonoma County’s largest school system. The…
Author: Roger Coryell
Comstock Middle School closes for good as Santa Rosa schools claw out of fiscal crisis
SANTA ROSA — The last bell at Hilliard Comstock Middle School rang Friday, ending 54 years on West Steele Lane and closing one more campus in a Santa Rosa City Schools cost-cutting drive that district leaders describe as the deepest financial reckoning in their more than 100-year history. Comstock, which opened in January 1972 and…
Cotati hit with new federal civil rights lawsuit
COTATI — A federal civil rights lawsuit was filed Tuesday against the City of Cotati in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, according to court records — the third such case filed against the small Sonoma County city by a plaintiff named George Barich in the past decade. The case, Barich v….
Micro-Winery Guild launches in Napa and Sonoma, cashing in on Santa Rosa lawmaker’s vineyard-tasting bill
A small-producer trade group that spent years pushing California to legalize tastings out in the vines is now turning that win into a consumer brand. The Micro-Winery Guild, the rebranded version of the nonprofit Save the Family Farms, announced this week it is launching a Napa- and Sonoma-based collective of family-run wineries that make fewer…
Top-down view of parched, cracked earth texture with small green plants emerging
Cloverdale will be short of water in dry years — by a third
In a dry year, Cloverdale will be short of water by a third. That is the city’s own estimate. It is published in a new draft plan posted to the city’s website on Wednesday. And it is the first time a Russian River town has put a number on what life will look like after…
Hidden recording in a Davis living room:
Jones threatens to sue Thompson over attack ad Two and a half weeks before California’s June 2 primary, Eric Jones’ campaign sayssomeone secretly recorded a small house event in Davis — and that Rep. Mike Thomp-son’s campaign is now using the audio in an attack ad. A reportedly secret recording and a new attack ad…
Four Napa County weeklies go dark May 22 as Highway 29 Publishing pauses operations
Four Napa County weekly newspapers will stop publishing on May 22, the company that owns them announced Wednesday afternoon. In a letter posted to the Calistoga Tribune website and signed “The Highway 29 team,” Highway 29 Publishing told readers that May 22 will be the last day it publishes the Calistoga Tribune, the Yountville Sun,…
Word Junkie: The spring edition
In which we drag a perfectly nice season into a basement of dictionaries and refuse to let it leave Spring is the season everyone loves and no one can describe without sounding like a greeting card. “Renewal.” “Awakening.” “Rebirth.” Sure. Also: mud, allergies, and the unsettling realization that you have not, in fact, gone to…
Death cap mushroom. CDPH photo.
Three hospitalized near Deer Park as California’s wild-mushroom poisoning toll climbs to 47
Three adults are in the hospital after eating wild mushrooms picked in the hills above Deer Park, and Napa County’s top public health officer is asking everyone in the region to put down the basket until further notice. Dr. Christine Wu, Napa County’s Public Health Officer and a deputy director at the county’s Health and…
Medtronic’s Santa Rosa exit closes a 27-year chapter in Sonoma County medtech
The slow goodbye finally has a date. Medtronic told its 370 Santa Rosa workers on Wednesday that the company will shut its Fountaingrove campus by spring 2028, ending a presence in Sonoma County that began in 1998 with what was then one of the largest medical-device deals in California history.The work — pacemakers, coronary stents,…