Page 38 - Sonoma County Gazette April 2017

Housing Workshops
Whether you are a renter, a home owner, a homeless person, a landlord, or a potential landlord, the price of housing impacts you! It’s wise to understand the policy options and economics at play here.
These workshops will give you the opportunity to understand our City’s current programs and provide a forum so you can give feedback to the City Council on potential future plans that will address our community’s housing needs.
Meeting #1 covered Overview of Current Housing Inventory, Policies and Programs and was held at the end of March. Subsequent meetings will cover topics like:
• Secondary Housing Units
• Legal mechanisms that can support affordable housing (e.g., Housing Trusts)
• Subsidized affordable housing (e.g., Section 8, Habitat for Humanity) • Rent Control
Want to be a panelist?
If you have expertise on one of these topics and would like to be a future panelist, please contact
City Clerk Mary Gourley mgourley@cityofsebastopol.org
Save these dates! Future workshops will also be on Monday evenings: April 10, April 24, May 22, and une 12
Questions? For more information, contact the Planning Director Kenyon Webster: kwebster@cityofsebastopol.org
Have you noticed new landscape designs around parking lots and other new developments?
This summer is the 20th anniversary of the Hallberg Butterfly Garden and they are holding an Open Gardens Celebration on Sunday, June 25th from 10am-4pm. Come visit the Purplish Copper, the Painted Lady, West Coast Lady, Grey Hairstreak, Skipper, Mourning Cloak, Anise Swallowtail and other poetic powdered-wings. As is customary, there will be children’s activities, a wild ower display, walking tours, and bird and butter y sightings. Check out the plant, book, and craft sale. No reservations needed, just show up .
Development of land typically increases the hard surfaces of a site. Low Impact Development, or LID, is a design strategy that has the goal of mimicking the hydrologic
functions of the land before
Miss Hallberg aka Butter y Lady
Low Impact Development Protecting Water Quality
Upon retirement, our amazing Butter y Lady started expanding the now 9-acre garden and her studies that elevated it to a California treasure. Much is due to the exacting record-keeping she did for years, including daily butter y counts and raising chrysalises in her own home. Imagine the focus and careful tracking of those tasks alone. Today you can still visit and internalize the vital lessons by just making an appointment.
It was just in February that we toasted
the 100th birthday of Graton’s beloved Miss Louise Hallberg, the devoted maven of Hallberg Butterfly Garden. By the end of the same month our dear “Butter y Lady” had grown her “wings” and own from this life.
She leaves a legacy that few achieve and
many can continue to enjoy and learn from
for years to come. It is one thing to hear about
butter y habitats being threatened and the
potential loss of species critical to pollination
and the food chain; it is another to visit and
see the various types hatching and feeding,
and to learn about what you may be able
to plant in your own garden to provide food and nesting refuges for them. Louise’s mother Della started the whole adventure in the 1920s by planting Dutchmen’s Pipe vine, the only plant Pipevine Swallowtails will nest on. Louise was o getting a degree in political science and pursuing a long career as a meticulous registrar at the Santa Rosa Junior College.
Please read our story on Louise at www.SonomaCountyGazette.com
it’s development. Small-scale, permanent, planted LID features capture and treat the stormwater as it would have been pre- development. The result is equivalent or improved quality of stormwater runo at the site even after redevelopment.
Show Flowers ~ Speaking of the crucial role owers play in our lives, from feeding our winged allies to salving our winter-ravaged souls, the Graton Community Club is once again holding the Spring Flower Show and Sale. Friday and Saturday April 28-29 the Community Club doors downtown will be open to show o impressive table top arrangements and tableaus, serve
Low Impact Development
features include vegetated
swales, rain gardens, bioretention areas, and many more. Benefits include:
a tasty homemade lunch and treats, and o er up a porch sale and a fantastic plant sale. You can find ornamentals, annual and perennial food plants in the greenhouse along the right side of the Clubhouse. Don’t miss a glass of wine and conversations with knowledgeable local gardeners and ower experts with some live music on the side. Doors are open 9-4 each day.
• Preventing trash and debris from owing into our creeks and rivers. • Treating pollutants and protecting water quality.
• Reducing high ows which cause erosion and ooding.
• Recharging our groundwater basin!
The whole shindig is no ordinary club fundraiser; for years they have had a tradition of annually awarding scholarships to graduates from West County high schools and Santa Rosa Junior College who are continuing onward to complete a four-year education. Hope some study botany & butter y science!
Low Impact Development is a requirement for many development projects in the Russian River watershed. Designers, engineers, architects and builders can download the Low Impact Development Technical Design Manual at www. rrwatershed.org/project/low-impact-development.
Village Mind ~ I can’t help but ruminate about the role little hamlets/ villages play in cataclysmic political policies like those grinding at our country these days. Villages are somewhat larger than hamlets and historically clustered around a central point, estate or business center, with agriculture surrounding it. Hamlets were small dots of imported humanity without a central focus pe se, just yeast spores in the dominating wildness around them.
The next time you park your car, look around the parking lot and see if it has any Low Impact Development features. You can also learn more on www. rrwatershed.org’s Project page for Low Impact Design.
Earliest settler’s villages were formed around ideas and values that they had emigrated here to practice freely. At the same time they protected those ways, they were defensive of them and critical of others values. We come from strangely pluralistic and yet exclusionary roots, starting at village level. I see this in our own wee townlet, with over owing neighborly support alongside suspicion about those danged new ADA sidewalks. Building a bridge to understand our fellow citizens must include understanding our early roots. Trying to imagine life - or at least getting the mail - in someone else’s wheels would help too.
This article was authored by Craig Scott, of the City of Cotati, on behalf of RRWA. RRWA (www.rrwatershed.org) is an association of local public agencies in the Russian River watershed that have come together to coordinate regional programs for clean water, habitat restoration, and watershed enhancement.
38 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 4/17
Please get your events to me before the 15th of the month prior: heatagran@sonic.net.