Sonoma County Gazette February 2019
P. 1

     FEBRUARY 2019
    Teaching     Building a     LEARN about     Should we BAN New
    Democracy to Students ~ 7
Legacy through Connection ~ 12
Land Use Policies ~ 20
Home Construction in all Areas Prone to Fires? ~ 28
        Fifth District Supervisor
Lynda Hopkins Looks
Both Ways on Cannabis
By Will Carruthers
Homelessness is one of Sonoma
By Jonah Raskin
By no stretch of the imagination
County’s most intractable problems. Despite the efforts of local activists, nonprofits, and government agencies, the number of people living on the streets, in vehicles, and in improvised shelters remains largely unchanged from year to year.
could Lynda Hopkins be called a “pot politician,” but she’s the supervisor of the Fifth District, where more marijuana is cultivated than in any other district in Sonoma County. Geography, agriculture and politics have pushed her front and center where cannabis is concerned, not just locally but nationally.
The problem has been going on for decades and the situation has only grown worse as housing prices continue to rise.
In January, she appeared in a New York Times story by Thomas Fuller, the paper’s San Francisco Bureau Chief. The article was titled “Now for the Hard Part: Getting Californians to Buy Legal Weed.”
An annual federal report on homelessness found that Sonoma County had the third largest homeless population – 2,657 in 2018 - and third highest number of unsheltered youth – 715 – of any “largely suburban” county in the country.
“The icon for cannabis is going to become the Marlboro Man,” The New York Times reported Hopkins as saying. “In California we’ve done what we always do—regulate, regulate, regulate, which ultimately gives significant advantage to large companies with significant economies of scale.”
There was also a significant increase in the number of chronically homeless individuals in the county over the past
To understand and share another’s emotional state.
How do advocates
for the homeless
stay motivated?
 CAUGHT cont’d on page 8
To understand another’s pain and want to ease that pain.
HELPING cont’d on page 8
Your HOME TOWN NEWS: pgs 28-48 EVERYTHING to DO Calendar: pgs 53 - 71
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