Page 5 - Sonoma County Gazette 3-19

LETTERS cont’d from page 4
Coastal Marathon
Nobody cares what the weather was weeks ago when these columns were written. Just get to the point.
We are writing to oppose the Coastal Marathon that’s been proposed for Highway One on September 29.
In fairness, every editor I worked for had his or her pet peeves. One said never begin a paragraph with the word THE.. another said go through your story and cut out half the THAT’S. Still another said there was no such thing as a first annual anything. Counting starts with the second annual.
As full-time residents of the
Jenner community, we are extremely concerned about the impact this proposed event would have on our area. This event will have a negative impact on coastal businesses by closing Highway One to travelers and tourists on one of the busiest days of the year.
So I put my weather report criticism in that same category. Just one of those things that bugs an old retired editor.
Closing the highway will also make the Sonoma Coast State Park inaccessible for most of a whole
day, and give preference to paying marathon runners while denying it to taxpayers, citizens, and visitors who have a right to use our free parks and beaches. It will also make Fort Ross, an important historic site that brings in money for State Parks inaccessible from the south.
Hopefully your columnists have thick enough skins to either take my criticism to heart or to just consider me a relic of the past and simply blow me off.
My suggestion to them and anybody else who writes would be to take a close look at Mo McElroy’s work. She has something to show us all.
The expenses and energy required to provide emergency services, highway directions, cleanup, and myriad other needs of this event such as radio communications since cell phones do not work along most of the coast, could much better be used to solve problems we already have at the coast. Our roads are crumbling, our volunteer fire and ambulance services are over- stretched, our beaches and roads are littered with trash, the trails to the beaches are a shambles, and our state parks’ personnel are severely overtaxed, and our community centers struggle to raise funds to exist.
Pete Margolies Guerneville
Sonoma Column
Her reminder of what is going on
at the border is profoundly important to us all. Let’s do what we can and let’s not turn our heads away from
it: “They are taken to the dog house where they are put in cages. Families are kept there for three days, then sent to the Ice House where it’s super cold. Big fans blow, night and day, no one knows why, keeping the temperature in the 50’s and 60’s.” After three days they are prosecuted for illegal entry and separated from their kids....the bail up near 2500 and to 10,000...
And please read Immigrant Stories by Christopher Kerosky’s December column: WAITING FOR RELIEF: My Own Journey to a Refugee Camp South of Tijuana - a guest column from Liz Linde, a Sonoma County resident, about her recent trip to a refugee camp in Mexico holding many thousands of asylum-seekers awaiting their asylum interviews at our Southern border.
A special shout out and thanks for Stephanie Hiller’s last column in Savory Sonoma.
(Read it: Feb. issue, 2019.) Katy Byrne
Carol Sklenicka Richard Ryan
The suddenness with which
news of this marathon proposal has emerged suggests that it has not been carefully planned and that no local communities have been consulted in advance.
Equal Justice and
I have a strange story to tell: Last November a family of four assaulted two male employees of a Santa Rosa mobile home park with a baseball bat, a car, and a shovel--all deadly weapons. A terrified 14-year-old girl witnessed the entire attack.
Compassion?
Both men were badly bruised and missed several days of work. The perpetrators have remained free
and hostile and have continued to make threats, either overt or implied. Neighbors are living in fear.
LETTERS cont’d on page 6
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