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PRELIMINARY CITY BUDGET PRESENTED FOR SUGGESTIONS, REVISIONS
Healdsburg, California Healdsburg, California
May 16, 2024 Date, Date, 20202020
SCANT PUBLIC ATTENDANCE AT SPECIAL COUNCIL MEETING ON TWO-YEAR BUDGET By Christian Kallen
Photo by Galdones Photography LLC
A special five-hour meeting time was blocked out for the Healdsburg City Council on Monday night this week to allow plenty of time for council review, and public comment, on a proposed two-year budget for the city. It even started an hour early, at 5pm, in the usual meeting room at City Hall. But barely an hour and a half passed before Mayor David Hagele gaveled the meeting over, at 6:35pm. For most of the meeting there were only one or two “citizens” in the meeting room, though city managers and staff were well represented as they heard the preliminary numbers as presented by Finance Director Katie Edgar. “ W h i l e a tt e n d a n c e was light last night, our neighbors’ feedback was very robust during the entire budget process,” said Hagele the next day, referring to a lengthy public comment process that included an unusual app that allowed anyone to modify the budget to their own priorities. Prior to the meeting, City Manager Jeff Kay outlined its purpose, to estimate “revenues and expenditures for each of our major funds as well as preliminary recommendations for discretionary, one-time expenditures (mostly capital projects),” he said. “In short, once we match the available revenues with the costs to maintain dayto-day operations, we will have a limited pot of money left for new projects or programs,” he added. “We’ll be looking for City Council direction on the recommendations so that we can
GARDEN LUNCH The Garden-to-Table Lunch at Kendall-Jackson Wine Estate on Friday is one of many events taking place around Healdsburg this coming weekend, part of the third annual Healdsburg Wine & Food Experience.
The Table Is Set for Weekend’s Wine & Food ‘Experience’ HEALDSBURG ON THE MENU FOR 3RD ANNUAL CULINARY FESTIVAL By Christian Kallen
This weekend the streets, restaurants and wineries of Healdsburg will buzz with the excitement of the third annual Healdsburg Wine & Food Experience, a fourday workout for the palate that draws upon local produce and product to offer a well-rounded “experience” for its participants. Experience? “What we’re trying to create are experiences for people that they will remember for the rest of their lives,” said Steven Dveris, the founder of the event and CEO of SD Media Productions. A longtime ad executive for Food & Wine magazine, Dveris knows well the secrets of
a successful winery, and believes it often comes down to the experience people have when they visit. “Once you have the experience of seeing the grounds and the grapes and the way that the winemakers do the work, and then you see the beautiful tasting room that they created, and then you sip their wine with the guy who created it, that experience—it will change you forever,” Dveris said. The idea that a series of activities in a given destination can create positive memories for participants has even come to be known as “experience tourism” in the travel industry, and this coming weekend Healdsburg is Ground Zero. “I just thought it was the cutest, most beautiful, charming town,” he said, remembering his first visit,
which happened when he was scouting out the area as the new ad rep for Food & Wine magazine. “I almost bought a house there, but I ended up in Marin County,” he said, adding that he needed to be closer to his offices in San Francisco. Dveris found a kindred spirit in Karissa Kruse, CEO of Sonoma County Winegrowers, who was also working toward a celebration of local wines and foods. Together, they hatched the first Healdsburg Wine & Food Experience in 2022. “We couldn’t be more excited to invite culinary experts and wine enthusiasts to Sonoma County to experience the best of what we offer locally alongside a global fabric of incredible wines and food,” Kruse said this week.
“I’ve worked for Food & Wine for 25 years, as I mentioned, so everyone calls me and asks me, ‘Where should I go in Wine Country?’ And they’re usually thinking Napa,” Dveris said.
Why Healdsburg?
“We wanted to put Healdsburg and Sonoma County on the radar—we have world-class wines, too, and world-class chefs! We wanted to put Healdsburg on par with the great wine regions of the world.” He plans to deliver that message to the guests at the four-day event’s welcome celebration this afternoon at Montage Healdsburg, where the VIPs (holders of the priciest tickets, sponsors and other favored guests) are likely to be enthusiastically receptive to the idea. Like all events in the
upcoming festival, Sonoma County’s wines are paired with curated bites by celebrity chefs—in this case, from Iron Chef Americawinner Viet Pham and local star Domenica Catelli of Geyserville’s Catelli’s. Other smaller-scale events are pinot noir and Champagne seminars, cooking demonstrations, a barbecue and vineyard tour, a garden-to-table lunch at Kendall Jackson estates, a Saturday morning “Insider’s perspective” on wine trends for industry professionals, and the ever-ebullient Jean-Charles Boisset showing off his latest batch of designer tequila at Lo & Behold. Not to be overshadowed, Guy Fieri caps Saturday’s Maui at the Matheson dinner with a fund-raising Magnum for Maui party until midnight, putting the ➝ Experience, 4
➝ City Budget, 7
VIGIL FOR PEACE RETURNS TO HEALDSBURG, SAME TIME, SAME BUS STATION THURSDAY NIGHT DEMONSTRATION MAKES A COMEBACK IN TIMES OF STRIFE By Christian Kallen
Photo by Christian Kallen
PROTEST FOR PEACE Demonstrators last Thursday on
Healdsburg Avenue included Lillian Read, in the black t-shirt, and Petra Boardman, with the ‘Peace is Possible’ sign.
Last Thursday afternoon, the Healdsburg Peace Project reappeared in its traditional spot on Healdsburg Avenue at the bus stop on the Plaza, across from Hotel Healdsburg. The participants carried flags, banners and signs, all with a common message in favor of peace over conflict, a message that never
seems to lose its currency. Lillian Read, a longtime member of the looseknit organization, sent out word to an extensive mailing list just a few days earlier, and about 15 people showed up, as they have since the 20th century. “It started for me during the Iraq war in 2003, and I know there was some presence during the first Iraq war, so it’s been going on for a long, long time,” Read said. “The time is the same as it’s always been, between 6 and 7pm on Thursdays.” She recalled, “I don’t remember exactly when it started. Some of the original people in the project have died.” Among the departed were Bob Boardman, who passed away in 2011, and his wife Laura Beach, who died 10 years later. Read was planning on attending a memorial for another
“peace veteran,” Liz Hawthorne, the following Saturday. “So we’ve lost a lot of people, a lot of the leadership of the group,” she said. While many at Thursday night’s vigil were of an older generation, younger faces brought with them a louder energy animated by the current conflict in Gaza. The vigils first began with the onset of the Gulf War in 1990, and continued, rain or shine, well into the 2020s. but with the social isolation that the Covid pandemic brought, the weekly vigils struggled to continue, then ceased. Now they’re back, with the specter of the war in Gaza motivating demonstrators to show up once again. Wrote Read in an announcement this week, “Signs, flags, silence, chants, prayers, drums, information, whatever you bring, this call for ceasefire needs everyone.”