Furch: A longtime voice for environment

<p>For many west county environmentalists, Rue Furch is a crusader of the green movement, their anointed voice when they want someone to challenge development and growth.</p><p>"She is one of the most hard-working, most sincere people that anybody involved in the progressive community could find," said Craig Litwin, political director of Conservation Action, the county's leading environmental political action group.</p><p>For the past three decades, the seat that stretches along the Sonoma County coastline has been held by politically powerful environmental advocates -- Eric Koenigshofer, Ernie Carpenter and, for the past 12 years, Mike Reilly.</p><p>Furch, a Sebastopol resident and veteran of the county planning commission, comes from the same ranks of grass-roots activists who consider this seat on the board of supervisors to be theirs by rite of passage.</p><p>A community weekly, the Russian River Times, dubs her "True Rue" in almost every issue in which it runs her picture.</p><p>"Sometimes I have been the only voice for the environment on the planning commission," she said.</p><p>Yet the district is not an environmental monolith. It also extends to the urban edge of Santa Rosa, where her opponent, Efren Carrillo, received overwhelming support in Santa Rosa's west side neighborhoods as well as in the largely Latino Roseland where he lives.</p><p>The division is reflected in the endorsements from former supervisors, with Carpenter and Reilly endorsing her, while Koenigshofer is campaign consultant to Carrillo's campaign.</p><p>Her fervent supporters dismiss the controversy over her failure to pay her property taxes for five years, with a bill that totaled $71,310, as a dead issue because she paid it off over a year ago.</p><p>She said the issue still comes up at candidate forums, but she feels she's put it to rest. "There was never anything illegal about how I handled it. Our taxes are paid in full. I made some bad business decisions," she said.</p><p>For 17 years as planning commissioner, residents and activists counted on her to challenge proposals from developers, vineyard operators, timber harvesters and people proposing additions to their homes.</p><p>"I have been consistent," Furch said at a recent candidates' debate in Forestville in answer to a question about wastewater. "I could go on about this for a long time and you would probably die of boredom."</p><p>Her advocacy of a water resources section in the 2020 General Plan resulted in lengthy debate over well monitoring, biotic habitat and riparian corridors when the planning commission and the supervisors conducted public hearings.</p><p>Still, she defends its inclusion because "water was the issue raised in every part of the county" during General Plan subcommittee hearings that she and the late Supervisor Mike Cale conducted.</p><p>Inclusion of the water element, she said, was done "by bludgeoning" the issue into the document over opposition of landowners and farmers.</p><p>But critics say her strength on the environment is also a weakness. They say that she is a one-issue candidate in tough economic times that demand a broader vision of how best to tackle a wide web of complex issues facing the county.</p><p>She rejects that view, saying her critics have short memories. She points out that she has worked as a consultant to small businesses, was a project manager for the Sonoma County Farmland Group and was involved in west county education issues in the 1970s.</p><p>"I have to laugh because an environmentalist is not all that I have been," she said. "I have lived here long enough and lived through enough issues for anybody to try and frame me."</p><p>As further evidence of her commitment to environmental issues, she points to Conservation Action's "Upstream Swimmer" award and Concerned Citizens of Santa Rosa's "Agent of Change" award.</p><p>"I was the one they could call, I was the one that would listen," Furch said.</p><p>If elected, she said her top priority would be drafting the ordinances that enforce the new General Plan.</p><p>"Implementation of the General Plan occurs in the ordinances, and you have to take aggressive stances in your ordinances," she said. "I would take it on with vigor and aggressiveness, and I have not heard a lot of plans of action from my opponent."</p>