Tour of California to miss Sonoma County for 2nd straight year

For the second year in a row, the Amgen Tour of California cycling race will not go through Sonoma County in 2015, Santa Rosa city officials said Friday.

“We’re disappointed,” said Raissa de la Rosa, the city’s economic development specialist and co-chair of the local organizing committee that was negotiating with the Tour’s sponsors to have Santa Rosa host a stage of the professional cycling race. “We tried really, really hard. A lot of work went into this, understanding what it means here and the role Santa Rosa has played in the race. It just didn’t work out.”

De la Rosa said unlike last year, when the city cited donor fatigue in declining to bid to participate in the race, there was a concerted and prolonged effort to bring it back to Sonoma County. The organizing committee spent months in discussions with AEG, the media conglomerate that owns and operates the eight-day bike race, but could not reach an agreement to bring the race to Santa Rosa for the eighth time in 10 years.

Among the issues de la Rosa cited was Santa Rosa’s desire not to host a weekday stage because of concerns it would back up traffic at key moments during afternoon rush hour.

“During a weekday work day in Santa Rosa we have as many as 24,000 people in downtown, which is equal to the population of Windsor,” she said. “There’s no way to stage the race without blocking large amounts of traffic in a way that offsets the commuting pattern at a time also when schools are getting out.”

The race begins and ends on a Sunday, which means there are only three weekend race days. AEG, de la Rosa said, wanted those dates to be reserved for larger media markets.

Santa Rosa’s private sector provided funding for its stage of the Tour from the race’s first year in 2006. In subsequent years, fundraising efforts were bolstered by the success of Santa Rosa cyclist Levi Leipheimer, who won the Tour of California in 2007, 2008 and 2009. After organizers decided to bypass Sonoma County in 2011, the city hosted the overall start of the race in 2012, seeing a peak in fundraising and enthusiasm.

In those years, the race generated an estimated $20 million in economic activity for the region and helped cement Sonoma County’s reputation as a mecca for cycling. Today, the area plays host to many local bike tours and races, including the Vineman triathlon and Leipheimer’s King Ridge GranFondo. City officials said the success of those events makes hosting a stage not as critical as it seemed in the early years of the Tour of California.

“I can’t even count how many events we host because I don’t know all of them,” de la Rosa said. “We’ve become a robust destination now. It’s remarkable, the number of both professional riders and amateurs who come here for tours and races and training.”

Bret Gave, who owns the Trek bike store on Mendocino Avenue, said he was disappointed that Santa Rosa would not be part of the race next year.

“It’s a shame it won’t be here,” he said. “I wish they had tried harder.”

But de la Rosa said the city was not giving up on the Tour and would continue to work with AEG to bring it back to Sonoma County.

“We tried not only for Santa Rosa, but we talked with other cities in Sonoma County,” she said. “We never stopped talking to AEG, and we’ll continue talking to them. We’ll definitely be trying for 2016.”