LeBaron: Tourism debate echoes ’70s, ’80s fears about growth

It just keeps chipping away. A hotel here, a gourmet restaurant there, a luxury resort in a rural valley, more limousines, fewer mom-and-pop stores, Friday and Sunday night traffic on the 101 - and pretty soon you’re talking about real change.

Sometimes it’s political issues, like how much water does it take to grow grapes, or is this big idea too big for a two-lane road, or will the SMART train ease freeway congestion?

And sometimes it’s just personal laments, the kind that we share with family and friends, a kind of quiet wail that things are not like they used to be.

Change is a much easier topic to discuss some years after it happens than while it is actually happening.

This great truth (accompanied by a chorus of “duh!”) has come to me with my morning paper these past weeks.

The current “cultural shift” (which is a fancier term for “change,” I learned last week at a Leadership Santa Rosa panel discussion) began, as did so much of our earliest history, in the town of Sonoma. It was our only “tourist town,” with its mission and historic sites. But for more than a century it also was a very small and, I might say, insular town, with a population still a little miffed at losing the county seat in 1854.

Until the notion of “Wine Country” took hold, it remained pretty much unchanged - well into the second half of the 20th century. Surrounded by the last spurt of the old hot springs resorts, healthy orchards and dairies, with two or three big-name wineries and a couple historic hotels that were more quaint than comfortable, it was a town that resisted growth. But that was then.

Now, Sonoma is so geared to tourism that it pays for its own advertising on radio and TV as the “real Wine Country.” And the community battles over how many fancy hotels to allow and whether it will ruin the ambiance to let in chain stores.

Those large, rectangular outlines in the middle of the streets that ring the Sonoma Plaza should be the first clue. They are parking spaces for the tour buses.

Just like you know when you see a town in summer with grooved sidewalks that it snows a lot in the winter, in that same way you know when you see those big bus spaces that Sonoma has become a place where the residents don’t go downtown on weekends. Some of them don’t go downtown at all.

Meanwhile, in Healdsburg (where the elite meet to eat?), the hot topic is affordable housing. The new hotels and restaurants have converted the old “Hillsburg” - the “Buckle of the Prune Belt” - to a capital-D “Destination.”

Like old Sonomans, the residents have watched with mixed feelings - proud to be “discovered,” aghast at what discovery has wrought.

We cannot go forth without remembering the comments of two Healdsburg folks who were there before the millennial rush to upscale - rancher Bruce Campbell’s lament as the hometown businesses gave way to chic: “I have to go to Santa Rosa to buy underwear”; and “The Linen People,” which was pioneer wine writer Millie Howie’s label for the first of the San Francisco social set to hit town.

There’s no question that this cultural shift creates jobs. Lots of jobs. So it’s great for the economy, right?

Well, it depends on whose economy we’re talking about. In places like Healdsburg, where housing costs have skyrocketed, these jobs don’t pay the kind of wages that afford a cute little early-20th-century house on Matheson Street or a townhouse on the square in Windsor (if you can afford a car).

The servers and busers and kitchen workers and housekeepers and desk clerks in the restaurants and hotels are a huge part of this economy but may not be enjoying it as much as the owners and managers and chefs and the customers they serve.

It’s an age-old problem.

“The working poor.” That is such a sad phrase.

Change is a constant. We know that. Sometimes it comes with a jolt, like the discovery of gold or a world war. But it usually comes in such small measure that we don’t notice it until it gets too obvious to ignore. That’s when it becomes one of those cultural shifts in direction that alters the course of local history forever and always.

The small changes are part of a bigger picture and quickly become part of a hot topic, such as the one that arose in the 1970s, when the county’s population count was growing like Pinocchio’s nose. Growth became the overweening issue that defined the ’80s. That’s when we took Warm Springs Dam and the general plan and urban boundaries and widening the freeway and the first SMART projections and that same question of where people live - of gated communities and the right-to-farm and NIMBYism - and rolled them up in a ball of controversy that was labeled “growth.”

We began to pay attention. What came out of that bulge of “growth/no-growth” making its way through the python (to borrow an image from the boomers) were advances in activism and environmentalism. Today, Sonoma County can match its commitment to open space and protection with all comers.

And it worked. The runaway growth of the ’70s was slowed to a crawl, although there is a lingering perception that it is still rampant.

And it’s still working. Or at least that’s the image we project. Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent quote about the county’s stance - “They don’t want houses up there” - is pretty much dead-on. We still don’t want people to come and stay, but we certainly want them to come and go, leaving money behind.

Which brings us back to this new clump of issues, which is no longer growth, but tourism. It’s not a bad word in itself, but, like growth, it can become one if it goes out of control.

It’s hardly a shock that such a beautiful place as Sonoma County, situated on the northern flank of the most expensive city in the U.S. (yes, statistics will show that it’s San Francisco, not New York City), will draw tourists with money to spend.

How many is too many? The debate has begun.

In Napa County, supervisors and planning commissioners met for an eight-hour session March 10 to discuss how many more wineries should be allowed. A forum is planned on such issues as land use and water and traffic, all of which have a familiar sound here, west of the Mayacamas. Each new winery or tasting room here can expect to be protested. Some proposals, like food channel celebrity Guy Fieri’s, will be beaten back. Others, like the Dairyland Winery proposal between Santa Rosa and Sebastopol, are in the hopper.

Every new anything - wineries, tasting rooms, hotels, restaurants - will create more jobs as well as more questions.

The flipside of “working poor”? “Living wage.” That sounds like an answer but is sure to be debated as just one of those many, many issues that keep chipping away at us, on the way to yet another “cultural shift.”