Joe White bought a home 4 years ago across the street from a proposed fire station site on Newgate Ct. in the Fountaingrove area of Santa Rosa. He believes the fire station does not belong on his block and should be moved to another location.

Can a Santa Rosa fire station be bad for a neighborhood?

DEREK MOORE
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Some Fountaingrove residents say their Santa Rosa neighborhood is just too upscale for a fire station to be built there.

"It is morally and ethically unacceptable to place a fire station with two trucks in the center of one of the most prestigious areas in the community," wrote Herb and Wendy Steiner in a letter they submitted to the Santa Rosa Planning Commission.

Likewise, some neighbors of a proposed school in Windsor's Vinecrest Estates argue that it would degrade property values and invite problems on an almost apocalyptic scale.

"We're looking at a lot of retired people who have spent a lot of money on these homes," said John Boyles, an engineering consultant who lives in Vinecrest. "The potential impact is going to be only negative. We've already suffered a huge decline in property values in the state of California."

Even for Sonoma County, where resistance to development of almost any kind is routine, protests over a school and fire station stand out amid the bruising battles over asphalt plants and big-box stores.

Does opposition to these stalwarts of communal life represent the usual, if occasionally over-the-top, rhetoric that greets most development here? Or is it evidence of NIMBYs gone wild?

"I've been doing work in county land use, publicly and privately, for 30 years, and I've never had anyone disparage the idea of a fire substation as being a negative in a community," attorney and former county Supervisor Eric Koenigshofer said.

Sonoma County does, however, have a rich history of activism over land use policy and urban development.

Fifty years ago, opposition to a proposed nuclear power plant at Bodega Head sparked what is widely acknowledged as the nation's first large-scale organized environmental protest.

That protest also was seen as California's first example of the doctrine of "Not in My Backyard," two decades before the phrase or its commonly-known moniker, NIMBY, were coined.

In the decades since, urban growth boundaries, open space districts, scenic corridors and other regulations have been put in place to preserve what most residents find appealing about living in Sonoma County, and that's the natural beauty.

"If that's called NIMBY-ism, I want it," said Bill Kortum, an environmental activist since the days of the the nuclear power plant protests. "That's why we've got the county that we have."

But Kortum draws a distinction, as many would, between battles over nuclear power and a fire station or school.

Has the pendulum swung too far?

Koenigshofer thinks so, and said he fears for communal life if it can be argued that schools and firehouses are detrimental to neighborhoods.

"We still have to fit in the working parts of the community," he said. "You can't build a school, or a firehouse, or an asphalt plant, or a winery, or put in 70 miles of bicycle paths along a rail line without having environmental impacts of one sort or another. That's a fact of life."

But a project that one person views as benefitting the greater good is, for others, a detriment to their quality of life.

Opponents of the proposed firehouse and school don't view their opposition as being narrowly motivated by their own self-interest, which is the classic definition of NIMBY.

"It's very easy to dismiss objections with a phrase, but that really is not the situation at all," Boyles in Windsor said.

Said Joe White, a retired engineer who lives across the street from the site of the proposed fire station in Fountaingrove, "The neighborhood needs a fire station. It's just that this site in my opinion is ill-chosen."

White said he disagrees with the idea that Fountaingrove is too nice for such a station. He said his primary concerns are with the lot being too small to fit the facility, and with engines having to navigate the narrow streets.

"Forgetting all that, the economics are ridiculous," he said.

But critics of such opposition are likely to latch on to the views expressed by some of White's neighbors, including that of the Steiners, who live next door.

The couple, who could not be reached for comment this week, argued in their letter to the city that the value of their Newgate Court home, which the couple said they paid $1.3 million for in 2007, would be degraded if the fire station is built.

"We cannot find another fire station in an exclusive, upscale neighborhood in the city of Santa Rosa," stated the couple.

Another letter writer, Linda Barr, raised the spectre of "domestic help" who park along Fountaingrove's streets being threatened by all those fire trucks zooming by.

The Wedgewood Way resident said in an interview that she and her neighbors "don't all have the same gardeners who come on the same day" and that there's "always a lot of people parking on the street."

The Planning Commission approved the project at its April 8 meeting. However, several residents appealed that decision to the City Council.

Mayor Susan Gorin said she could not comment specifically on the proposal because she will have to vote on the appeal.

But she said in general, no neighborhood in the city is off-limits for a new fire station. She said one is particularly needed in the Fountaingrove area, which has had a history of devastating fires.

"I think it's really important for all of us to look at the broader context of what is required for a community to function, and put up with relatively minor distractions and interruptions to our living conditions," she said.

Others were more direct in their criticism of fire station opponents.

"The fact some citizens don't want to look at a fire station or have it near their houses strikes me as absurd," said Peter Katz, author of "The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community."

"Those citizens should feel lucky that their fellow citizens are willing to pay for those services," he said.

Katz, who lives in Florida, made the case that suburbia, with its large tracts of single-use development, fosters tensions whenever something else — like a firehouse — tries to squeeze in.

"It's easy to get people out to a hearing to respond to the impacts of a proposed development because typically, the impacts are very localized," he said. "It's harder to gather a constituency for the benefits of the project, because usually the people who benefit are dispersed over a larger area."

That seems true of the proposed school in Windsor.

While some will see the benefit of having more space for kids to learn and play, some neighbors of the school will bemoan having to live with the unpleasant side effects of that benefit, such as increased traffic.

The school, as with others in Windsor, will be a "grade cluster school," which means parents of second- and third-graders from all over town will be driving in and out of the neighborhood to ferry their kids.

That could amount to 500 additional cars traveling through the neighborhood twice a day.

"Most of what I've heard from the neighbors is that in general, they're opposed to the school, and the primary reason is that it will bring a lot of traffic to the neighborhood," said Tim Ibrahim, president of the Foothills of Windsor Homeowners Association.

The school project does not require approval from the Town Council because it falls under state control. But the council has scheduled a public hearing to address concerns.

Windsor Mayor Sam Salmon said he would prefer the school to be located nearer the town's urban core to encourage more kids to walk.

"This site tends to be the antithesis of that," he said. "It's on the edge, and it could very well be growth-inducing. That being said, the school district is limited as to where they can locate the site. They're limited by funding. That's a big deal."

Boyles, who's lived in the Vinecrest neighborhood for 20 years,

has a litany of reasons for why he's against the project, including his fear that residents will be blocked from evacuating their homes in the event of an emergency because of vehicles clogging the streets.

"It's a disaster waiting to happen," he said.

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