In wine industry-backed reversal, Sonoma County supervisors expand farmworker evacuation-zone access to include harvest
The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors stepped back into a familiar fray Tuesday, using a special session to evaluate a hotly debated program authorized a year ago giving farmworkers access to agricultural lands during wildfires and other widespread disasters.
The discussion of an ID-card system for entry into evacuation zones — known as the Agricultural Access Verification Program — proved just as contentious as it had been in 2022, when a monthslong public debate preceded passage of the original resolution. As they had before, farmworkers rallied outside the county administrative building Tuesday and made impassioned pleas to the board.
And the supervisors reengaged in some testy exchanges.
After 4½ hours of wrangling, periodic confusion and a string of racist Zoom bombs during online public comment, just one significant change was made to the original Ag Pass resolution. It gives more explicit latitude to the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office in interpreting the original blueprint — resulting in powers some believe the law enforcement agency already possessed.
Crucially, that means farm harvests, including the region’s signature wine grape harvest, may now be included among the scope of covered “critical agricultural activities” for which farmworkers are allowed to continue work in evacuation zones.
Harvest operations had been excluded in the board’s 3-2 vote on its original resolution in 2022. That meant farmworkers would not be allowed into evacuation zones to hurriedly pick grapes, as they did under smoke-choked skies during the devastating North Bay wildfires in 2017 and 2020.
But in its reversal on Tuesday, in another 3-2 split decision, the board authorized the Sheriff’s Office to define which agricultural activities are “critical,” and under what circumstances during calamities like wildfires and floods.
The move came at the request of wine industry representatives who had been pushing supervisors for such changes since the harvest season last year, according to emails and other communications released in a public records request shared with The Press Democrat.
The board majority favoring those changes Tuesday included Supervisors James Gore and David Rabbitt, joined this time by Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, who had been opposed to that discretion for the Sheriff’s Office only a year ago.
She left no doubt about why she had changed her mind.
“Quite frankly, there was a Sheriff at that time that I did not trust to prioritize public safety,” she said from the dais Tuesday.
Hopkins had a tense and at times bitter public relationship with then-Sheriff Mark Essick, punctuated by a complaint she filed with county personnel officials accusing Essick of threatening her during a call to discuss evacuation protocol in the midst of the Walbridge Fire in September 2020. Hopkins has praised Eddie Engram, who was elected to succeed Essick last November and now leads the agency.
While Tuesday’s decision was a clear victory for agricultural interests, it marked a setback for some farm labor groups, who have advocated for civilian leadership of the program. They had largely seen the original policy excluding harvest activities as a win.
“Workers and the community are outraged that last night a majority of the Board of Supervisors neglected their responsibility, went back on their commitments to worker safety, and sided with the interests of a few wealthy wine companies,” Max Bell Alper, executive director North Bay Jobs With Justice, said in a statement Wednesday.
“The truth is that workers are stronger than ever before and prepared to take collective action to win the dignity and wages they deserve.”
Supervisors Chris Coursey and Susan Gorin were against allowing harvest in evacuation zones, as they were in 2022.
The revisions Tuesday set Sonoma County apart from many other jurisdictions, including San Luis Obispo and Santa Cruz counties, that do not allow farmworkers into evacuation zones for harvest purposes.
But the changes align Sonoma with Napa County, where that emergency access is granted, and often during the most critical time of year — harvest for the region’s multibillion dollar wine industry, which had its crucial weeks of picking repeatedly shadowed by massive wildfires in recent years.
Mike Martini, a former Santa Rosa mayor who is now executive director of the wine industry group Sonoma Alliance for Vineyards and Environment, framed the Ag Pass program as a public safety issue that should be administered by public safety professionals.
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