Rep. Jared Huffman proposes naming Petaluma post office after former Rep. Lynn Woolsey

Petaluma’s historic downtown post office would be renamed in honor of former Democratic Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey under a measure introduced by her successor, Rep. Jared Huffman of San Rafael.

Woolsey, who remains a Petaluma resident, retired in 2012 after two decades in Congress representing a liberal Marin-Sonoma district that she took over from Barbara Boxer upon her move to the Senate.

Huffman described Woolsey, 83, as “a passionate and outspoken leader in the fight to make a more perfect world” who was “part of the beginning of a historic wave of female leadership at the federal level.”

Woolsey, who retired at age 75, was best known for the hundreds of speeches she made in a nearly empty House chamber opposing the Iraq War. She earned national headlines in 2006 for giving a guest pass to George W. Bush's State of the Union address to anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan.

A former welfare mother, Woolsey founded her own personnel agency and made a surprising leap from the Petaluma City Council to Congress in 1992, known as the “year of the woman” in U.S. politics.

In office, she was a stalwart advocate for protecting more of the North Coast from offshore oil drilling — including permanent protections that finally came under executive action during President Barack Obama’s second term. Woolsey was on hand to tout the marine sanctuary expansions.

“Lynn has done the work, inspired so many, and brought us closer in our journey towards a more equal, perfect world,” Huffman said in a news release.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, Woolsey wrote a Close to Home column in The Press Democrat in June calling for “systemic reform to our policing practices” and changing “how we educate our children about race.”

Huffman’s news release noted that Woolsey and her office delivered millions of dollars to the North Bay, including $9 million for a Petaluma River flood control project and $52 million for a seismic retrofit of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Woolsey’s own list of her achievements included a $13 million pilot school breakfast program in six school districts, including Santa Rosa; twice saving the Two Rock Coast Guard base from closure and restoring wetlands at Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato.

She also got the Inverness post office named after Jake Robert Velloza, an Army specialist and Tomales High School star athlete who was killed in Iraq in 2009.

Petaluma’s downtown post office, completed in 1933, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.