All clips written by Roger Coryell, owned by their publishers
The Santa Rosa City Council voted unanimously to adopt a $575.9 million budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, eliminating 27 positions and tapping reserves to close an…
The Hill Road crossing over Mill Creek that east-side Round Valley residents know as the Green Bridge gave out under a car on June 12. The people who depended on…
Federal agriculture and interior officials convened a meeting Monday at the White House with PG&E and a Southern California water district over the future of the Eel River — and…
DESCENDANTS OF THE POMO who survived the 1850 Bloody Island Massacre still live around Clear Lake. Many can’t drive into town without passing a name that, to them, honors one…
For more than two years, getting the mail in this town at the northern tip of Mendocino County meant a half-hour drive up Highway 101 to Garberville. On Monday morning,…
Steve Amato is still out working his 38 acres of cabernet off Feliz Creek Road. He prunes. He sprays. He suckers the vines. He mows the grass between the rows…
A bridge on Hill Road near Covelo gave way Friday as a vehicle crossed it, dropping the car onto its roof beside the Eel River and leaving the driver with…
For half a century, North Coast Opportunities, based in Ukiah, has been part of the floor under Mendocino and Lake counties — the agency that fed people going through cancer…
Every summer a line of volunteers in masks and wetsuits floats down the South Fork Eel, shoulder to shoulder across the current, counting the one fish almost everyone on the…
Some guy at the end of the bar swears it’s gotten hotter out by the Narrows since they widened U.S. Highway 101. Normally you let that kind of thing slide,…
On the Mendocino coast, the question isn’t whether you can bring the dog. It’s to which beach. The rules change every few miles: off-leash at a couple of spots, a…
Mendocino County’s supervisors cut the county budget Tuesday, and by the end of the day, everyone knew where the money went. On paper the proposed budget is balanced — but…
Mendocino County supervisors set aside two days to work through next year’s budget. They finished in one.
Plants sold at Costco stores around California this spring, the Ukiah warehouse among them, harbored the glassy-winged sharpshooter — an insect that can spread Xylella fastidiosa, the bacterium behind the…
The kittens are beginning to show up at the Mendocino County animal shelter in Ukiah. A few at first. Then a few more each week. By mid-summer, there will be…
Mendocino County supervisors will open two days of budget hearings Tuesday with a legally balanced $106.7 million spending plan that masks a deep structural deficit by relying on $2.6 million…
Longtime gardeners got just 15 days notice before the water was shut off May 23.
Almost all will learn a different river.
Mendocino County is not in a drought. That was the message Tuesday, May 19, from county Department of Transportation staff, who delivered the first formal drought briefing since the county…
The Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District wants to buy the Potter Valley Project — but the physics of the system make the bid nonsensical. A look at what the project actually does, and why a Southern California water agency's offer doesn't hold water.
LEE MARTINELLI SR. IS 87, and he can read his family on the trunks of his vineyard the way other people read a photo album. On the 60-degree slope of…
The board of Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op spoke publicly for the first time this week, more than three weeks after most of the store’s staff walked off the job and…
LAST SUMMER, paddlers who pulled their boats onto a wet strip of sand near Forestville in Sonoma County were met by private security guards and signs telling them to leave.…
Two and a half weeks before California’s June 2 primary, Eric Jones’ campaign sayssomeone secretly recorded a small house event in Davis — and that Rep. Mike Thomp-son’s campaign is now using the audio in an attack ad.
MENDOCINO CO., 5/15/26 — The Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District wants to buy the Potter Valley Project. The district sits in Riverside County, more than 500 miles south of the Eel River. It has never run a hydroelectric dam. Its vice president, Darcy Burke, told a podcast in late April t...
MENDOCINO CO., 5/13/26 — Cannabis has collapsed from its boom years, and wine is contracting. Coastal tourism is one of Mendocino County’s few industries still pulling crowds — but the county doesn’t support its primary tourism marketing platform, Visit Mendocino County, at least not with the fun...
MENDOCINO CO., 5/12/26 — Clean, moving water may be the fastest single addition you can make to attract birds to your yard. A shallow basin works. A small fountain works. Even a slow drip onto a saucer will do it. Keep it shallow, change the water often, and scrub the basin; a dirty bird bath can...
Four Napa County weekly newspapers will stop publishing on May 22, the company that owns them announced Wednesday afternoon. In a letter posted to the Calistoga Tribune website and signed “The Highway 29 team,” Highway 29 Publishing told readers that May 22 will be the last day it publishes the C...
Spring is the season everyone loves and no one can describe without sounding like a greeting card. “Renewal.” “Awakening.” “Rebirth.” Sure. Also: mud, allergies, and the unsettling realization that you have not, in fact, gone to the gym since November. But the words we use for all of it — those a...
Three adults are in the hospital after eating wild mushrooms picked in the hills above Deer Park, and Napa County’s top public health officer is asking everyone in the region to put down the basket until further notice.
A young female mountain lion who spent the last five months at Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue in Petaluma is back in the wild, after state biologists walked her into a stretch of remote Northern California habitat earlier this month.
The slow goodbye finally has a date. Medtronic told its 370 Santa Rosa workers on Wednesday that the company will shut its Fountaingrove campus by spring 2028, ending a presence in Sonoma County that began in 1998 with what was then one of the largest medical-device deals in California history.Th...
On October 15, Richardson Bay closes for keeps. After that date, no boat may stay anchored in the bay more than 72 hours. The Richardson Bay Regional Agency calls it a milestone, and on the agency’s own terms, it is one. From more than 200 illegally anchored vessels in 2018, the count is down to ...
Napa Valley runs on immigrants. Its wineries, restaurants, hotels and farms all do. What a new report makes plain is that more and more of those workers can no longer afford to live in the county where they work — and a growing share have left altogether.
A Sonoma County Civil Grand Jury report released Sunday May 10 says the agency that has spent 35 years buying up farmland and open space across the county is, by and large, doing the job voters paid it to do. The report’s title — “It’s On Their Website!” — is the jury’s broad answer to citizens w...
If you bought a GM truck anytime in the past decade — a Silverado in the vineyard rows, a Tahoe at the trailhead, a Sierra hauling firewood off the coast — your name, your home address, and a four-year record of where and how you drove most likely passed through a pipeline that ended at an insura...
The general manager's hiring — and firing — has created a rift between the board and the grocery's workers.
UKIAH, CA., 5/8/26 — Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op, the 50-year-old member-owned grocery at the center of Mendocino County’s organic-food economy, is without a general manager again. Robert Drake, hired this spring to replace longtime manager Lori Rosenberg, was terminated days after more than half t...
LAKEPORT — While the chi push up Adobe Creek and Kelsey Creek for what may be one of their last legally unprotected spawns, a federal lawsuit filed last month is trying to force Washington to do what it was supposed to have done in January.
SONOMA — Police are reviewing cellphone videos from a fight at Sonoma’s Tuesday Night Market after two teenagers went to the hospital and a woman was arrested during the first market night of the season.
The nonprofit that owns Bodega’s fire station has called a special meeting Thursday night to brief local residents on lease talks with Gold Ridge Fire Protection District, the agency that staffs the station and runs calls in this rural coastal corner of Sonoma County.
A slough borders the western fence line where state Highway 37 meets Interstate Highway 80 in Vallejo, with egrets working the marsh. On the dry side, 160 acres contain grass…
MENDOCINO CO., 5/6/26 — If you live in Mendocino County and you have a dog, you have already learned the hard way that most state-park trails are off-limits to four-legged company. Pull up to Van Damme on a Saturday morning, get out of the truck with a leash in your hand, and a ranger will polite...
BODEGA BAY, CA., 5/5/26 — For the first time in three years, commercial salmon boats are pushing out of Spud Point Marina with king salmon as the target.
LAKEPORT — Lake County supervisors merged two departments to save money, raised the salary range for the new director job and then appointed the man who had proposed the merger — after interviews held outside public view.
A Glen Ellen woman who ran a residential contracting business under the names Lone Wolf Designs and LW Design Build despite never holding a state contractor’s license has been arrested and charged in Napa County in what investigators say is a scheme that has cost victims more than $1 million acro...
A deceased adult male gray whale discovered on RCA Beach had traveled past Tiburon on March 28 before passing through the Golden Gate on April 1 and washing ashore in…
When I moved to West County twelve years ago, dropping a load of yard trimmings at the Pocket Canyon transfer station cost $7. Today the minimum charge for the same vehicle, at the same gate, is $47. The per-ton rate over those twelve years has climbed roughly with inflation. The minimum has clim...
On the first day of Wildfire Preparedness Month, Lake County fire leaders stood beside state Sen. Mike McGuire to celebrate $2 million in state money for badly needed firefighting equipment.
A century-old hydropower facility in Mendocino County is being decommissioned after PG&E filed to surrender its federal license. The Potter Valley Project includes Scott and Cape Horn dams, which will…