North Bay reporter
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.
Santa Rosa City Attorney Teresa L. Stricker told the city Saturday she is stepping down on Tuesday, June 2, citing “new professional opportunities.” The City Council, which holds the appointment, plans to name an interim replacement at the same June 2 meeting.
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...
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…
Robledo Family Winery, founded by a man whose father was a Bracero, joins the worst quarter California wine has seen in years.
A 1916 Saxon roadster painted suffrage yellow rolled up to the Saturday Afternoon Club in Santa Rosa on Thursday afternoon, carrying two of the best-known names in the modern women's…
YOUNTVILLE — At 3 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29, the Yountville Town Council went into closed session. The agenda had one item: a performance evaluation for Town Manager Brad Raulston.
A speaker at Tuesday’s Sonoma County Board of Supervisors meeting told the room about the day Esteban Diaz had a heart attack on the floor of a Sonoma County courtroom. An ambulance was called. The judge, Hon. Patrick M. Broderick, did not pause the proceedings. Instead, the speaker said, he dire...
Drive north through Hopeland this spring, past Ukiah into Redwood Valley. You’ll notice gaps. Where Cabernet and Zinfandel twisted toward the sun last October, now there’s bare dirt, stacked rootstock,…
The river at Guerneville more than doubled within the same week. The public gauges that would tell us why have nothing to say.
In places like Brooktrails, this is the time of year when people start looking down a little more carefully. The grass is up. The days are warming. Kids run ahead…
Most marketers don’t fail at social media because they misunderstand the platforms. They fail because they mistake visibility for progress and activity for strategy.
Cloverdale Vice Mayor Todd Lands has spent the better part of this month working the phones with the Trump administration, lobbying USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins and her staff to derail PG&E’s plan to tear down the Potter Valley dams. He told the Press Democrat last week that 750,000 people in th...
The bâtonnage is done, the foudre is breathing, and the cellar smells like rancio, brett, and Tuesday. The pourriture noble has set in on the late-pick Sémillon, gloriously and on purpose, and somewhere in the back a saignée tank bleeds off rosé like a politely punctured artery. (Roger Coryell / ...
For forty years, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors voted every spring on the same small contract — Sheriff’s deputies patrolling Lake Sonoma from May through September, paid back by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They asked questions. They kept watch. This spring the vote didn’t happen, a...
A 1st District ruling sets statewide precedent on California’s price-gouging law and clears the way for hundreds of Santa Rosa residents to keep their post-emergency rents intact. A California appellate court has barred Santa Rosa mobilehome park owners from raising rents to make up for annual increases they couldn’t impose during the multi-year wildfire state…
Lake Mendocino was about 10,000 acre-feet above the threshold for critical conditions on April 24. Operators have already cut Coyote Dam outflow by about 65%. Lake Mendocino is getting tight, and Russian River releases are dropping Lake Mendocino entered the last week of April with less room than water managers want heading into summer. On…
Up on the ridges above Willits, Steve Amato has been counting lights. "These hills used to light up at night," the president of the Mendocino Cannabis Alliance said last spring,…
April 25, 2026 Two and a half weeks ago, Southwest Airlines rolled into Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport with Snoopy on the tarmac and a teaser tucked inside its press release: a new perk called Sip and Ship, set to take effect later in the month. As of Friday, the perk is real. Eligible Southwest…
Residents from three Petaluma parks flooded Monday’s city council meeting to defend Jody Johnson, who has led their fight against major rent increases for three years On Friday afternoon, residents of Youngstown Mobile Home Park found an unusual document on their doorsteps. Hand-delivered — reportedly by the park’s own manager — the packet appeared to…
For three salmon seasons, the boats at Spud Point Marina haven’t gone out for salmon. They’ve sat. Crews scattered. Some skippers picked up crab work or rockfish, some got out of fishing altogether, a few sold the boat and the slip and walked off the dock for good. California’s commercial salmon fishery shut in 2022…
Sebastopol’s Apple Blossom Parade hits 80 this weekend, and the Chamber went and themed the whole thing “Blossoms of Oz.” Ruby slippers, yellow brick road, the works. Saturday morning you’ll have witches on flatbeds, Munchkins on Main Street and, if the Humane Society of Sonoma County’s plans hold, a small pack of adoptable shelter dogs…
The well at the back of your property doesn’t care what’s in a state filing. It runs, or it doesn’t. For thousands of Sonoma County households on private wells, that is the bottom line of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, the 2014 state law that forced local agencies to manage several of the county’s most…
Throwing a wedding on a vineyard? Hosting a charity 5K on a ranch? Running a summer concert series on a winery lawn? If your event happens in unincorporated Sonoma County, a new ordinance is about to reshape how you do it, and most of the people affected have no idea it exists yet. On June…
If you have ever cracked a fresh Sonoma Coast crab, slurped a local oyster or picked up a filet of wild rockfish at a Santa Rosa seafood counter, one very specific piece of equipment deserves a thank-you. Not a boat. Not a net. An ice machine. And for years, it has been quietly falling apart….
Drive north through Hopland this spring, past Ukiah into Redwood Valley. You'll notice gaps. Where Cabernet and Zinfandel twisted toward the sun last October, now there's bare dirt, stacked rootstock,…
At the Mendocino County Fish and Game Commission's April grant hearing, commissioners spent the better part of an afternoon listening to some of the most ambitious habitat restoration pitches the…