Selected Work
Stories by Roger Coryell
2026
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Hidden recording in a Davis living room:
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.
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Point Arena nonprofit Action Network to close
POINT ARENA, CA., 5/19/26 — After 24 years of serving the south coast Mendocino area, Point Arena nonprofit Action Network will close in June. The organization fell on hard times after losing major funding sources they had come to rely on. The nonprofit began as a coordinating entity to help c...
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The downstate bid for Mendocino’s Potter Valley Project
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...
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Changes afoot in Mendocino County’s prime tourism vehicle
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...
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The best thing for birds in your Mendocino yard isn’t a plant
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...
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Four Napa County weeklies go dark May 22 as Highway 29 Publishing pauses operations
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...
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Word Junkie: The spring edition
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...
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Three hospitalized near Deer Park as California’s wild-mushroom poisoning toll climbs to 47
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.
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Tailless Petaluma rehab cub turned loose in remote North State
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.
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Santa Rosa City Attorney Teresa Stricker resigns; council names interim June 2
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.
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Medtronic’s Santa Rosa exit closes a 27-year chapter in Sonoma County medtech
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...
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Where the misfits went: Sausalito’s last anchor-outs and the long retreat of bohemian North Bay
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 ...
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Napa’s wine and farm workers can’t afford to live in Napa anymore. A new study puts a number on it.
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.
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Grand jury gives Sonoma’s open-space agency a clean review — and flags a 2031 cliff
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...
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GM sold drivers’ location data for four years. Two North Bay DAs helped shut it down.
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...
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Crisis at the Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op leaves unanswered questions
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...
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Federal lawsuit lands as Clear Lake hitch run their spring spawn
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.
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Police review videos after Sonoma market fight sends two teens to hospital
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.
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Bodega residents to get update Thursday on fire station lease talks
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.
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Lytton Rancheria sues Vallejo over casino agreement, alleges CEQA violations
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…
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Mendocino County’s best dog hikes
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...
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For Bodega Bay’s salmon fleet, the season is open. Whether the fishery is back is another question.
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.
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Lake County names public works director after merger and pay increase
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.
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Glen Ellen woman accused of $1M-plus contracting fraud across Northern California
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...
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Coastal waters from Mendocino to Bay Area turning into a graveyard for gray whales
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…
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Opinion: A quiet scam at the dumps voters own — and pay twice to clean up after
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...
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State money buys trucks, but Lake County fire districts still face crunch
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.
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Potter Valley dams to come down as SoCal interests challenge local water agreement
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…
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Sonoma’s first Mexican American family winery is in bankruptcy court
Robledo Family Winery, founded by a man whose father was a Bracero, joins the worst quarter California wine has seen in years.
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Santa Rosa advocates make tour stop in push for Equal Rights Amendment
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…
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Yountville’s town manager walked into a performance review. He walked out resigned.
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.
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Permit Sonoma’s code-enforcement reckoning
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...
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California’s 40,000-acre question: What happens when vineyards disappear?
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,…
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Federal gauges below Lake Sonoma have gone dark just as Sonoma Water calls a dry year on the Russian River
The river at Guerneville more than doubled within the same week. The public gauges that would tell us why have nothing to say.
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Head’s up — or maybe down
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…
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Why so many marketers miss the mark with social media
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.
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Cloverdale’s own water plan says the city doesn’t need the Eel River dams its vice mayor is fighting to save
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...
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Word Junkie: A flight of obscure wine words
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 / ...
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The Lake Sonoma contract the board no longer votes on
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...
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Appeals court blocks Santa Rosa mobilehome park owners from recouping wildfire-era rent increases
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…
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The lake that feeds the upper Russian River is losing ground
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…
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The lights are flickering out across Mendocino County
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,…
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Pop the cork: Southwest’s Sip and Ship is officially live at STS
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…
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Petaluma mobile home residents say park owners are running a smear campaign against their advocate
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…
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After three years tied to the dock, Bodega Bay’s salmon fleet gets blessed again
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…
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Witches, munchkins, and shelter mutts: Sebastopol’s Apple Blossom Parade hits 80
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…
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Three years in: Is Sonoma County’s groundwater plan actually working?
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…
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Sonoma County just rewrote the rules for big events: Here’s what changes June 9
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…
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Your Dungeness crab starts with one ice machine in Bodega Bay: Inside Sonoma County’s quietest infrastructure win
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….
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California’s 40,000-acre question
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,…