Sonoma Police Chief Brandon Cutting briefs the Sonoma City Council on traffic conditions and enforcement during a February 2026 meeting. (City of Sonoma)

If you sat through Tuesday night’s Sonoma City Council meeting (Feb. 4), you heard two very different kinds of local truth in the same room.

One came early: a longtime Montini volunteer talking about quail habitat lost when a blackberry thicket was removed at the 4th Street entrance.

The other took up most of the night: a sober, state-mandated evacuation “stress test” of Sonoma’s road network—followed by something that mattered just as much as the modeling: the fire chief and sheriff’s command staff explaining how evacuations actually work now, and why.

The technical item was a study session on the AB 747 programmatic assessment of emergency evacuation routes, tied to the City of Sonoma General Plan Safety Element update. If you hear “AB 747” and your eyes

glaze over, don’t feel bad. Most people don’t want to read traffic modeling. They want to know one thing: if we have to get out, can we?

The consultants (Ian Barnes with Fehr & Peers, and Ben Ritchie with DeNovo Planning) explained what they did and what they didn’t do. This wasn’t a “plan” telling people where to go in an emergency. It wasn’t a CEQA analysis. It was, in their words, a transportation planning exercise—a stress test of the road system under conservative assumptions.

And they made those assumptions about as heavy as you can make them.

The baseline they modeled was 4:30 p.m. on the Friday before Labor Day, in harvest season, when tourists are in town and commute traffic is already thick. They assumed, essentially, maximum occupancy: people home, people at work, hotels full, tasting rooms busy, retail active. Then they layered on future growth out to the general plan horizon—what they described as the 2045/2050 world.

The point wasn’t to predict a perfect real-life scenario. The point was to ask: where does the system break first?

The answer, unsurprisingly to anyone who lives here, is that Sonoma is a funnel.

We’ve got a grid in town. Then fewer roads out. Then the whole valley ends up feeding a limited handful of state highways. The model showed evacuation demand congregating at the creek crossings and other pinch points—bridges, key intersections, the routes that dump onto Highway 12, Arnold Drive, 8th Street East, and Napa Road.

The report named the usual suspects for consistent congestion: Spain Street, Napa Street, Leveroni Road, Napa Road, Broadway, and Fifth Street both directions.

One of the most practical points of the night had nothing to do with new asphalt. It was about traffic signals.

When the power goes out and a signal turns into a four-way stop, the consultants said you essentially lose half the capacity of that intersection. Their recommendation: battery backups and hardening, and possibly remote signal control—so signals can be managed from an emergency operations center to flush traffic out more efficiently.

They pointed to Santa Rosa as an example of this working along Highway 12, in place by the Glass Fire.

But here’s the part that mattered most to me: the chiefs didn’t pretend the model is “the truth.” They treated it as a useful tool that mostly confirmed what experience already taught them.

Fire Chief Steve Aker (Sonoma Valley Fire District) gave the clearest explanation I’ve heard in a public meeting of what changed after 2017.

Back then, he said, the county didn’t have a robust system of evacuation zones or a consistent methodology for warnings and orders. That changed after the fires.

Now, evacuations are built around zones and staging. The goal is to move people in phases—orders for those at immediate risk, warnings for those likely to be at risk next. It’s strategic and incremental, not “drop everything, everyone go at once.” That matters for traffic. It doesn’t eliminate gridlock, but it keeps the system from collapsing all at once.

Aker also described what’s changed in alerting and notification since 2017. Reverse-911 landline systems failed quickly back then. Now there’s a stack of tools—alerts, Nixle, Wireless Emergency Alerts on phones (and he reminded people those can be turned off in settings), and a county contract connection to the National Weather Service for fast “canned” emergency messages while more detailed messaging is crafted.

He made another point that deserves to be repeated because it’s the truth in every disaster: redundancy matters. Don’t rely on one channel.

That led to a moment you could feel in the room. A councilmember asked about NOAA and the National Weather Service—concerned about administrative cuts and what that could mean for services Sonoma now depends on.

Aker said they’re watching it closely and haven’t experienced service gaps.

Then Chief Cutting speaking from the law enforcement side said something even more important: they never assume alerts are received.

“We have zero assumptions that when we send the messages out that they’re received,” he said.

That’s why they still do door-to-door checks. They talked about driveway tags people can use to show they’ve evacuated so responders can move faster. They talked about physically checking homes—sometimes kicking in doors—because the elderly population is large and because people sleep through alarms, miss messages, or refuse to believe it’s real until it’s too late.

It’s not glamorous. It’s labor. But it’s how people stay alive.

There were also two sharp public comments worth flagging.

One speaker, Tom Conlon (speaking personally and as someone who serves on the Climate Action Commission), said the report is “sobering” and cited a figure: 15.5 hours to get everybody out.

That number will get attention. It should. But even the consultants and chiefs kept stressing that the modeling is intentionally conservative and that “everyone evacuates at once” isn’t the operational approach in real incidents.

Conlon also raised a valid policy critique: that the Safety Element draft doesn’t yet appear to fully integrate the granular recommendations from the evacuation report; that one policy reference appears tacked on and even contains a typo; and that the Safety Element should do more for existing buildings and existing residents, not just new development. He specifically asked for “home hardening” language, and for more specific attention to access and functional needs.

Those are the kinds of details that get lost in broad plan language. They also happen to be the details that determine whether a plan is useful or ornamental.

A second public comment (Ken Stokes) asked the question that’s always sitting under all of this: is there a red line where the city says, “We’re at capacity”? Or, put more bluntly: does evacuation reality ever become a reason to slow or limit development?

The consultant response was careful, and correct as far as process goes. The General Plan EIR will analyze a citywide buildout condition. But specific projects aren’t automatically approved by that. When a project comes in, staff determines the level of CEQA review needed. It might be an exemption, a mitigated negative declaration, or an EIR depending on site-specific impacts.

And yes—Sebastiani came up. A councilmember asked directly whether the stress test assumed a developed Sebastiani site. The answer was yes: the modeling used the draft land use map, which redesignates the property as Sonoma mixed-use. The council hasn’t adopted that map yet, but the model assumed buildout consistent with it.

That will matter later.

First, the obvious: Sonoma’s road network has known choke points, and this report names them.

Second: the fixes that might move the needle aren’t fantasy megaprojects. They’re targeted improvements— signal backup, signal control, traffic management planning, coordination with Caltrans, and keeping the system functional when power fails.

Third: the most important improvement since 2017 is not hardware. It’s practice.

Zones. Staged warnings and orders. Unified command. Training. Better alerting. And the unglamorous promise that responders will still come down the driveway and knock on the door when the electronics fail.

We can’t engineer our way out of every risk. But we can get more honest about what breaks, and we can fix the parts we actually control.

That’s what Tuesday night felt like: less reassurance, more realism. And in this subject, realism is the only thing that’s useful.