All clips written by Roger Coryell, owned by their publishers
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.
The agenda for the April 21 Sebastopol City Council meeting seemed rather blasé, but the council chambers were packed with neighbors from some of the town’s worst-maintained streets come to…
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...
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…
Drive south on Highway 101 toward Hopland, and you'll pass a turnoff for McNab Ranch Road. Most people zip by without noticing. But that little road is the namesake of…
Wildfire preparedness in Sonoma County centers on evacuation routes and ember threats—spot fires ignited far ahead of main blazes—which Israeli startup FireDome claims to address through detection and rapid response.
March in Sonoma County has a particular mood: longer light, cooler nights that still mean business, and gardens that look like they're thinking about what comes next. It's also a…
Sonoma County just dropped a document that reads like a warning label — and it’s weirdly easy to miss because it’s not a crime, a fire, or a lawsuit. It’s…
At North Bay Science Discovery Day oin Santa Rosa, n March 7, Alyssa Huang plans to do more than run a booth. She wants to change the way kids —…
If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a young person in Sonoma County gets court-ordered into the juvenile justice system, here’s one answer: Sometimes, they don’t go to Juvenile Hall.
If you have spent any time around wine people, you have heard the phrase: It starts in the vineyard. DaVero Farms and Winery is taking that one step further, straight…
Ticks collected along Umbrella Tree Trail at North Sonoma Regional Park came back positive in pooled tests for Borrelia burgdorferi — the bacterium that causes Lyme disease — at a…
Ticks collected along Umbrella Tree Trail at North Sonoma Regional Park came back positive in pooled tests for Borrelia burgdorferi — the bacterium that causes Lyme disease — at a…
Ticks collected along Umbrella Tree Trail at North Sonoma Regional Park came back positive in pooled tests for Borrelia burgdorferi — the bacterium that causes Lyme disease — at a…
Petaluma’s school board hit the brakes Tuesday night after parents discovered — and then read aloud — safety plan language telling staff to “collect intelligence” on student walkouts, including monitoring…
The morning starts the way county meetings often do — polite, almost ceremonial.
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.
At Tuesday night’s Sonoma City Council meeting (Feb. 4), the first public comment was about something most people would walk past without a second thought: a patch of Himalayan blackberry…
If you’ve ever run a business that gets reviewed online, you know how this usually goes. The more people you serve, the more likely it is that someone has an…
On a winter morning in west county, you can still find places where the loudest thing is a shovel bite and a creek moving under the willows. That’s the mood…
A 16-pound mountain lion cub from Southern California spent Thursday night in Sonoma County under close watch after state biologists couldn’t locate her mother.
Rohnert Park’s network of license-plate reader cameras isn’t going away. But after a long, uneasy public debate, city leaders agreed to put some limits on how much data police can…
Sonoma County grape growers weighing a shift to regenerative practices now have some hard numbers to work with.
Sonoma County grape growers weighing a shift to regenerative practices now have some hard numbers to work with.
John Burgess / The Press Democrat The Medlock Ames estate vineyard in Healdsburg received the first Sonoma County Regenerative Organic Certification for practices including no tilling of the rows and…
The Pride flag at Sonoma Valley High School was only down for a few hours. But for the students who spoke at the Jan. 26 Sonoma City Council meeting, the…
Getty Images Close up of a man looking and touching on phone over laptop with coffee atop book aside sitting at cafe’s white table. Study or Working, Going Outside.
It was 1987. Vermont. I was young, dumb, and living with a woman whose Rottweiler was very pregnant.
You see them at the mouth of the Estero Americano, gliding low over the water with wings locked, skimming inches above the surface. Farther upstream, there is sometimes a flash…
One of Sonoma County’s most familiar farm names received statewide recognition this winter. Lee and Wayne James of Tierra Vegetables in Santa Rosa were named Legacy Farmers of the Year…