Roundup: Tick Tock
Bank's digital clock, Fircrest's new owners, a good mood store, West County teachers and district in agreement, and one final SAY
People are happy to see that the WestAmerica Bank sign with time and temperature is operating again. Gwynn O’Gara writes: “I love that sign and took it as a bad omen when it was out for so long, like the fraying world had come a little too close.” The sign does help you pass the time while waiting at the intersection of Hwy 116 and Bodega Hwy.
Friendly Fircrest Market in new hands
Dave and Mark Hoffman, the twin brothers who have owned and managed independent grocer Fircrest Market for nearly thirty-one years, have sold the store south of town to Lawrence Jacobs and Eric Meuse. The good news is that the new owners are local and both have been working at Oliver’s Market for many years. The sale is still pending, waiting on Health Department review to close.
I caught up with Lawrence Jacobs at the store on Friday. Originally from Crescent City, Jacobs went to Sonoma State University where he started working at Oliver’s Market in Cotati to pay for school. “I started off as a bagger, and then moved to many different positions,” he said. “They were very flexible with my school schedule, which was nice and allowed me to complete my degree.”
Twenty-six years later, after gaining a lot of experience at Oliver’s, Jacobs felt “it was time to move on and take everything I’ve learned and flip it into something else. Independent markets are getting gobbled up. I feel really lucky that Dave and Mark gave us an opportunity to further their legacy and hopefully strengthen one of the long-term independent markets in Sebastopol.”
One of the challenges of running an independent market is retaining the staff. Jacobs said that’s not an issue at Fircrest. “When we walk in here, we can see the relationships they have with the customers. I’m really excited because I think a big value of this transaction is the people, the friendly staff. ”
Jacobs’ partner, Eric Meuse, was his boss for twenty-two years at Oliver’s Market. “I started talking to him a few years ago about us working together if we found the right opportunity,” said Jacobs. “We found this location here and it really seemed to fit what we want to do very nicely. It feels like home.”
He said that the plan is “to get to know the customers and the staff more, and the operation and then apply some our skill sets to improve incrementally what’s here.” He suggested that they might update the product mix and try to attract new customers.
“(Fircrest) is already doing amazing things here and we want to make sure that we don’t screw that up.”
—H/T to reader Bleys Rose for alerting us about the sale.
Teachers Union and District Quickly Reach Labor Agreement
In a letter sent to its members last Monday, the West Sonoma County Teachers Association (WSCTA) said that its bargaining team had reached a tentative labor agreement for the 2024-2025 school year with the West Sonoma County Union High School District. The bargaining team was to meet with teachers last Thursday and they were confident that members would ratify the agreement, which then must be approved by the school board. “Everybody wins with this agreement,” said the letter from the bargaining team, which included WSCTA Chief Negotiator Brian Miller and WSCTA President Lily Smedshammer.
While the salary schedule is too complex to publish here, here are a few points:
Step increases for teachers are 2.6% year over year.
The new salary schedule only has 3 columns: BA+0, BA+30, and BA+60 (down from five) and every column sees a 7.12% increase.
The top salary in the district increases 9.7% to $115,921
The letter said that “This change will put our average member’s salary at around $98,000, which is ABOVE the State of California average teacher salary!”
Asked for comment, Superintendent Chris Meredith said that he wanted to wait until the school Board had the opportunity to vote on the Tentative Agreement.
The Good Mood Store
Sebastopol Botanicals opened three weeks ago on Burnett Ave. When I asked owner Jenna Cash how she would describe her store, she said “it has everything that puts me in a good mood — herbs, plants, crystals and candles. I think of Sebastopol Botanicals as the good mood store.” Customers in the store on Saturday morning seemed to be in a good mood after smelling scented candles or opening jars of aromatics.
Jenna said that she expects to have a grand opening this summer after a new awning arrives.
Note: the office of Sonoma West Times & News was at this same location from 1989 to 2013.
Time is running out on “NBA’s maestros of joy”
“The final scene of Golden State’s dynasty will play out in the most enjoyable way, with relevance and resurgence. And also a refusal. While others can see the end is coming, the Warriors, the NBA’s maestros of joy, are still evolving,” writes Candace Buckner in the Washington Post in the article “‘Golden State University’ offers a lesson in how to stay relevant.”
Time to Vote
Just a reminder to vote in the March 5th election. You can vote in person at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts though March 5th and you can also drop off ballots at the location.
One final SAY
The news of the sudden closure of SAY’s Dream Center and its filing for bankruptcy is sad indeed, especially because it required a last minute re-location of the vulnerable youth it served. No one should think this turned out alright — moving young people from SAY to group shelters like Sam Jones Hall is only better than putting them back out on the street.
There’s plenty of blame to spread around — misappropriation of funds and mismanagement by SAY staff; lack of supervision by the SAY board who also gave mixed messages about whether SAY could be saved or not; lack of oversight by county agencies that provided funding for services; and the federal government which passed a new regulation limiting the number of youth that can be served in a group home to 20.
(A similar change in government policy was responsible for the closure of Children’s Village in October 2015, which provided group homes for children in foster care and was intended to keep siblings together. Link to PD article.)
My worry is that all parties involved in SAY are as much in a hurry to run away from this mess as they were to see young people move out this week. What hard lessons can we learn from these events?
Here’s the story with some of its twists. SAY’s Dream Center occupied a former hospital facility that it had renovated with $10m of local funding to house 60 or so youth. The need was so high for homeless youth that it had a waiting list. (A former employee told me that a young girl showed up every day and knocked on the door and asked for housing but they didn’t have room so they turned her away and she went to sleep in a field nearby for another day.) The County itself has not dealt effectively with the hundreds of youth ages 18-24 in the homeless population, even with SAY. (See 2019 Civil Grand Jury Report, Homeless Youth: Sonoma County in Dubious First Place (PDF) which said the County “ranked first in the nation in the size of its homeless youth population when compared to all other similar communities in 2019.”)
SAY’s main focus was providing housing services for youth who had aged out of foster care. However, the federal government changed its group-home policy to limit the number of youth under one roof to 20. To comply, SAY had to reduce its capacity by 40 at its facility. Stripped of funding needed to pay for the facility and staff, coupled with other internal issues, SAY was losing money fast. Yet, the direct cause of its closure was the change in government policy, no doubt intended to improve conditions for homeless youth. The unintended consequence of this policy was that SAY’s remaining youth were moved out of a suppotive facility for youth and some of them were placed in an adult homeless shelter with 188-beds, a facility that the Grand Jury report said was not suitable for homeless youth. Neither SAY nor county officials made any apparent effort to push back on this misguided government policy.
According to the Press Democrat, eleven youth were moved from SAY to Mickey Zane Place, a former Santa Rosa hotel that in 2020 was converted into “long-term supportive housing solution for the homeless.” The youth from SAY are expected to stay there for 10 days before being moved elsewhere. Mickey Zane Place is managed by DEMA and the former hotel must not be at full capacity if it has room to take eleven youth.
This week, the Board of Supervisors received its Auditor’s report on DEMA Consulting and Management, a contractor that came under scrutiny after a series of investigative reports starting in July in the Press Democrat. The supervisors were meeting in private to discuss the report, and one must assume that it’s another potential mess. If the Supervisors were to hold DEMA accountable for any of the problems that the Auditor has found, DEMA has threatened to sue them. What’s more, if the County has to decide that DEMA will no longer be a service provides, are there alternative contractors to manage existing contracts for homeless and housing services?
DEMA ran Elderberry Commons in Sebastopol until it was closed in 2023 and its residents were moved out in a hurry. Now the former hotel sits empty. SAVS, a local non-profit agency, is similarly struggling to re-locate its residents from Horizon Shine.
There’s a pattern here: vulnerable people, already wary of trusting the government, are promised housing assistance and services, which are said to be long-term solutions but turn out to be temporary solutions that often fall apart. The other pattern is that the County receives Federal and State funds, which it passes on to a patchwork of service providers, who are mostly non-profit contractors and who operate without adequate oversight by County officials and its various boards.
I recall the words of Kris Johnson who runs the Barnabas Ministry and serves breakfast to the homeless at Sebastopol Christian Church, and whom I interviewed a year ago. Johnson said: “I see all the money the government is spending on the homeless, and I wonder where the money is going. It isn’t going to the homeless.”
It is heartbreaking to see this Press Democrat photo of staff helping youth move out of SAY on Thursday. These youth are in a rush, running in the rain, carrying what they own, stuffed into trash bags. That’s the final image of SAY that will stick with me.
The Week of February 26-March 1
The Sebastopol Times ended the week with 687 paid subscribers. Can you help us reach 700? New paid subscriber Juliet Rowe said that she supports Sebastopol Times: “Just because…”. That’s as good a reason as any.
Here is their Instagram, which lists south Main street but it is down Burnett on the right from Main Street. https://www.instagram.com/sebastopolbotanicals/
What's the address of Sebastopol Botanicals on Burnett ST.?