Monte Rio Musings by Chuck Ramsey — May 2019

RUSSIAN RIVER ALLIANCE

April 29, 2019

Recovery. It’s good to see our area cleaned up and most businesses re-opened with other businesses re-opening soon in time for the tourist high season. The county did a great job helping us when we needed it the most. Hopefully this will be another strong tourist season.

Understanding how our government works is always a moving target. It seems that whenever you think things are better, under-control, and on auto-pilot, they aren’t. While criminal activity is up in Guerneville as well as Monte Rio, our Sheriff’s department is cutting back folks in the Guerneville sub-station due to budget cuts again. Our roads and infrastructure long neglected now require more work and funding due to the recent flood damage. Meanwhile roads that were damaged from storms over two years still aren’t repaired. How long will it take to repair the recent damage? Anyone try to upgrade their septic tanks through Permit Sonoma/PRMD lately? How was that experience? We have been told that since our area generates a substantial amount of TOT funds, that we would get to keep more of the funds we generate and have more local control over where those funds are spent. The funds are supposed to be used to promote tourism and to mitigate any impacts from tourism. Now it appears that instead of getting more funds and control, we will actually get less, and a lot of the funds will instead go to the fire districts. I won’t even go into the drama occurring at our local fire district lately. There will also be funds available to assist in starting up local special tax districts where either property owners or businesses can tax themselves more to obtain basic services that our tax dollars should already be paying for.

What does this mean? That it will take the ongoing efforts of residents, businesses, and community groups to continue to demand a basic level of government services in our River area, so we can all live in safe welcoming communities and our businesses can thrive with happy tourists. On a positive note, we have more people with more drive than ever before to make this difference, which is great.

Thanks to all that have contributed time and money to the flood recovery efforts. There are more events planned and I learned about another one working with the Russian River Alliance that should be at the top of the salesforce tower in the fall. The support from people in the City has been so gratifying. Thanks to Rodger Jensen for his Flood Aid Love Wins weekend last month.

Monte Rio Rec & Park welcomes its newest board director Paul DuBray! We now have a full board again and should be ready for beach season and Independence Weekend fireworks soon. Our fireworks are sponsored by MRRPD, Monte Rio Fire Foundation, and Monte Rio Chamber. The Chamber is putting on their 19th annual golf tournament to support the fireworks on Friday May 3rd at Northwood.

Vacation Wonderland, we just keep getting better.

Chuck Ramsey has resided in Monte Rio for 15 years. Building community is his passion. He currently serves on the boards of the Monte Rio Alliance and Russian River Alliance.

If you would like to learn more about the Lower River Area Community Alliances, become involved as a volunteer, or if you have some community concerns or solutions you would like to share, you can “like” our Guerneville Community Alliance and/or Russian River Alliance FB pages, or visit our website at www.russianriveralliance.org. You can also contact Jeniffer Wertz at 707-483-7038 (Guerneville), or Chuck Ramsey at 707-239-1639 (Monte Rio).