Responsive Government arrived in Sebastopol this evening, in a big way!
In its first session led by Mayor Michael Kyes and newly seated Council Members Robert Jacob and John Eder, Sebastopol's City Council voted to approve the two most porgressive city ordinances that the city has seen in years.
First, an anti-harassment bill for cyclists and pedestrians, the first in Northern California, won in a 5 to 0 vote. Sebastopol's ordinance. backed by the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, is likely to be a model for similar ordinances in other Sonoma County cities, and for the Board of Supervisors as well.
More dramatically, the Council voted to ban all new drive through windows in downtown Sebastopol, and to NOT issue a building permit to any new business with a drive through window. Even Council Member Patrick Slayter, the only Council Member remaining of the three who voted to override our Design Review Board's rejection of the CVS project (and its suburban style design), this time voted with the majority to stop drive through windows. A year and a half ago, Council Member Sarah Gurney was the only Council Member courageous enough to challenge the suspicious traffic report that claimed this development's 2,000 new car trips per day would not add more than five seconds to the congestion of the busiest, most dangerous corner in West County. Today, she was one of five members with a mandate to sustain a thriving, green, pedestrian-friendly downtown.
Tonight's vote means that without singling out CVS, the enormously unpopular development at the crossroads of our community will not be able to have a drive through window. An insider at CVS told me more than a year ago that the entire project was being built to allow a drive through window at the intersection between 116 and Highway 12. Without the drive through window, the economics of the a new CVS store fall apart. After all, the new store would contain less than half the retail space as the CVS it was going to replace, next to Mary's Pizza.
During the past few months, before and after the Council Election on November 6, scores of neighbors have asked me if we have any chance of defeating CVS.
It appears as though just happened tonight!
Responsive Government for the People prevailed. Our votes were registered, Jacob and Eder were voted in, and our elected representatives , as well as our city staff, listened. Thank you!
As they did last summer, Armstrong Development tonight had their representative trot out their thinly veiled legal threat to sue our city on behalf of their multi-billion dollar client, CVS, if we did not acquiesce to their right to build what they wanted.
Except this time, their threats fell on deaf ears.
Citizen after citizen spoke politely, but incredibly firmly, about our vote to Go Local in this past election. We spoke against the drive through windows and the auto-centric, carbon monoxide poisoning, fossil fuel-reliant, climate change-causing way of life they represent.
Not here. No more. Take your corporate marbles and go home.
It was as though the magical power of the gargantuan Corptocracy withered and died in the sunlight that Responsive Government brought to bear.
Their Big Lie: "what's good for multi-billion dollar companies and their profits is good for Main Street, USA, no longer had the power to sway. We, the people, just voted out of office those who believed this decrepit mythology.
Except for a highly paid representative from out of town, not a single human being spoke up for the corporate person that CVS claims the right to be.
A consensus was reached this evening in Sebastopol, only a few days before the Mayan calendar ends.
A new paradigm of representative democracy is beginning.
I recently heard the question, "Is Community the New Messiah."
This evening, in Sebastopol, it feels like the answer is YES.