City Council Speech 2/20/18
Good Evening Mayor and City Council, This debate is not about whether there should be more hotels in Healdsburg -because plenty more hotels are already coming. This debate is about impacts and unintended consequences. The difficult fact we must accept is that we are in the dark about how all these new rooms downtown and elsewhere will affect livability and business in town. We don't know if more hotels will increase or decrease our ability to market Healdsburg as a get-away from crowded city life . Both tourism and local’s interests are at stake. If we want to be empirical, if we want to lean on the facts, and if we do not want to make irreversible mistakes, then we need to find a way to effectively safeguard our iconic downtown while we find out what will happen after this new wave of hotels is built. Protecting the downtown area during the upcoming period of growth reflects our town's core values and is supported by numerous points in the General Plan. It repres