The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors is taking a look at the county’s five-year strategic plan, which outlines goals set for the board through 2026.
The plan was first adopted in 2021 and its first progress report was published Tuesday. In it, the county’s priorities include becoming carbon neutral by 2030, promoting racial equity in county services and employment, increasing affordable housing, focusing on health initiatives for underserved residents, and investment in infrastructure.
The board was presented with several accomplishments already met, including millions in grants to address fire risk, carbon farming supports such as augmenting degraded soil, preventing erosion and generally improving crop production, and mobile health crisis teams, for a total of nearly $40 million.
On Tuesday, the board approved nearly $1.2 million for infrastructure improvements toward the Tierra de Rosas mixed-use project in Santa Rosa. The Tierra de Rosas project is a “master development” that will transform a former shopping mall at the intersection of Sebastopol Road and West Avenue. Seventy-five new affordable housing units will be built there in hopes of “strengthening” the Roseland neighborhood’s economic resiliency, according to the county.
The board also approved a language access plan to better communicate with residents who don’t speak English, money to bolster the county’s data center to respond to disasters, increasing electric vehicle charging stations, and almost $250,000 toward climate-related initiatives.
The county also plans to boost its Office of Equity by hiring an “anti-racist results-based accountability program planning and evaluation analyst” for three years, an analyst to help the county meet its strategic plans around equity, and an administrative assistant for the department.
Striving for equity
“Equity” is defined by the county as “an outcome whereby you can’t tell the difference in critical markers of health, well-being and wealth by race or ethnicity, and a process whereby we explicitly value the voices of people of color, low income and other underrepresented and underserved communities who identify solutions to achieve that outcome.”
According to U.S. Census numbers from 2021, Sonoma County is 2 percent Black, 5 percent Asian, 28 percent Hispanic or Latino, and 61 percent white (4 percent other).
The county acknowledges that broader equity issues involve gender, sexual orientation and ability, but they will expand to those concentrations next, according to the strategic plan.
“The Board and staff commitment to proceeding with this crucial and difficult work can change the trajectory of treatment of those historically impacted communities for generations to come.”
Alegria De La Cruz, director of the Office of Equity
So far, the Office of Equity in Sonoma County has created an equity core team of 57 county employees across 15 departments and agencies, the county said. Team members have been trained to apply racial equity concepts to their jobs.
A Racial and Social Justice Pillar is part of the county’s five-year strategic plan. The county chose to tackle racial equity first, as opposed to socio-economic equity, because “If Sonoma County wants to start closing those gaps, we have to start there,” according to the strategic plan. “Research and best practices nationally show that successful equity programs begin with a focus on race.”
“Without defining and understanding institutional racism and what it looks like on a day-to-day basis in service provision and employment at the County, we cannot proceed to address those actions correctly and dismantle inequalities that have persisted for too long,” said Alegria De La Cruz, director of the Office of Equity. “The Board and staff commitment to proceeding with this crucial and difficult work can change the trajectory of treatment of those historically impacted communities for generations to come.”