“The distinction on this was it was very visceral,” Gore said.
The onslaught came as the trail camp continued to swell amid colder and wetter winter weather. The emails and voicemails offered a window into how elected officials grappled with the mounting pressure to take swift action.
Hopkins, who is nearing the end of her first term with the Board of Supervisors and is up for reelection, said the sheer volume of emails was rivaled for her only by the experience in the wake of her district’s bout with devastating floods, and by the county’s searing wildfires. And the constant emails over road damage, she added.
“Yeah, it’s infrastructure, disaster, homelessness,” Hopkins said.
Residents want respect
Many writers identified themselves as taxpayers or residents living adjacent to the trail, a county park within Santa Rosa city limits.
They expressed frustration and anger that local officials allowed people to live on public land in such numbers. Fallout from the camp was spilling over into their yards and businesses, they wrote.
“This isn’t a complex issue. I am a tax paying, hard working, contributing member of society who should not feel threatened on their own property by people who choose to contribute nothing and who trespass illegally,” Erin Rineberg, of Santa Rosa, said in a Nov. 17 email. She voiced concern for the well-being of homeless people, but deep dismay over repeated instances of trespassing. “Homeowners should have more rights and be treated with more respect than they are when it comes to the homeless.”
Neighbors near the trail, their emotions still raw from the Kincade fire and the evacuation orders that displaced nearly 200,000 residents, returned home to watch the camp grow almost immediately. Resident Bonita Cole spelled out her fears in a Nov. 4 email to county officials.
“It occurs to me that one carelessly discarded cigarette could turn this trail into a tunnel of fire,” Cole said.
Something short of that scenario happened late last month, when a propane tank exploded in the trail camp, fueling a fire that nearly jumped a neighbor’s fence and left a 150-foot burn scar. It was the second such blaze, at nearly the same location, in as many months.
Some residents, including Samantha Yates, shared personal stories.
Yates called the encampment strung out along the south side of Highway 12 an eyesore. It hadn’t affected her personally until Dec. 11, when, she said, she had packages stolen from her porch. A neighbor suspected trail residents, spying them jumping the fence back to the trail.
“Those were Christmas gifts I saved a long time for and put a lot of thought into,” Yates wrote in a Dec. 12 email. “To me, this is a personal attack and has gone too far.”
Mary Paternoster is chief operating officer of Southpoint Management, which has a self-storage facility separated from the trail by a fence. She sent numerous emails to county supervisors, attaching pictures of discarded drug needles carelessly thrown onto the property and documenting the trail’s continual growth.
An email from Paternoster to the city about untended fires on the trail in November rose to Fire Chief Tony Gossner’s attention and prompted an investigation by the Santa Rosa Fire Department. After a conversation with the chief about the complaint of open fires, Fire Marshal Scott Moon dispatched two inspectors along the trail, emails showed.
