But this is Chico, too

Santa Rosa was supposed to become the next San Jose. “Just wait. In another 20 years, it will be just as big,” my parents told us the summer we moved from the San Jose suburb of Campbell to Santa Rosa.

But this was 1964 and for now Santa Rosa, with barely 40,000 people, was the largest city in Sonoma County, which had less than 200,000 people at a time when the San Jose area already had a million people. To us, Santa Rosa seemed like a small town.

A job transfer for my dad enabled us to move, but the underlying motivation was to escape the sprawl of the future Silicon Valley, which had reached our backyard fence. A couple of years before we moved, the orchard behind our house had been torn up and replaced with a ticky-tacky housing development called Crestfield.

Another family prophecy from those years was that someday all the land along Highway 101 between Salinas and Cloverdale would be entirely built up.

Forty-three years later, the Sonoma County part of the prediction is close to coming true. Today there is so little farmland — pastures in the south and vineyards in the north — separating Petaluma, Rohnert Park, Santa Rosa, Windsor and Healdsbrug that these cities will coalesce in less than 10 years. For now, Cloverdale, which is several miles up the road from Healdsburg, remains out of reach of the sprawl.

What’s happening is a shame. This is incredibly beautiful country. Rugged mountains, redwood forests, chaparral woodland, rocky and sandy ocean beaches, the Russian River resort area and the fabled Wine Country all lie within a half-hour drive of Santa Rosa.

But unlike Napa and Marin counties, Sonoma County got a late start in taking steps to protect its farmland. Today, the county has almost 460,000 people. Santa Rosa’s share of that is 156,000. Just about everyone lives within a few miles of Highway 101. The county has allowed a sprawling suburban strip to cut through its heart.

This is what will happen in Butte County if strict farmland protections aren’t put in place. We will see a city snaking its way along Highway 99 from the county’s north to south borders. And, of course, such growth won’t respect county boundaries. It’s not hard to imagine a continuously built up landscape extending from Los Molinos in Tehama County to Yuba City in Sutter County.