The former Sonoma Developmental Center — the roughly 900-acre former state institution at Eldridge, tucked between Glen Ellen and Kenwood — is the largest and most consequential land-use question in the valley. Since the facility closed in 2018, the county has been steering a plan for what comes next: how much housing is built, how much of its open space, creeks, and historic core are preserved, and how its water, wildfire risk, and roads are handled.
It is a story with a long timeline and a great many moving parts — a Specific Plan, environmental review, developer selection, and years of hearings. The Wag will track it here step by step: every filing at Permit Sonoma, every Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission item, every decision that moves it forward or holds it back, laid out in plain order so you can follow the whole arc without reading a thousand pages.
This is the start of our running tracker. Updates will appear here as they happen.