The cross and the Star of David on Rohnert Park’s official city seal will soon be purged.
Any religious imagery on the 40-year-old seal, which appears on police shoulder patches, city vehicles and other city property, must be removed by 2003. The change stems from challenges regarding the constitutionality of the seal, by resident Irv Sutley.
Sutley’s complaint, filed with the city last year, charged that the Christian and Jewish symbols on the seal violate the constitutional separation of church and state. He had previously filed a claim challenging the use of a religious invocation during a January 2001 city council meeting — an action the city agreed not to repeat.
“Mr. Sutley is a very strong advocate of the separation of church and state, he feels very passionately about it,” explained City Attorney Betsey Strauss. “The seal struck him as wrong. We felt he would probably prevail” in court.
But while the city agreed to settle the matter and avoid a possible lawsuit by redesigning the seal, not everyone on the Rohnert Park city council is very happy about it.
“If it’s what we have to do legally then we’ll do it,” said Vice Mayor Linda Spiro. “But my personal opinion is, I don’t think we should have to change a thing.”
The eight-point, star-shaped city seal was chosen in a contest in 1962 and appears to have been drawn by a child, said Spiro. It is divided into four sections depicting different aspects of Rohnert Park, such as business, industry, public safety and education, she said.
The two offending areas are the education section, which includes a flag and the word “schools” inside a slanted Star of David, and the section next to it, which pictures a church with a cross atop its steeple. The bottom section includes a tractor puffing smoke, a stick-figure couple and a blossoming plant.
While the star “may have a number of points equal to that of a Star of David, it is not a Star of David,” said Spiro, who is serving her fourth term on the council and plans to retire mid-term. “To me it looks like an old-fashioned police badge, whether it has the right amount of points or not.”
It is also unlikely that the seal would include a Star of David since Rohnert Park does not have a synagogue and “there was not a large Jewish population to begin with.”
As for the cross on the steeple of the church, “it is what it is,” said Spiro.
“We could call it a math building, and make it a plus,” she suggested.
While Spiro said it will be costly to phase out the old seal and put a new one in place, the actual dollar amount was not yet available.
She also said the city council has yet to decide how to redesign the new seal, but will probably hold a contest or hire a professional designer.
Meanwhile, in nearby Sebastopol, the city council last week settled a design issue of its own — a potential city logo with inadvertent Nazi symbolism.
The logo, picked from 20 entries in a design contest to update Sebastopol’s logo for its upcoming centennial in June, drew criticism in January. Many felt that the artsy, angular “S” for Sebastopol, set atop a perpendicular wavy line representing a river, looked a lot like a swastika.
The council had given artist Andrea Ovik an additional month to redesign the logo and eliminate any unintended hints of the Third Reich. But at a meeting on Feb. 19, council members unanimously voted to chuck her redesigned logo and any other new logo entirely. The city will stick with its old logo, a traditional round seal featuring apples.
“They just felt like there was too much negative association with this [redesigned] logo, that it had been tainted and had too much baggage,” said Kenyon Webster, the city’s planning director. “We didn’t want a city logo that evokes those negative associations.”
The council also agreed to award Ovik the $500 prize for designing the logo and enduring the controversy. But Ovik declined, asking that it instead be donated to Sebastopol’s community arts center, said Webster.