Located about 20 miles southwest of Woodland, the city of Winters has a lot to offer to those who live within Yolo County.

If you consider yourself a “foodie,” then Winters is the place for you. According to the website “TheTravel,” Winters ranks as the top small town in California to satisfy your taste buds. That’s not all. According to Strategistico, Winters is among the eight most “charming” small towns in the Golden State.

Winters Mayor Bill Biasi recently spoke with the Daily Democrat about a wide range of topics, including his background, the COVID-19 pandemic and the future of Winters. Read more below:

Q How did you get into politics for a career?

A I am born and raised in Winters. My family grew up here, so I’m third-generation. I have been working in agriculture most of my life but decided to get involved with the city council.

I choose to get involved on various committees, planning commissions and city council to be able to give back to a community which has given me the opportunity to grow up and live in a special town. I had relatives and family friends of my parents who served on city council when I was younger and that set a good example for me and created a desire to give back to the community which has given me so much.

I was on a couple of committees and I got involved with committee work because I wanted to have some input and influence on things that were going on in Winters. I got appointed to the Winters Planning Commission, I was on there serving as chairman of that for four of those five years.

Then I decided to move up to the next step and run for city council. I’m in my seventh year on the city council. I just wanted to be able to have a voice to represent a lot of the people that I know in Winters. Find out what they want to see Winters be and the decisions that are being made for where we’re going in the future. So I decided to get involved and be able to have a vote on things.

Q What does the town of Winters mean to you?

A I’ve seen it change from the time when I grew up here. Primarily, everything was around agriculture. There was a railroad that use to go through town. We had fruit packing sheds that were very active because we had the first apricots in the market for a long time before water was in the central valley and farther south. Winters was really big with growing apricots that were shipped to the east coast.

Everything that was downtown, it all grew around the agriculture industry. The railroad was pulled out in the early 70s, packing sheds all closed down and Winters shifted from apricots to more walnuts, almonds and prunes. So it changed that part of it with the packing sheds moving out of downtown.

We’ve grown, starting in the 90s and early 2000s, our downtown got really quiet for a while. Then we started to do some things to revitalize the downtown. We did some streetscape improvements, did some things to attract new businesses to make it more of a destination.

Winters is still a small town. We’ve now become more of a destination, but we still maintain our small town charm that we’ve always had. For me, what Winters is is the people who make it special. There’s a sense of community here. There’s a strong spirit where everybody pitches in to help one another and volunteer on different projects.

Winters is my hometown, I’ve always been here and I hope to stay here for the rest of my life. Our school systems are strong, we just opened up a new high school facility last year. Winters is a good place to come raise kids in a safe environment.

Q What were some concerns about the city that you had when you were elected to the city council?

A It wasn’t that I had a lot of concerns, I wanted to have a vote in the direction that we were going. What we were going to do as far as how we grow and have smart growth so we don’t grow so fast that we outgrow all the services that the city offers. Be able to have good schools, good streets, parks, all those types of things. I wanted to make sure that those were all considered as we made decisions on new housing developments that came in.

What I really like to do is to do everything we can to promote our economic development and bring new businesses into town and create jobs here in Winters so people don’t have to drive out of town so much to work. There are a lot of people who live here and work out of town. Things changed with COVID obviously, a lot more people are working from home now. One of the other things that we’re trying to focus more on is trying to make sure we have good broadband services throughout the community. We have parts of the community that have good service and other parts that we still need to improve.

I just wanted to have a say in all these different things that go on with running the city. Making sure our budget is strong, which it is. We survived COVID I think in really good shape.

Q What are some of your top accomplishments during your time as mayor?

A Personally, it’s not just me. It’s the whole city council and planning commission, especially our city staff working together to make things happen here.

One of the big things is we brought in a new state-of-the-art PG&E gas-safety training facility. That’s right out near the 505 highway out here. They bring in people to train them on gas safety so it brings a lot of people to town for that. We were able to get a new hotel built downtown. It’s more of a boutique hotel, which has been a very big draw for Winters. It allows us to host conferences, things like that downtown that it has a place for. People who are coming to the PG&E facility for training have a place to stay.

We just recently, about a month ago, cut the ribbon on another new hotel that’s near the PG&E facility so we now have two hotels in town, that was a big thing. Another big thing that we’ve done, it’s been over 10 years now since we finished it, we have the Putah Creek Park, a nature park down there. We have a paved trail along the upper bank so people can go downtown and it’s right there within walking distance, only a couple minutes. There’s a nice trail that you can walk along the creek. Go out there, relax and see the nature.

The top things would be bringing in new hotels, the gas safety training facility as well as the Putah Creek Park nature trail. It hasn’t been just me, it has been a collaborative work of all the council, city manager we have now, as well as the previous city manager. People all working together, that’s the good thing about Winters is that we all work together.

Q What was it like being the mayor pro tempore during the COVID-19 pandemic?

A There were a lot of things that we had to change like everybody else. Going to meetings on Zoom, not having our meetings in-person. Trying to decide what to do to try to keep our businesses alive and active during that period was a challenge.

One of the things that we did was we closed off half a block of Main Street downtown and we installed some outdoor seating areas with covered pergolas over them so that people had a place they could go with the restaurants being unable to seat people inside. We had places where they could go get food to-go and sit outside on Main Street and enjoy their food. So we tried to help out the businesses in that way.

Q How has the town of Winters rebounded from the pandemic?

A I think our businesses are still strong. Now that they’re able to have people inside and things are getting more back to normal where most of our restaurants are open seven days a week again, where they had to cut back their schedules before.

I think they’ve rebounded really well. They seem to be drawing a lot of people into town with weddings happening again, there are a lot of wedding venues right around Winters. The downtown hotel, Hotel Winters, it opened right at the beginning of the COVID period so it was really a struggle for them to get established. Now when I go by there, you see cars parked out there all the time, they have rebounded very well. They have a restaurant in there that they opened as well, business is picking up for them as well as our other restaurants in town.

The Buckhorn, the Preserve, we have a number of world-class restaurants in Winters. People like to come here because we’ve become more of a destination instead of a small agricultural town. We’ve been selected as one of the eight most charming small towns in California. We were ranked right up there on that because of the atmosphere downtown, the safety of town and we’re ranked with places like Monterey, Solvang, different places like that. I think we’ve done a lot to change the atmosphere in town that make people feel like they want to come here and it’s really helped our businesses.

During COVID, it was a challenge for a lot of them. I can’t really think if there were any that closed down and didn’t reopen, I don’t think there are.

Q Why should Yolo County residents come visit Winters?

A We have a number of really good restaurants here with the Buckhorn, Putah Creek Cafe, Preserve, Ficelle, Carboni’s, which is at the hotel. There’s also a couple of local wineries that are owned and run by people who are second-, third-generation or more Winters people who started these businesses. We also have a couple breweries here.

So, there’s a lot of things to do in Winters. Our downtown business association is becoming really strong. They host events downtown. What we started during the pandemic, closing down half a block of Main Street, we’re doing that on the weekends now starting on Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon, where the outdoor seating is. The downtown business association is providing live music down there every Friday night. We recently had our spring open where we had a street fair downtown. We’ll have another one in the fall for our fall harvest festival. There’s a lot of events that happen in Winters if you keep up with our chamber or downtown business association’s calendars.

We have a beautiful, wooden playground structure at our city park that was all built by volunteers with money that was donated. It’s a wonderful wooden playground structure that people can bring their kids here to play in the park on this structure.