I am Bill Hocker. Mui Ho and I have spent our weekends for the last 26 years on Soda Canyon Road in Napa County, California.

This website is an outgrowth of the potential development of a new tourism venue to be located in our back yard. The scale of this new proposal and its ambitious tourism marketing plan promises to change the character of our lives on the road. And it, and the projects that will surely follow in its wake, will destroy the reason we, and the other residents on our road, chose to live in a remote rural area.

The project has also made us aware that these developments are being proposed throughout the county, impacting many communities besides our own. We have become more and more concerned about the fragile legislation that has kept this county rural for 50 years while suburban development has overtaken the rest of the bay area. The successful commitment of a previous generation to make the county an agricultural preserve is now under assault by a tourism development industry masquerading as a protector while it consumes the land and the ideals upon which the preserve is based.

Although this website offers an infrasturcture for an online community of residents, right now it is intended merely as an archive of County and developer materials related to past and ongoing projects. Documenting past and current development battles will give some context for the battles yet to come. It is also my therapy to deal with the heartbreak of possibly losing the remote tranquility my wife and I came up Soda Canyon Road to find.

You can contact me at bill@sodacanyonroad.org

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