Bill Hocker | Jan 11, 2021

Update 3/13/21

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NVR 3/13/21: Privacy's group sues Napa County over hot air balloon launch increase

Update 1/15/21

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NVR 1/15/21: Napa supervisors grant Balloons Above the Valley more launches

The Board split along its pro-development faultlines with Sups. Pedroza, Ramos and Gregory supporting more tourism and Sups. Dillon and Wagenknecht pushing back on the ever increasing commercial business use of lands zoned for agriculture. The problem is that once you officially define tourism as an essential element of the wine industry, as has happened in Napa County, it's difficult to exclude those tourism uses that go beyond the restaurants, event venues and amusement parks (like Castello di Amorosa) currently allowed on ag zoned lands.

1/11/21

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NVR 1/11/21: Once thought decided, winery and hot air balloon issues are having new life in Napa County

Barry Eberling, reporting in the Register about the upcoming "Balloons Above the Valley" appeal hearing at the Board of Supervisors on Jan 12, 2021 (item 13B here), links to other projects coming before the Board which, taken together, represent a broad issue: the pushback of residents trying to to prevent the commercialization of their communities in a county now more devoted to urban development than rural protection. Each project, like the remote Mountain Peak winery proposal on our fire ravaged road, has its own specific issues that have brought them to the Board, a couple with a detour through the courts that question the Board's previous approvals. But since these legal battles must be fought on very specific issues, the more general issue of loss of community quality of life that each development represents often goes unsaid. Yet it is at the core of the anger makes residents willing to spend the vast amount of time and money needed to fight them. Unlike developers, residents get no tax writeoff for their efforts or the promise of money returned on their investment. Their only reward is the maintenance of the quality of life that they feel they have found in rural Napa County, "the agricultural lands and rural character that we treasure" in the words of the Napa County General Plan vision statement. In its rush to promote tourism, housing and industrial development in the name of "growth", the Board of Supervisors no longer embodies that vision.

While each new year I feel like giving up on this quixotic effort to document the progression of urbanization in Napa (and thereby feel I'm doing what I can), an article like Mr. Eberling's comes out, or the Planning Commission makes a good decision like "Balloons", or the Board steps back from its development zeal, just enough to show that the ideal of retaining Napa county as a rural refuge in the greater bay area still has some currency; and I go on adding to the site.

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