Bill Hocker | Jul 23, 2015

NVR: City approves water service deal for Napa Pipe 7/22/15pm
NVR: Costco, Napa Pipe waiting on city decision 7/22/15am

At the Napa City Council meeting on July 21st, 2015 Ray Tooker, the city's Community Development Director, presented the final, final, final negotiation between the City, the County and the Developer on the Napa Pipe Project. The city council signed off on the agreements necessary to allow the project to proceed including the final issue of promising to provide city water for the project. It is of course the harbinger of death for the tattered agricultural ambitions of the Napa County General Plan. My rant on Napa Pipe is here.

But it was this slide from Mr. Tooker's presentation, as he put forward the steps that the city council must now take, that truly summed up the future of Napa County.



The idea of a greenbelt around Napa to prevent it from becoming just another indistinguishable part of the Vallejo-Napa metropolitan area faded some time ago. The areas south of the Soscol/29 junction have long been slated for industrial development and the parcels are currently being filled willy nilly, pushing against both sides of Hwy 29. (no 600' setback here.) The 1988 development of the Napa Valley Corporate Park, now Napa Valley Commons, between Napa Pipe and Soscol, killed off one of the better opportunities to maintain a buffer between Napa and American Canyon.

The grape-crusher monument built as part of the corporate park has always seemed an apt metaphor for squeezing ever more profits out of Napa land through building projects. Monuments and plaques may eventually be all that is left of Napa's agricultural history. (The scenic overlook at the monument is also a bad omen: the view presented up the Napa Valley is of the potemkin vineyard of the Meritage Resort in the foreground and the roofs and mechanical equipment of the corporate park blocking the view of the valley.)

But the powerpoint slide above was even more poignant in that it truly represents the last vestige of a once laudable idea to try to control urban growth. It highlights in the clearest way possible the failure of the city and the county in the face of development pressure to be able to follow through on their goals. Sad.

There is still an elaborate annexation scheme, needed to incrementally transfer property from the county to the city as the project is built, that must be approved by the state-supervised LAFCO agency that regulates urban development. That will involve another round of public hearings. It's never quite over.

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