Update: 8/14/17

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City report on the hotel explosion this Tuesday

Napa Vision 2050 has just sent out this notice about a staff report to be presented to the Napa City Council on Aug 15th, 3:00pm about the various hotel projects going on in the city. You are encouraged to attend.
AND Black Elk Hotel is up for its use permit on Thursday

On Thursday, Aug 17th at 5:30, the City Planning Commission will take up the Black Elk Hotel Use Permit. The project, a 4 story barnish block of a building cutting off the Oxbow district from the rest of the city, is shown in the rendering below. The staff report and documents are here.

7/14/17

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NVR 7/4/17: Proposed four-story Oxbow hotel to receive Napa planners’ scrutiny

The Black Elk Hotel had a preliminary review by the Napa City Planning Commission on July 6th 2017. The Staff Report and Documents are here. It is a very innappropriate building for the location, out of scale, a visual barrier to the Oxbow district, of "barnish" shape and materials out of place in its urban setting, a box of a building trying to squeeze as many hotel rooms as possible on the small site, which brought to mind a 19th century tenement house.

What became very apparent here, and in all of the hotel projects in the news recently, is that the city has no master plan for the development of the city, no commitment to integrate housing and real people and businesses into the tourism economy, and no design guidelines to regulate what the character of the place will become. As with the rural areas of the county, the future of Napa City is being irrevocably altered in this developer boom period, and the Planning Commission decisions about Napa's future are being made on an ad hoc basis, one isolated project at a time, without looking at the long term result. Which, of course, will be a hodgepodge of developers' schemes, some with good taste and some without, trying to maximize the money to be made from the tourist trade on every square inch of the city, while the residents are forced out.

Update: 7/2/17

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NVR 7/2/217: As hotels increase, do Napa residents benefit? Readers, officials weigh in

Howard Yune, Napa city reporter for the Register, had to previously ask readers what they thought about Napa's hotel explosion, and he gives some of the responses in the above article. He had to ask because the Register, in a blow to the free exchange of ideas in a democracy, decided to discontinue the ability to comment online to news articles last year. There were, no doubt, legitimate concerns leading to the discontinuance. But for those seriously interested in issues in Napa county, like the explosion of hotel development, citizen reaction to the news is an important part of the story. The problems that the paper experienced with responses, I think, had much to do with the anonymity of the posts and the freedom that gives to be irresponsible in posting. Require real names and let the comments continue.

Update: 6/20/17

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It's hard to keep up with this issue:
NVR 6/25/17: Downtown Napa hotel plan calls for merging Zeller's and former post office sites
NVR 6/22/17: Surging hotel taxes become a larger part of the new Napa city budget
NVR 6/20/17: How many hotels are enough -- or too much? Contact the Register

The hotel explosion raises several issues.

First, the loss of a community. Hotels not only bring in more tourists, but they increase the 24-hour tourist population. At some point, as the ratio of tourists to residents increases, and as jobs, commercial activity and housing continue to shift from resident-serving to tourist-serving, the sense of normal, small-town community life will be lost to the collective endevour of catering to, and being the local color for, the tourism experience. And the real town and its community will disappear. (St. Helena is at the forefront of this phenomenon.)

Second, a financing dependency. TOT revenue and other in-lieu fees are welcomed as a quick fix for the deferred infrastructure and service costs needed to mitigate the impacts of previous urban development. But low wage jobs are created by the hundreds and the money isn't there for affordable housing. Traffic and parking problems explode. The increased tourism and employee population require additional infrastructure and services which then encourage more new project approvals and so on. Ultimately the place becomes a dense tourist trap, devoid of residents, and, much like Oxbow is now, packed with people wondering what's so special about Napa.

Third, the loss of Napa's rural soul. The number of hotel projects, like the amount of traffic, is a symptom of a community losing it's resitance to development pressure. That pressure was was contained in Napa for the last 40 years by a combination of politicians and citizenry with a clear vision of an un-urbanized future, and an industry dependent on an agricultural product. But as the landscape and vineyards are slowly filled with buildings to exploit the expanding tourist population, the vision of a rural enclave in the urban Bay Area is harder for politicians and their citizens to imagine, and the industry is finding that more money is to be made by providing wine-related experiences than from making wine. The importance of agriculture fades beyond its use as a stageset for TOT-paying visitors.

Update: 6/17/17

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A neighbor just sent over a link to the latest Napa Life, Paul Fransons's weekly "insiders guide to the Napa Valley." The June 19th, 2017 issue is here. Scroll down to the section on "Lodging News". Below the summaries of the latest hotel projects in the Register he has a list of the projects currently in the approval and proposal pipelines. While I struggle to keep up on this site, as an insider he has a much better handle on these things. And it is a bit freightening.

Most freightening of all is the mention of a Ted Hall 80 room hotel in South St Helena (described in this 2015 NVR article). Ted Hall (recent profile here) is perhaps the most revered grower-vintner in the county, one of the few statesman in an industry filled with entrepreneurs. Each trip to the planning commission to present his winery projects turns into a lovefest (just as the hotel project did). He will probabaly make the most sensitive, ecological integration of agriculture and overnight accommodation it is possible to make. And he will set the precident for lesser lights to follow for the next phase of the "wine" industry in its transition to an entertainment industry. Now that the winery restaurant is firmly established as an acceptable "incidental and subordinate" use allowed at wineries, it is only a matter of time before the winery b&b begins to make its way into the definition of "agriculture" as well. A euphanism will have to be invented - "immersive agricultural experience" perhaps - to make sure no one would mistake a winery for a hotel. But with the precedent set by this most solid citizen of the County, every good-life entrepreneur will now want a hotel-of-their-own to go along with their winery.

Update: 6/8/17

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Cohn LTE 6/8/17: Slow the stampede of development and his petition
And the concurrences:
Don and Arlene Townsend LTE 6/16/17: When is enough enough?
Lynn Korn LTE 6/12/17: Enough already
Barbara Cioppone LTE 6/8/17: All for the rich people

A lot of proposed Napa hotel projects in the news:
NVR 6/8/17: Cambria Hotel coming to Napa's Soscol Avenue (And subsequent sale)
NVR 6/5/17: Napa Valley Wine Train owners plan $100 million resort development
NVR 6/2/17: Design of south Napa Marriott hotel leaves city planners cold
NVR 5/17/17: Altamira family reviving plans for a winery/hotel project on Silverado Trail
And other projects:
NVR 6/14/17: Napa approves 4-story building for Bounty Hunter wine bar, restaurant

Update: 2/20/17

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NVR 2/20/17: Napa asks, How many hotel rooms are enough?
NY Times 2/1/17: A Waking Giant or a Monster? Developers Eye Once-Sleepy Napa

In the Times article Napa Vision 2050 is recognized nationally for its efforts to slow the urbanization of Napa County. Kudos to Harris Nussbaum and Patricia Damery.
Jim Wilson on the Napa Vision 2050 Economic Forum

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It's exactly the effect we heard is coming at George Caloyannidis' Tourism Economy Forum in April of last year:

Samuel Mendlinger:

• Tourism accelerates the polarization between the population and the very wealthy.
  
• Polarization begins when businesses begin to cater to tourists and affluent locals at the expense of townsfolk.
  
• Now a major social revolution: small group of elderly people and few young people.
  
  Q: Whose town is this anyway? What can community do so the power doesn’t get concentrated in the hands of a few?
  A: There are a few only. Locals are usually the last to get a voice in tourism development. Usually money does the talking. Local leaders who are wise enough know that the local people need to be part of the process. Most people don’t really know what their long-term needs are. Community groups need to have experience.
  
  Know what they’re doing, how to get things done, like NV2050. It’s what attracted me to this event in Napa. Hospitality is about cheap labor. Tourism is about value added.
  
  Q: Local schools close and students are sent out of town?
  A: Imbalance. Older population crowds out the younger people. Mis-managed tourism.. Petersborough losing its school system,, and its vertical, complete society. Declining school enrollment is a sign that either young adults don’t want to have children, or they don’t see a future in the town.
  
  Q: How do you organize the population?
  A: NV2050 is a great example. You’re anxious over the future, you’re organizing through people who can organize, and have the time and abilty to see things through. Then expand! It’s bottom up. Top down is very rare.
  
  Q: How do you recommend citizens get involved in decisions on smart tourism?
  A: Mendlinger: What is motivation for County and City political leaders to get involved? Do they want more development or a higher quality of life for citizens? If interested in business they won’t listen. But if you have wise leadership you’ll do the part of the job that improves the quality of life. Especially in Napa you have a great pool of experience and wisdom. It’s cosmopolitan not provincial. Political leadership has to listen to well-organized citizens who understand how real life works. Citizens can go far. Like this meeting where you have political leadership plus informed citizens. I traveled fro Boston to see how Napa is doing, and I am encouraged by the possibilities. Rural areas - resource extraction areas – when industry pulls out there’s not much reason for community to be there.
  
  Q: Advice on blasting open “iron triangle” government/agencies/industry?
  A: Mendlinger; How to develop experienced and wise leaders and citizens is the question. I just don’t know how.

Eben Fodor:

• In an economic impact study, costs are just as important as revenues.
  
• Too much tourism can overwhelm a community.
  
• Impact studies usually tout all the benefits of a development. Fiscal impacts are often overlooked and no multipliers are used.
  
• The reports that go out make the development look great but it’s not. There’s no balanced perspective with costs to the community.

Napa Vision 2050 Economic Forum: Understanding the tourism driven economy
George Caloyannidis' articles on growth and tourism
More on Napa City development here
More on Napa Growth Issues here

Update 8/15/17

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Appeal denied 3-2. Ramos, Pedroza Gregory to deny. Dillon, Wangenknecht to uphold. Recognize, allow, expand.

NVR 8/16/17: Napa County Supervisors side with Raymond Vineyards

Chair Ramos went on at length on the virtue of separating the issue of compliance from requests for expansion, something she felt the county really needed to pursue. Just not here, of course.

Often at these hearings speakers talk rhetorically of a "turning point". This decision represents a point turned. Tourism trumped agriculture in a philosophical contest between two iconic and opposing figures in Napa's wine industry. Sup. Pedroza in justifying his decision to deny the appeal recognized Raymond as the wine industry of the 21st century. I interpret that to mean that wine tourism "experiences" are now the official product of Napa Valley and the actual wine, as has always been the case in other endeavors, is used simply to loosen the purse strings. The vote on the appeal divided the three newly elected supervisors from the two veterans. It was a poignant and, for those of us who have come to appreciate how difficult protection of the county's rural legacy's been for previous generations of supervisors, a sad vote.

Update 8/14/17

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NVR 8/14/17: Winery appeals stacking up before Napa County Board of Supervisors

The Raymond-Ticen appeal will be heard by the Board of Supervisors on Aug 15th. It will be interesting to see if the Supervisors split their decision along the lines of their Planning Commissioners. Given the players, it is truly a showcase, as Sup. Pedroza has framed it in various discussions, for a "difference in philosophies" about the future of Napa County. What does agricultural protection mean? Do we protect every vine or do we pull some out to accommodate tourism? Is the future to be an agricultural economy that benefits from tourism or a tourism economy that capitalizes on agriculture? Or perhaps capitalizes on an agricultural history?

Norma Tofanelli has weighed in on the potential of non-compliance forgiveness presented egregiously by this project, by citing a letter by Michael Honig regarding the Bremer project.

In the three and half years that this site has been up there have been appeals on the following wineries: Woolls Ranch [5-0], Yountville Hill [pulled], Castellucci [5-0], Melka [2-2], Reverie[5-0], Bell [5-0], Girard [5-0], Mountain Peak [4-0], Raymond [3-2], Caves at Soda Canyon, Flynnville, and on the non-winery projects Walt Ranch [5-0], Syar[5-0, 4-1, 5-0, 4-1], and on the pre-PC reviews Caymus [5-0] and Cuvasion.
Save Yountville Hill which is being redesigned, all thus far have been denied allowing the projects to proceed.

3/20/17

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NVR 3/20/17: Split Napa County Planning Commission approves Raymond Vineyards changes

On Mar 15th 2017 the County Planning Commission, after years of presentations, approved modifications to the Raymond Winery use permit. It has been a tortured process involving the recognition and allowance of years of permit violations, the clash of two iconically different players in the valley, and the impacts of the subordination of wine making to wine marketing in the economy.

The use permit application has pitted Raymond's owner, the flamboyant good-life entrepreneur Jean-Charles Boisset, against his next-door neighbor, mega-grapegrower Andy Beckstoffer, in a symbolic battle for the soul of Napa County. As has happened in countless, but increasingly intense, planning commission battles over these last years, the forces for more tourism development have won over the preservation of Napa's agricultural heritage, and a few more acres of vines get paved over for buildings and roads and parking lots.

This is the second Raymond proposal to come before the Commission. The first in 2014 ran into concerted opposition not just from Beckstoffer, but also residents on Zinfandel Lane faced with ever increasing traffic to the winery. The proposal was dropped after 2 continued hearings. Beckstoffer continued to challenge Raymond on non-compliance independently of the use permit request.

Raymond defused Zinfandel Lane opposition in this second project by buying an adjacent property, giving the winery direct access to Hwy 29 and dividing the service, visitation and employee traffic load into two access points. It also added another entertainment venue to the complex. It was apparently enough to placate residents of Zinfandel Lane who did not turn out for this meeting, although it did rile the residents of problematic Whitehall Lane junction just across Hwy 29 from the new Raymond driveway.

Mr. Beckstoffer was not assuaged by the new proposal, and, although he did not make the impassioned defense of the ag preserve that he has made in previous hearings, his lawyer made a CEQA-esque presentation in preparation for the appeal and, no doubt, court challenge ahead. The commissioners voted 3 - 2 to approve. Comms. Basayne, Scott and Gill seem to be reliable pro-development backers so far this year. Comms. Gallagher and Cottrell seem to be taking the position that where there's controversy on projects extra concern must be given to the negative impacts. I wish that all of the commissioners were willing to make the effort to balance the lives of impacted residents, the potential future impacts on the rural character of the county and on the integrity of the concept of the Ag Preserve, against the increased profits of individual applicants. (Comm Cottrell in her dissent made a strong argument against the precedence of "recognizing and allowing" non-compliance that this project embodies.)

As reported in the NVR article, Comm. Scott repeated a statement often used in these hearings to justify pumping up winery tourism:

“The marketing of wine has changed dramatically and direct-to-consumer sales and relationships are what create wine club members and purchasers of wine. Frankly, I don’t think a lot of our wineries would survive without the marketing events they need to establish those customer relationships."

Given the impact that this assertion is having on the number of tourist venues being proposed and approved in the county, and the impact that the increased tourism will have on our resources, environment, infrastructure, and the rural quality of life that is the hallmark of the county, someone should be asking if tourism is really necessary to the survival of the wine industry. What percentage of the wine industry is dependent on at-winery sales to survive? Why are so many wineries able to survive with very little or no winery visitation? Isn't it only new entrepreneurs, who must poach customers from established brands for the finite quantity of Napa wine available, that must rely on d-t-c tourism marketing because they are too small to be distributed? Are those new brands simply being approved because they increase the tourism draw to the county? Are there other methods to promote the sale of high-end wines besides the destructive invasion of mass-market tourism into the county?

Of course, Raymond is not a startup needing the tourist trade to kept it afloat in post 3-tier world. It is a mature and successful business acting on the reality that there is more money to be made in entertainment than wine. The Ag Preserve was created in the knowledge that there are many enterprises more profitable than making wine, and that controls were necessary if an agricultural economy were to survive. Raymond has flouted those rules to increase profits. And several acres of prime Rutherford acreage has been lost to roads and parking lots needed for its several tourism venues. Tourism, and the urbanization necessary for its success, is hardly less a threat to agriculture now than the housing business was in the 1970's. The dissenting commissioners were right not to recognize, allow and increase the changes that Raymond has requested.

Timeline:
3/15/17: PC hearing video[approved 3-2]
3/15/17: PC hearing agenda and Documents
2/1/17: PC hearing video [hearing continued]
12/16/15: Beckstoffer SMW letter on Raymond to BOS
4/29/15: Beckstoffer Abbott & Kindermann letter on Compliance to BOS
8/20/14: PC hearing video [hearing continued]
8/2014: PC hearing agenda and documents
8/20/14: Beckstoffer statement at Aug 20 hearing
7/16/14: PC hearing video [hearing continued]

Background: Our representatives on city councils and the board of supervisors hire helpers, collectively called “staff,” to research topics they need to decide on. Our elected representatives routinely rely on staff’s recommendations regarding the issues that affect us.

Noteworthy: At a recent St. Helena City Council meeting, when dozens of citizens objected to a staff proposal, something remarkable happened. The council heard the citizens and actually voted as the people wished, counter to its staff’s recommendation.

It was remarkable because too often in this county, elected officials hide behind staff. Mr. Pedroza did the other night trying to justify his vote to allow more winery visitors up Soda Canyon Road.

But staff takes its cues from its boss, the board of supervisors. In this county---where planning commissioners and supervisors profess respect for our semi-rural character but incongruously allow ever more visitors and non-agricultural winery events; and where wineries which ignore their permits are forgiven then actually rewarded for their transgression---staff is not blind. It sees how friendly its bosses are to rampant development.

It’s not likely to recommend denial of a project if it can be in any way permitted. And staff, being “expert,” as Pedroza avers, is educated enough to articulate objectivity and defend those recommendations that it understands its bosses like.

Yet---what do the residents of Soda Canyon Road care about staffs’ recommendations? They didn’t elect staff. They elected a representative they thought would respond to their legitimate concerns. They know from daily experience the hazards of that road and the danger of tippling tourists. But as for their supposed representative---he heard staff, not them.

No wonder Napans appealing to their representatives about development feel cynically like Sisyphus. Over and over, same old thing: “less than significant impact.”

Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope. For years, Upvalley residents have been remarking the loss of the semi-rural character of the valley as tourism vies with agriculture for the county’s soul. The Soda Canyon Road travesty is just one example. But it’s been difficult for Down-valley residents, mostly in urban Napa or suburban American Canyon, to appreciate the extent of the county’s transformation from a semi-rural arcadia to a tourist mecca.

Now, at last---judging from robust attendance at the Napa Vision 2050 town forum, and from recent letters to the Register---the tourism plague is infecting Down-valley too. Big hotels are planned. Crowds jam the streets with music festivals. The model trains will vanish. Good-bye small-town Napa.

As for quiet, rural Upvalley Napa County: just a memory.

Unless -- unless we voters realize the decision is ours. We don’t have to elect people who’ll use staff to justify the degradation of Napa County. We can choose representatives who actually hear and respond to what residents want.

St. Helena City Council voted out incumbents. So can we.

NVR LTE version 8/15/17: We didn't elect the staff

Sup. Pedroza's Town Hall: a difference of opinion

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NVR 8/11/17: Napa Supervisor Pedroza on the firing line at town hall meeting

As town halls have been going in this country of late, that of Sup. Pedroza on Aug 7th was a civilized affair. Our Supervisor started out his presentation expecting some disagreement - we may disagree, he said, but disagreements lead to better decisions - and gave a smooth presentation of the background statistics and his program for a healthy future Napa, with more affordable housing and more jobs and a flyover at the Soscol junction. The powerpoint is here.

There was a bit of pushback. The issues that have been of greatest concern to residents in the Soda Canyon, Atlas Peak, Montecello Rd regions were given their most fulsome airing in Cindy Grupp's comments: Citizens are not listened to. Dissenting expert opinions are dismissed out of hand. There is no balance of interests between residents and developers - the developers win every time. The supervisors are ignoring the hundreds of people that showed up for the Mar 10th 2015 joint BOS-PC meeting to protest against the level of development occurring. She quoted from the petitioner in the recent court decision in Sonoma, in its failure to consider the true impacts of development in their CAP: "It is time to admit that perpetual growth is not sustainable."

Other speakers also voiced concern. Yeoryios Appalls asked why, with $80 million in tourism taxes in 2014, the roads aren't fixed. Where is the cost benefit analysis for all the tourism development that is going on. Harris Nussbaum asked how, with 5000 people on the waiting lists for housing and more low paying jobs being added to the county with every project approval, the housing crisis will be solved with a handful of difficult-to-realize low cost housing units in the pipeline. We aren't going to build our way out of the housing crisis. Barbara Gubbia asked how fast-tracking wineries, a proposal Yeoryios appallas called a solution looking for a problem, would benefit residents. Anne Polotas asked about the 1000 opposition signatures ignored in the Mountain Peak decision. Residents don't have a government that listens.

I listen, Sup. Pedroza responded, but I respectfully have a difference of opinion.

As I found out in a previous meeting with Sup Pedroza, at each occasion that the negative trajectory of tourism development is brought up, rather than discussing it, Sup Pedroza cuts off the discussion with, well, we have a difference of opinion. Next question. He knows that the development projects that he is supporting and promoting are generating the traffic and housing problems, and that any discussion that questions that relationship is one discussion that he does not wish to have. Just concentrate on mitigating the impacts.

Sup. Pedroza began his presentation with some raw statistics that seemed in a nutshell to encapsulate our problems: Less than 1%/yr population growth in the county (actually .07% and projected to decline) probably due to the high cost of housing, and 14% growth in jobs since 2014, (actually 3.1%/yr) , due mostly to the expansion of the tourism and construction industries. The difference between jobs and housing creation leads to both housing shortages and traffic congestion, the principal impacts that everyone focuses on. The reality is that as long as the new-housing-to-new-jobs ratio remains at 1 to 4, no amount tweaking will alleviate the increasing impacts - they will only get worse.

He also knows that the imbalance will not be solved by building affordable housing - yet he proposes it as a solution. 4 projects were presented that may generate 200 affordable housing units when they are realized years from now. As Mr. Nussbaum pointed out there are 25 times that number of families on waiting lists for affordable housing now. How many more will be waiting by the time the projects are completed. Affordable housing is a feel-good talking point, but no solution to the jobs-housing imbalance.

The one solution he will not discuss is on the other side of the housing-jobs equation: limiting job creation by limiting the urban development. It is, of course, against the DNA of any politician to disparage job creation. But job creation is the essence of urbanization, and if the county is interested in remaining an agricultural economy, as it often claims, then job creation in the non agricultural sector must be looked at differently than in a traditional economy based on ever increasing growth.

The real difference of opinion between this supervisor and many of his constituents, is in whose interests are to be served. Sup Pedroza promotes urban development, through housing projects and infrastructure projects and more tourism while presenting the opinion that it will preserve his constituents agricultural lands and rural character, the end goal lauded in the General Plan and by generations of residents and government officials. It is an opinion that aligns neatly with the banking, real estate, tourism and construction interests that stand to profit from Napa's 40 year legacy of open space preservation. These are, not coincidentally, the same interests that contribute generously to political campaigns.

The citizens that are speaking up, however, are of the opinion that the promotion of such urban development is the death of agriculture and the death of the rural character that they treasure. Indeed they see the rural character disappearing with every building project approved, in traffic congestion, loss of affordable housing and local businesses, a landscape defaced with building projects. Those impacts are not opinions. They are the reality created by an opinion that continuing development projects will have a less-than-significant impact on, or are more important than, our rural, small-town way of life. It is an opinion with which many in the county respectfuly disagree.


Napa Vision 2050 Town Hall: a multitude of opinions

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NVR 8/11/17: Residents have say at Napa Vision 2050 forum

I wasn't at the Napa Vision town hall three days later. I want to believe that a different opinion from that of Sup. Pedroza was presented, but on reading Barry Eberling's account and on reviewing notes taken by a participant at the meeting the proposals seemed to encompass a wide gamut of opinions, some of which might be geared to slowing the urban development of Napa County, and some, like a commuter rail system or affordable housing projects, aimed at assuaging impacts to and fears of current residents, will in execution only further urbanize the county and induce future urban growth.

Beyond a moratorium on development, no concrete proposals were made to slow the pace of development, in the way that minimum parcel sizes and 1% housing growth cap and voter approved rezoning did to curb the growth of housing development in past decades. Yet the urban development of Napa county through tourism and industrial uses is every bit as great a threat to the agricultural lands and rural character that housing presented 40 years ago. And the strategies required to stop the urbanization should be just as radical.

As suggested, and as was suggested at the May 10th 2015 joint BOS-PC meeting, a first step beyond the moratorium would be to consider a big picture general plan that integrates county and city issues and begins to look at a desired limit to ultimate growth of the county. The vision needs to be restated and should answer the question, put to developers as well as preservationists: what do we want the county to look like 40 years hence? (I would like fewer buildings, less traffic and less population than it does now - but that's just me.) And then ask, how does one make it so?

Charlotte Williams send information about the on-going resistance in Sonoma County.

WinerWaterWatch 8/10/17: APPEAL OF CONTROVERSIAL KNIGHTS VALLEY WINERY BACK TO SONOMA COUNTY SUPERVISORS
The Appeal and Documents

And this editorial from a member of the Maacama Watershed Alliance
Sonoma County Gazette 6/28/17: PRMD approves Winery Use-Permits that Urbanize Rural Areas

Comments are due by Sept 18th, 2017 4:00pm and should be sent to
David.Morrison@countyofnapa.org

NVR 8/14/17: Obscure Napa County position may play a bigger winery growth role



Update 8/11/17

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[In response to questions from Chris Malan, Planning Dir. David Morrison elaborated on the process that the Limited Winery Ordinance will endure through the county meat grinder]

Date: August 11, 2017 at 6:14 AM! PDT

Chris,

Thank you for the inquiry.

No, a CEQA document has not been prepared as of yet. This comment period is solely to obtain public input and concerns regarding the proposed ordinance.

After the additional 45-day review period has been completed, staff will revise the draft ordinance, incorporating public comments where appropriate. The revised draft ordinance will then be used as the project for preparing a CEQA document, which will have a separate public comment period. In addition, the public will have opportunities to comment at public hearings before both the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors.

I hope you find this helpful in clarifying the status of the current review period. If you have any further questions, please let me know.

Respectfully,

David

8/4/17

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NVR 7/8/17: Napa County eyes streamlining approval process for smaller wineries

Proposed Limited Winery Ordinance
Dir. Morrison's request for comments.
Local Procedures for Implementing CEQA (CEQA sm. winery def. see appendix B, #10)

What can one say? The County is issuing use permits for new wineries at the rate of one a month (and increases to existing wineries at two per month) even with Planning Commission review. Apparently that is still not fast enough to keep up with developer's desire to profit from an expanding tourism economy and booming real estate market. The County wants to streamline the process, providing an easier avenue for speculators to increase resale value with "winery-ready" properties. Not one more gallon of Napa wine will be added to the county's "wine industry" (producing acreage hasn't budged in the last 10 years despite some 100 new winery approvals), just more luxury estates and tourism venues. This is not about affordable small "family" wineries. It's about expediting a real estate strategy targeting wealthy vanity investors.

One can see the problem from the County's standpoint: The amount of pushback from citizens who will be negatively impacted by all of the proposed development is bogging down a process whose purpose is to allow public participation. The solution proposed is to reduce the visibility and amount of public input in the process.

The Planning Commission is a public event. Its meetings are predictable and previewed on the county's website and in the Register. Its proceedings are broadcast and a video archive is retained. The county claims that the public will have a similar opportunity to vet projects being presented to the Zoning Administrator. But notification will only go to residents within 1000' of the project. No previews in a public calendar. And likely no mention in the Register. It will then be up to a neighbor to make the project known to a wider audience, a daunting task for some. Once the hearing is done, no record beyond brief meeting minutes will be available for review. But the collective changes that these projects bring, with increased tourism throughout the remote areas of the county and the expansion of taxpayer-funded infrastructure to accommodate an ever increasing number of tourists and employees, will affect the county as a whole, not just the immediate neighbors.

As a recent article on Visit Napa Valley highlights, county and municipal governments seem to see a "growth" economy based on tourism as the prime objective of planning decisions. As we have seen in all meetings throughout the last few years, the county is unwilling to seriously consider the increasing cumulative impacts of growth that have led to so much citizent opposition. In this proposal, conceding to the demands of the development industries, they wish to make the opposition more difficult.

The County's continued promotion of building projects and the resulting impacts on traffic, affordable housing, community character, infrastructure and service demands, the physical landscape and resource sustainability, run counter to the County's stated image of itself in the first paragraph of its Vision Statement in the Napa County General Plan:

"While other Bay Area counties have experienced unprecedented development and urban infrastructure expansion over the last four decades, Napa County’s citizens have conscientiously preserved the agricultural lands and rural character that we treasure."

Many county residents, seeing the urbanization taking place before their eyes, no longer feel that vision is being supported by their government, and they should be allowed to conscientiously make their voices heard. In a public forum.

The question the County should be addressing is not how the approval of building projects can be streamlined to increase the pace of urban development. The question should be how to scale back the amount of development being proposed, as previous governments and citizens have done with the Ag Preserve, zoning ordinances and initiatives, to insure that Napa remains a rural, agricultural place to be treasured in the future. Fast-tracking building projects (much like pretending that building projects are "agriculture") is not the answer.

7/29/27 LTE version: Fast tracking Napa County wineries isn't the answer

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NVR 10/2/15: Planners look at fast-tracking small wineries

Note the difference between the 2015 and the current proposal: the requirement that grapes must come from the property has been eliminated. Wineries can be approved under the new proposal on properties having no vineyard potential (like The Caves); a lease on grapes (currently leased by someone else, no doubt) suffices. There is no mention of use-permit revocation in the ordinance, so presumably the lease may be sold as soon as the winery is approved.

[Letter sent to the St. Helena Star, 8/7/17]

Dear Editor,

For many years now, the debate over what is a "local serving" business surfaces each time a new store seeks a use permit in downtown St. Helena. Though the term is not clearly defined, most residents instinctively know what it means. It means Steves Hardware, Vasconi's, Sunshine, Lolo's, Main Street Books, Gillwoods.
The difficulty arises when one realizes that "local serving" shifts when community demographics change. When such change is from middle class to affluent, people don't bother to drive to Lolo's to sell a $ 400 dress for $ 40 and they prefer breakfast at Archetype rather than Gillwoods. And when that shift is also towards part time residents, these "new locals" bring along their own ideas as to what constitutes local serving and changes in the social fiber of the community, in civic engagement, schools, clubs, small town fundraisers, neighborhood parties etc.

While the debate whether this or that store is "local serving" garners little attention because of its incremental impact, the debate over the fate of the Adams Street property is of a magnitude that brings the entire set of issues to the forefront. Going over recent letters in the Star, I read Jeff Feeney lamenting that "investors pump hundreds of millions" in Napa, Yountville and Calistoga, while St. Helena is missing out. On the other hand, he is concerned by residents cashing out to second homers who will no longer support "our" stores. And Sara Cakebread criticizes those who oppose a large resort on Adams Street who would rather see "our roads, sidewalks and parks crumble" but at the same time she doesn't want to "lose our small-town character".

A few years ago, long time friends of ours moved to a gated Incline Village community with the kind of infrastructure Jeff and Sara dream of only to find out that most of their neighbors' stone-clad mansions were empty half the time. Socially impoverished, they sold.

No one personifies the ode to the beauty and character of the Napa valley to more people around the globe through his visual poetry on National Geographic and his magnificent albums more so than Charles O' Rear. Only a person with Chuck' sensitivity could have better articulated in a letter to the Star last March what it really means to have "many of our homes dark at night from the influx of absentee home owners". What it means "when $ 1,000 will buy you a nice hotel room, a bottle of wine and probably a dinner while teachers, city and winery employees must commute long distances". Or what "the abundance of jewelry stores - all to satisfy the whims of tourists" and a jammed Highway 29 really mean. "Goodbye St. Helena! We love you and we will miss you!" was Chuck's and Daphne's sad farewell.

Some arrogantly dismiss people like Chuck and Daphne as "among the vocal minority of naysayers". Theirs are legitimate concerns just as are those who want perfect and uncongested roads, beautifully landscaped sidewalks and profitable stores. But what good are stores full time residents never use? What good are dark at night homes? Declining school enrolment? Teachers who cannot come to dinner?

Some prefer less pristine sidewalks if it means keeping the Chuck O' Rears in town, others want a big influx of money to fix everything at once no matter what the consequences.

Perhaps there is a middle ground here. A comprehensive, value oriented ten-year plan, incremental budgeting and above all fiscal responsibility. The citizens are already paying for the water and sewage infrastructure upgrades. Las Alcobas with all its defective planning is at least on line. There are city assets beyond Main Street and Adams Streets which can be sold. Why not an inspiring, carefully framed ballot measure? But the leadership never developed an uplifting long-term vision - not just one for money one should think twice accepting unless it is hinged to the preservation and promotion of our social capital and its venues. Because, in the end, this is where our most precious assets lie.

Last year Napa Vision 2050 organized a forum on the tourist-based economy with three internationally recognized fiscal, social and traffic experts on the subject. Placing all eggs in the tourism basket is a cancer on multiple fronts everywhere it has been tried. One only need look at Venice, Barcelona, Naples, Majorca, Florence, Santorini, Mykonos, all of Greece for that matter, the list is endless, the effects devastating and the evidence undisputable.

Pristine Yountville is just a few miles down the road.

There’s a deep sadness when we lose a friend. We miss the familiarity and good times we’ve spent together over many years. Similarly, there’s a profound sadness when you no longer recognize what had been your home and your community. You no longer recognize it because it is being taken away from you piece by piece.

Gone are the toy shop, the dance studio, downtown Safeway, Pearl, Cervoni, Zeller, Brewsters -- places where you were welcomed, where you met friends, where your children met friends.

It’s all in the name of progress. They (our elected and appointed officials) tell us we need tourist revenue. But We (the people who live here) need our sense of place. We are losing the soul of our Napa.

And now, they have done it again. After almost weekly announcements of the demise of yet another local establishment, They told the model railroad museum at Expo it had to close. This museum was built by our fathers and grandfathers and designed to represent our Napa. But They decided the space is needed for progress. And many residents of Napa are deeply sad; this is a location so many have enjoyed for generations.

Last year, Napa Vision 2050 sponsored a forum on the social and economic costs of tourism. The main message was that unless carefully managed, tourism can irrevocably destroy the essence of place. You have only to look at what has happened in Aspen and Santa Fe and now Barcelona and Venice. A noted book on this subject, “Devil’s Bargains,” (Rothman, 1998) notes that residents gradually realize, as they seek to preserve the authenticity of their community, that decision-making power has shifted from the community to the newly arrived corporate financiers.

The forum was well attended by county supervisors and city council members from the Napa Valley. We encouraged them to act on this message of responsible, countywide planning by collectively managing the growth path they have been fostering. Not one of them has done so. Instead they are in the counting houses drooling over the increasing Transient Occupancy Tax.

And now -- to add insult to injury -- They are taking away our community model railroad museum. Who would have predicted this move and the wrenching impact it is having on the hearts of many Napans?

NV2050 is holding a community town hall meeting this Thursday evening in Napa (and on Sept. 7 in St. Helena) to hear from you. How do you feel about these changes and what do you recommend we do to bring our community back under control?

Longtime Napan Harris Nussbaum will moderate the discussion at the Horseman’s Association, 1200 Foster Road at 7 p.m. Please attend. For details, visit www.napavision2050.org.

Dan Mufson, President

NVR LTE version 8/8/17: What are They doing to our sense of place?

Wine and Water Watch 7/28/17: Judge Rules Climate Action 2020 Plan Violates CEQA

The Judge's decision in California Riverwatch vs. Sonoma County, et al. , if it withstands appeal, could become a landmark decision. The essence, as I try to interpret the decision's legalese and the supporting plain text newspaper articles and the statement of attorney Jerry Bernhaut who brought the case, is that:

1. The county failed to consider all of the greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts that the county's economic activity generates. For example, how much greenhouse gas is generated bringing a tourist to a winery experience from their point of origin. How much is generated getting a bottle of wine into the hands of a consumer.

2. The county failed to consider a wide enough range of alternative solutions to reduce GHG's in their plan. One alternative not considered, for example, might be a moratorium on the "growth" of new tourism facilities to be able to meet ambitious GHG reduction goals.

The questions being raised get at the fundamental issue of what it will take to reduce global warming. Is it enough to make buildings or vehicles more efficient at burning fuel and still continue to generate ever more urban development inherent in "growth" economies. Can we stop sea level rise, desertification, extreme weather events, or the mass migrations, famine and war caused by a warming climate simply by using solar collectors, bike lanes, vanpool parking spaces, electric powered tractors, or the other tweaks proposed by the Napa County Climate Action Plan? Or does an honest evaluation of the significance of climate change require a look at the impacts of "growth" economies in their entirety, and that slowing or stopping economic "growth", or comparing the GHG impacts of different economic "growth" models, (the conversion of a wine industry to a tourism industry, for example), should be among the alternatives considered given the magnitude of the problem confronting mankind's very existence? In the words of Jerry Bernhaut, “it’s time to admit that perpetual growth on a planet with limited resources and carrying capacity is not sustainable.”

These county Climate Action Plans are, at this point, voluntary efforts to reduce GHG's. It is possible to see that a county may just forgo making a plan rather than confront the development interests which governments usually serve to promote and protect. And even when such plans become mandatory, as the severity of the problem is realized, given that all governments are controlled by prevailing economic interests loathe to change, and indeed that wealth creation by GHG-producing urban development is baked into the DNA of human society, even in hyper-environmentally-conscious California, the chances of addressing the real problem of global warming look slim indeed.

In 2015, George Caloyannidis penned an editorial, "Hodja's Donkey in Napa traffic", about Napa County's lack of consideration of the complete traffic impacts of individual projects under CEQA.

Update 8/4/17

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Wine and Water Watch 7/28/17: Judge Rules Climate Action 2020 Plan Violates CEQA

Sonoma County, like Napa County, is crafting a Climate Action Plan. Not good enough, a county judge rules. Napa County will no doubt have to take another look at their proposed CAP in light of the the ruling.

Update 7/9/17 Final Draft CAP

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The Planning Commission 7/15/17 review of the county's proposed Climate Action Plan has been continued tentatively to Sep. 20th 2017. The staff presentation of the plan was made and public comments were taken at the 7/5/17 hearing.

At the hearing Dir. Morrison put the impact of the County's climate change efforts into the context of the world's climate problem - unincorporated Napa accounts for 9 millionths of one percent of global GHG's. Our incredible quantification and pontification and angst over the problem in this teeny, tiny corner of the world seem to amount to little more than a feel-good bromide when held up to the magnitude of the problem, as presented in this article in New York Magazine 4 days after the hearing: The Uninhabitable Earth Nevertheless, I suppose, we must do our bit.

The video of the hearing is here

Jim Wilson has taken on the laborious task of transcribing major portions of the hearing. He writes: "I have recorded everything said by Director Morrison and the Ascent project managers Erik de Kok and Honey Walters. Also all statements from the three Planning Commissioners Basayne, Scott and Gallagher. I did not take down any of the public comments except for one - Henry Mattei, an Environmental Science student at USC. He makes some striking observations utilizing the Quercus Group analysis."

Jim Wilson transcription of major portions of the hearing

Update 7/2/17 Final Draft CAP

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NVR 7/2/17: Napa County Planning Commission to consider climate action plan

The final draft of Napa County's Climate Action Plan (CAP) will be presented to the County Planning Commission this Wednesday, July 5th, 2017 beginning at 10:00am
Location: Napa County Building, 3rd floor

Meeting Agenda and Documents
Staff Agenda Letter
County's CAP page
Final CAP red-line version
Jim Wilson NVR Letter to the Editor
Christina Benz' comments
Napa Vision 2050 pre-meeting email
Jim Wilson suggests this reading if you don't want to wade through the thousands of pages on the County CAP page:
Quercus Brief
Sierra Club Brief
Center of Biological Diversity brief
County's Master Responses to Public Comments

2/20/17 First Draft CAP

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NVR 2/20/17: Napa County proposes carbon-cutting steps to combat global warming

The county has issued their Draft Climate Action Plan (CAP) aimed at reducing the County's Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG's) with a request for comments. A WICC Workshop on the CAP is planned for Feb 23nd, 2017.

The County's Climate Action Page (including public comments) is here
The Draft Climate Action Plan (with proposed final draft markup) is here
Jim Wilson's analysis of shortcomings in the Draft Climate Action Plan.

The breakdown of GHG's in the county includes 31% generated by buildings and 26% generated by transport, the 2 largest producers of GHG's. The Plan itemizes the 5 greatest GHG reducers in the plan:

• power domestic hot water heating with renewables
  
• replace carbon-powered with electric-powered ag equipment
  
• replace carbon-powered with renewable-powered recreational watercraft
  
• Preserve Oak Woodlands! (a bit ironic that)
  
• Pool employee commute trips

The relationship between building reductions and transport reductions came up in the LEED presentation for our Mountain Peak project on Jan 4th. A great effort was made to reduce energy use (and GHG production) in the design of the building using a LEED scorecard to spur conservation. 70% of the power was to come from the solar panels proposed for the project. Cave air was used to cool the tasting room. There are to be electric automobile chargers and bicycle racks, operable windows, LED lights. The building is LEED platinum, the highest score.

What is not considered in the LEED score is whether or not the building is needed in the first place. In the case of wineries that in fact will not increase the output of wine, but will merely shift the output from an existing winery to a new one, the GHG costs of building and maintaining a new winery should be more seriously questioned.

There was one large LEED category that Mountain Peak probably didn't score too well in - dealing with the transport GHG's necessary to access the building. The First LEED scorecard topic is "Location and Transportation", described thus:

"Surrounding density and diverse uses - 5 points - Intent: to conserve land and protect farmland and wildlife habitat by encouraging development in areas with existing infrastructure. To promote walkability, and transportation efficiency and reduce vehicle distance traveled. To improve public health by encouraging daily physical activity."

And "Access to Quality transportation - 5 points - Intent: To encourage development in locations shown to have multimodal transportation choices or otherwise reduced motor vehicle use, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and other environmental and public health harms associated with motor vehicle use."

Mountain Peak, like more and more tourism venues (few will actually add to the grapes grown in the county and many actually pave over vineyards) are moving into the watersheds of the county, meaning that the tourists and hospitality employees that are necessary for their financial justification must be transported ever greater distances - with ever greater generation of GHG's.

Given this interest in reducing transport GHG's in the LEED process and the large proportion of transport GHG's in the CAP pie chart, I was expecting some discussion in the CAP about the wisdom of continuing to approve industrial and commercial facilities, requiring transport of ever increasing numbers of tourists and employees, in remote areas of the county. While the emphasis in the CAP seemed to be on reducing commute distances by van-pooling employees, there was no mention of trying to keep the jobs and impacts in the winery and tourism sectors located near transit corridors in the future. Of course, in Napa many of the employees are farm workers, and a vanpool system for farmworkers is essential to maintain the true agriculture in the county. But most wineries and the hospitality workers they employ, now approved in the watersheds, will be generating a fair amount of carbon-based traffic around the county, and they are not mentioned.

And how much does this remote dispersal of the tourism industry cost in GHG's?
Well, the EPA estimates here that the average vehicle produces .00042 metric tons of GHG gas (MTCO2) for every mile traveled (based on hwy mpg) . The Mountain Peak project anticipates bringing 44000 trips (120 trips/day) up and down the 6 mile length of Soda Canyon Road each year. Were the winery located on the Trail, the GHG's saved would be 44000 x 6 x .00042 = 111 MTCO2/yr from this one project alone.

Looking at the chart of "remote" wineries in the county here we can make a horseback guess about the GHG's expended to make deliveries (of goods and people) to these existing remote wineries. Using averages, the visitation per winery is 5459 and the distance is 4.4 miles from a major highway and the number of vehicle "trips" each day is 37 or 13505 trips/yr. There are 70 wineries in the sample so the GHG's saved if all those wineries were located on major highways would be 13505 x 4.4 x .00042 x 70 = 1747 MTCO2 /yr. If they were located in the industrial zones, or the Hwy 12 corridor rather than up valley, the amount saved would be considerably more. These 70 wineries represent the GHG's generated by about 400,000 visitor slots. But the county currently has perhaps 120 new or expanded wineries, approved or under review, representing some 2,000,000 visitor slots yet to be occupied. And there is no sign of the proposals abating (or of interest on the county's part to reduce approvals.).

While the CAP looks at several ways to reduce GHG's, making a real effort to curb traffic in the county by not locating development in the watersheds is not one of them. It is not just a winery problem - resorts and housing subdivisions (masked as vineyard developments) are happening in the remote corners of the county as well. Unfortunately, in creating a climate action plan, the county's attitude is to suggest technological solutions to reduce the impacts that further urban development will continue to bring to the county. But there is no attempt to reduce the amount of development that is creating those impacts, and in fact by proposing only technological changes to reduce existing impacts the impediments to future development will only be reduced.

The original ag preserve efforts, which remain the soul of the county's self image if not the reality, used zoning and ordinances to limit urban development in the county. That same commitment is again needed in an era where developers don the cloak of the county's agricultural heritage while they build on the open land that remains as a result. The CAP was an opportunity to take on the ever expanding urban development continuing to pump up GHG's in the county. Unfortunately the CAP proposals are just aimed at making that urban development more palatable and probable.

Update 8/1/17

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NVR 8/1/17: Napa's Circle R ranch to be permanent part of wildlife corridor

Sometimes a map helps with these things: As you can see on the augmented (pink) Land Trust map, Circle S Ranch (now Circle R) and Walt Ranch together form a massive potential barrier to wildlife, (and hikers) along the spine of the Vaca mountains that form the eastern edge of the Napa Valley. This granting of a conservation easement for such movement is a huge act of civic responsibility and environmental consciousness. One can only hope that the Halls on the Walt property might become similarly concerned about a legacy of environmental stewardship of Napa's wild lands, in contrast to their urban development potential, and recombine the 35 developable parcels into a single property with appropriate conservation easements. Their proposed vineyards would still be a source of produce for their wines (or of profit for resale) as was their stated intention in the EIR.

Update 1/20/17

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NVR 1/20/17: Large swath of Napa County land near Calistoga protected
NVR 9/4/16: Effort underway to protect 856-acre forest in Angwin
NVR 11/28/15: Land Trust receives 110-acre donation near Chiles Valley
NVR 6/18/14: Land Trust acquires 1,380 acres on Atlas Peak

9/4/16

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Land Trust CEO Doug Parker is quoted as saying “We’re interested in building a corridor of contiguous, protected land across the ridge on the east side of Napa Valley.” On the map below it would appear that the stretch from RLS State Park to Lake Hennessy is looking quite promising. From Lake Hennessy to Skyline Park it seems like a much more difficult proposition. A trail down the ridge just below the huge Atlas Peak Sutro Ranch Preserve is blocked by two private estate developments, Circle S and Walt Ranch. The Circle S development has discussed the possibility of a 500+ acre conservation easement. Would that include a public trail? The Walt Ranch development has yet to weigh in on a conservation easement.

Update 7/31/17

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NVR 7/3/17: Napa transportation leaders try to speed up fix to 29/221 intersection

Update 7/25/17

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NVR 7/25/17: South Napa County makes pitch for Highway 29 congestion relief

NVR 7/25/17: Napa transportation leaders agree, disagree with grand jury findings

7/7/17

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NVR 7/7/17: Grand jury wants more done to address Napa County congestion

The Napa County Grand Jury has issued a report on the Napa Valley Transportation Agency's "Vision 2040 Plan" and it is not pleased, saying that the $250,000, 2-year effort "did not result in an actionable plan to measure and solve traffic congestion". As if the NVTA had the ability to "solve" congestion problems.

The congestion problems are simply a symptom of the amount of development taking place. As long as building projects continue to be approved in the county, bringing more workers, more deliveries and shipments and more tourists, transport infrastructure projects from trails to bus routes to light rail to freeways, which are expensive and take a very long time to complete, will never keep up with the congestion created. The solution to the congestion problem is to reduce the amount of development, unfortunately well beyond the mandate of the NVTA.

The failure of the Grand Jury report and of the CAC recommendations is that they assume that once congestion reduction measures are implemented that the congestion will be reduced. The example of the widening of Jameson Canyon to 4 lanes is instructive in this regard. As a commuter coming through the Jameson/29 intersection every weekend for the last 23 years I can testify that widening Jameson Canyon to 4 lanes not only did not relieve congestion, it has induced it to become more congested than ever. As traffic researchers know, when measures are taken to ease the flow, more development is induced by the promise that easier access is just around the corner. A vast amount of industrial development has occured in anticipation of the easier link to the central valley which filled the increased capacity even before it was operational. And now the intersection is more congested than it was before the widening.

The NTVA seems to be recognizing this paradox and in its most recent discussions is advocating not doing the proposed widening of Hwy 29 around the Jameson Canyon bottleneck. “If you build a six-lane road, traffic is going to follow,” the NTVA director said. “People go where there’s capacity.”

In this approach they are doing the only thing they can do to relieve the congestion: insure that the congestion will become just bad enough that developers and tourists and businesses will begin going elsewhere. The alternative is that urban development will continue to consume the Napa Valley as it has the rest of the Bay Area. It is stern medicine, but necessary if the patient is to survive.

Unfortunately, without the committment from county governments to curtail development projects (the strategy that allowed the wine industry to survive in the first place), NVTA will not be able to maintain this approach for long, and the demand by those convinced that congestion can be "solved" with more infrastructure, and those who want more infrastructure to enable more development, will force the NVTA to relent. And the flood gates will be opened once again, continuing to drown the vines and open spaces of Napa County in urban sprawl.

Barry Eberling series: Traffic Tales of Napa County
Napa County Travel Behavior Study 2015 Conclusions

Update 7/19/17

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NVR 7/19/17: Report says well-heeled Napa Valley tourists love wine and scenery

Update 5/3/17

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NVR 5/4/17: Napa Valley visitors spent nearly $2 billion last year

The latest Visit Napa Valley statistical analysis of the tourism industry is out; the numbers are good (oddly better, in fact, than the Visit California numbers outlined here). The number of visitors are increasing but at a slower rate than the previous 2-year cycle, it seems. Revenues from tourist venues are way up, so the amount taken in per visitor is dramatically increased. (The median family income of visitors is $161,000 - a bursting tech-startup bubble may have significant impacts.) The number of employees is way up so perhaps service is good, although the daily commute and need for affordable housing is getting much worse.

More visitors seem to like the place as it is than they did 2 years ago. Except for the traffic. What will they make of the 140 or so wineries still in the planning/construction pipeline, or of Napa Pipe, Watson Ranch, and the dozens of other projects destined to fill county landscapes and roads. Sup. Pedroza's question from 2015, what is the carrying capacity of the county?, isn't yet answered.

Tourism taxes are way up as well, but the county still doesn't have enough to repair potholes or bridges, build a jail, upgrade the sanitary system, relieve traffic congestion or build affordable housing, and probably not enough to cover the costs of servicing the 17,000 visitors (12% population increase) driving into the county each day. $6 million of those tourism taxes goes to Visit Napa Valley to encourage more tourism and create more jobs, and to fund the studies.

The Latest Reports are here:

Visit Napa Valley 2016 Quick Facts
Visit Napa Valley 2016 Visitor Profile
Visit Napa Valley 2016 Economic Impact Report

12/14/15

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NVR 12/26/15: Napa rings up another busy tourism year

At the Board of Supervisors on Dec 14th, 2015, Visit Napa Valley presented its financial report for fiscal 2015 and an overview for the first half of fiscal 2016. Tourism "shows healthy Napa County growth in all key lodging metrics". No one can accuse VNV of not doing their job.

Given my now almost manic obsession over the development impacts of ever increasing tourism in the county, VNV director Clay Gregory had some reassuring news: the number of tourists arriving each year is only increasing at about 1.5%. The amount they are spending is rising several times faster, meaning much more money in TID and TOT to deal with a modest increase in impacts. He also made a point of stressing the mandate of VNV to promote off season and weekday events, which seemed a direct link to an answer Sup. Luce gave me several months ago when I asked how the county justified spending $5.6 mil to increase tourism impacts.

I want to be comforted. But somehow the county pursuit of 130 new or expanded wineries under review or approved but not yet built with their cumulative request for 1.6 mil new visitor slots per year does not speak to a goal of just evening out the tourism flow. Just as with the discussions about wineries, the present is often conflated with the future. There are presently 3.3 mil tourists coming into the county each year who feel overwhelmingly they like things the way they are. In this regard Sup. Pedroza asked the right question of Mr. Gregory:

"The way tourism grew in our valley was remarkable, but at a certain point our lens should be, how do we live within the means of what we have. More rooms than this will not survive because of traffic and lack of access...That's information we need to know as we grow. How do we know we are within our capacity."

A question that has been asked before in respect to wineries as well - what is the tourism carrying capacity of the county? We will see if Sup. Pedroza's question finds an answer in Mr. Gregorys' presentation two years hence.

If a municipality wanted to preserve the ambiance of a single-family neighborhood, it wouldn't rezone it to residential high-rise. Over a short period of time, homeowners would sell to developers at a profit and the area would experience a fundamental transformation.

In Napa County, whenever a small winery pleads hardship, officials accommodate it with higher use permit limits of production and visitations. They say: "We all love small wineries. We must do everything to support them." Who can possibly argue with that?

But there is a problem. Even when wineries have been operating in gross violation of their use permits, their plea for survival becomes their passport to riches. Just like that, even without proof of hardship, the value of the winery is often doubled and tripled and sold within weeks.

Further proof of how this policy incentivizes small wineries to disappear from the supposedly intended idyllic landscape into big investor portfolios, is the current rampant winery consolidation activity, all fueled by the county's policies marketed by its disingenuous rhetoric as compared to its actions.

I often visit the northern foothills of the German Alps, dotted with small towns, forests and meadows where a dozen or so cows of small dairy farmers graze. These farmers make a living with milk, cheese, honey and schnapps. They are prohibited from increasing their grazing lands by clear-cutting their forests, a long view policy that provides them with a decent living but keeps the value of their holdings to levels not attractive enough to corporate takeovers.

Small farms are preserved in harmony with forests and crystal-clear streams. When visiting the region one is captivated by the agricultural serenity so beautifully preserved since 198 years ago, when it was memorialized in Beethoven's 6th symphony, so appropriately named: “The Pastorale.”

Meanwhile, the wine lobby myth our supervisors have bought into that wineries cannot make a living without direct sales has now mushroomed to 59 percent of total revenue and is fueling the market of runaway hotels and traffic congestion their drinking and merchandising tasting rooms generate.

Just over the Alps from Italy's Alto Adige to Sicily, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in Spain, from the Languedoc to the Loire in France, from Germany's Rhineland to Austria's Burgenland, the direct sales model even for the thousands of wineries producing fewer than 8,000 gallons is an aberration. Instead, one finds their wines around the globe from Los Angeles to New York, Paris and London. Such marketing takes hard work, but it is enough to provide a decent living generation after generation, not just for a decade or two and then off to the Riviera.

Making a decent living from a "small" winery in the Napa valley means Maseratis and Teslas in the garage, government-assisted denuded forests, soiled streams and clogged highways. Sadly, it is us in our state of Napathy who allow the damage. Instead of voting for the right candidates, we let them displace us with second homers and luxury commercial rents.

To top it all off, the supervisors are scheduled to hear a "limited winery" ordinance that will "streamline the process" of approving "new small and/or family-owned wineries" producing a staggering 30,000 gallons. In the process they will shut the public out the door by installing a wine Czar to dole out permits without environmental review or public hearings. The problem is that 261 of the county's 510 existing wineries - more than half of them - produce less than that, 209 of them produce fewer than 20,000 gallons and one quarter of them produce fewer than 15,000.

Traditionally, existing wineries have enjoyed more, not fewer privileges than new ones. No one in the right mind believes the county's smoke screen that new wineries will enjoy this privilege while old ones will be compelled to undergo full review. It is so patently unfair that the furry paws can no longer hide beneath grandma's dress.

Potentially, in excess of 2.5 million more visitors to existing tasting rooms could be added to the 3.5 million who visit us each year and 8,000 vineyard acres could replace forests in the process. This does not even include the un-quantified hundreds of potential new wineries - those supposedly covered by the ordinance -- waiting to join the gold rush.

Within a decade, this devious under-the-radar effort by the county will have replaced forest green with the only green it is beholden to and will have silenced the Napa Valley Pastorale once and for all.

NVR LTE version 7/18/17: Love the small wineries?

NVR 7/11/17: Napa County and city team up to protect reservoir water quality

As the watersheds that supply municipal reservoirs continue to be clear-cut and ripped for vineyards that are then bathed in chemicals, the potential issues of city water safety have come to the fore. Napa City, which provides over half of the county's residents with water from the Hennessey and Milliken reservoirs, has decided it's time to verify whether or not the conversion of natural landscape into vineyards poses a threat.

While the Milliken and Hennessey watersheds are the focus of this effort, and may turn up contaminants, more active study should really be done on the county's natural laboratory for watershed pollution, the Rector watershed. It is by far the most converted watershed in the county and, like a coal miner's canary, the most likely to show the negative impacts of sedimentation and chemical pollution now that will only become apparent in the Napa city reservoirs many years hence as development continues. There may be a dis-incentive to study its water: serving the veterans home (which sells water to the town of Yountivlle), Rector water falls under the purview of the state. As such it is probably out of the hands of local governments to monitor.

We understand that the Veteran's home is undertaking a periodic study of Rector's water quality and any new information will be added here when available.

Related:
SCR on the Rector Watershed
SCR on Round-up
SCR on the Watershed Initiative
Jim Wilson's County-City recap in 2015

NVR 7/9/17: Hello IKEA. So long, vineyards?
NVR 6/23/17: Developers lament short supply of industrial land in Napa County

As was the intention, no doubt, the title of Noel Brinkerhoff's article, less the question mark, could be the epitath on the Ag Preserve's tombstone.

The scale of the Napa Logistics Park development is more visible when you realize that IKEA's northern California distribution center would fit iinto just one of its four buildings. Napa Logistics Park is only a part of the unbuilt industrial development in the AmCan Industrial area and the Napa Airport industrial area just to the north. Who would have thought that Napa would eventually be known more as a light industrial center, a blue-collar Silicone Valley, rather than a bucholic agricultural Eden. Yet that will be the overwhelming reality of the "Napa Experience" as visitors are stuck in the traffic jam at Bottleneck Junction with an alley of tiltup warehouses as their only view of Wine Country. And no 600 foot setbacks here.

The fact that real estate interests are bemoaning the scarcity of industrial property and that the county is suggesting that vineyard land with less expensive grapes might fill the bill shows where things are headed. All that is needed now is a definition for "less expensive" to be codified in the next update of the general plan. Under $10,000/ton, perhaps?

NVR 6/29/17: County studies proposed Oak Knoll hotel on rare rural commercial property
Yountville Sun 6/29/17: Neighbors Not Sold on Oak Knoll Hotel Project

County Oak Knoll Hotel page
EIR Notice of Preparation

Given the relentless explosion of hotel projects in Napa, it is only a matter of time before overnight accommodation is included in Napa County's definition for agriculture - just as food service is now - to allow for their construction in the vineyards. The Oak Knoll Hotel, filling up a parcel on a legacy commercially zoned parcel surrounded by Agricultural Resource zoned land, is a forerunner of a trend that will become increasingly common in the current development frenzy to convert agricultural land to more profitable use. We already have the examples of the Carneros Inn and the Poetry Inn and the approved resort at Stanley Ranch. And the always threatened Altamura hotel at Trancas and the Trail. A highly respected grower-vintner is also proposing a hotel adjacent to one of his wineries. Again, as with Oak Knoll, the zoning technically allows it, but the incorporation of overnight stays into the heart of the agricultural landscape, perhaps even more impactful than the event-center wineries currently being approved throughout the vineyards, sets a precident that will up the pressure to change the definition of agriculture to allow inclusion of such use on a routine basis.

In this case, as in others, the County seems determined to insure that the least agricultural use of the land possible under county codes will be approved. It is an approach that will eventually result in every vineyard in the county being graced with buildings and parking lots.

The county policy in the General Plan that applies to this legacy property use, Policy AG/LU-45 states that :

"With respect to Policies AG/LU-44 and 45, due to the small numbers of such parcels, their limited capacity for commercially viable agriculture due to pre-existing uses and/or size, location and lot configuration, and the minimal impact such commercial operations and expansions will have on adjacent agriculture or open space activities or the agricultural and open space character of the surrounding area, such limited development will not be detrimental to Agriculture, Watershed or Open Space policies of the General Plan."

This parcel is eminently suited for agricultural use, leased perhaps to the owner of the adjacent vineyards. The "minimal impact" of a 50 room hotel, 33 employees and 109-space parking lot, on the open-space character of the surrounding vineyards plus the traffic load, water and sewer concerns such a project presents, should be a point of contention between the county and the developer. Unfortunately it is left to neighbors and others with a real concern for the rural character of the county, as has been the case in every development proposal these last so many years, to champion a less urban use against the combined efforts of county and developer. Paradise is being paved over in one building project after another as the official gardians of the county's rural heritage fall over themselves to promote development interests, hoping to bolster government coffers while really just adding to the government expense of maintaining a more urban environment.

Update 6/28/17

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James Conaway, following the Alastair Bland article, (which he subtitles "the Rape of Napa") has weighed in on his own disillusionment with the demise of the great Napa experiment in rural protection, lamenting that the place has "lost its Edenic quality ... and all vestiges of innocence":

James Conway, Nose 6/24/17: The existential choice today
NV2050 take on his comments: Have the Gods Gone Crazy?

6/16/17

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Alastair Bland, who recently authored this piece on the vineyard deforestation of the Napa watersheds, has now taken a look at the collaboration of the wine industry and their government regarding compliance and the pushback from residents impacted by that interaction.

Alastair Bland, KCET Earth Focus, 6/16/17: Here's How Big Wine Gets To Avoid Environmental Rules in Napa

While the essence of this article is to demonstrate how the county is failing to protect its rural heritage, I was struck by the quote from Chuck Wagner, of Caymus Vineyards. He has in the past inaccurately described dissenters at hearings as a vocal minority out to kill the wine industry. But here he asks the right questions, ones that need a public workshop to explore. From the article:

Wagner says he is sometimes perplexed by the arguments from industry critics. The two opposing sides, he says, actually want the “the same endpoint.”

“Preserving agriculture, reducing traffic and air pollution, conserving water, maintaining our bucolic ambiance, and reducing danger of fire are all shared concerns,” Wagner says. “Where do we become separated? What is the problem in a nutshell?”

In a nutshell, the problem is the tourism urbanization being promoted by the wine industry. The wine industry has always been, as one might assume, a staunch of protector of Napa's rural heritage. But as the "wine" industry has morphed from grape processing into tourist processing, and as the resident-vintners that built the industry have been superseded by growth-centric corporations and by plutocrats wishing to be good-life entrepreneurs, the maintenance of that rural character, now exploited to increase profits, is increasingly put at risk. With the wine industry, and its government, failing to support those shared concerns by encouraging more development and ignoring existing protections, residents have begun to make their discontent heard.

Unfortunately the wine industry, and in particular its founders, like Mr. Wagner, who have fought development interests throughout their careers to protect their agricultural resource, are now unwilling to see the construction of tourism venues in the vineyards, the expansion of wineries solely to accommodate more tourism and the deforestation of the watersheds for resorts and housing estates as the urban development that it is. It is an urbanization that is slower perhaps than housing projects but in the long run just as lethal to agriculture. In a desire to expand their businesses and increase profits they rationalize and define such development as a protection of agriculture. Yet the jobs and the people and the buildings and the cars generated by these projects, and the further infrastructure and construction they precipitate, continue to urbanize the county. Residents, not blinded by the money to be made, see these impacts for what they are: harbingers of the end of this rural enclave in the urban Bay Area.

Napa county is a small place. There is a finite level of wine production and tourism that the county can bear and still allow agriculture, the natural environment and a rural, small town way of life to be successfully sustained. Some might see the Napa of today as striking or only slightly beyond that balance. No one denies its current success. Yet there are over one hundred new or expanded wineries and thousands of hotel rooms and resort lodgings in the pipeline. And the wine industry continues to push for even more.

As is seen in the planning commission and Board of Supervisors meetings, and as is obvious in the article, residents have little leverage against such a dominant industry. They are routinely ignored in governmental decisions, no matter the efforts they make. Until the more influential members of the wine industry, such as Mr. Wagner, are able to see that in this small place there are limits to business growth and the amount of money to be made from wine and tourism without destroying its rural, agricultural substance and character (a realization at the heart of the original Ag Preserve and the zoning protections that followed), there is little hope that the urbanization will end, or that the complaints of residents, seeing their paradise lost, will be stilled.

Concerns about Napa County’s Climate Action Plan (CAP)
(see the plan and comments at http://www.countyofnapa.org/CAP/)

The CAP doesn’t provide a path for meaningful emissions reductions because:

1. It isn’t based on current climate science.

• The CAP accounting method was selected “to maintain consistency with latest statewide inventory (for 2015) prepared by California Air Resources Board (CARB).”
• CARB has updated accounting for its Short-Lived Climate Pollutant (SLCP) Reduction Strategy, going into effect January 2018 (SB 1383). (See https://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/shortlived/meetings/03142017/final_slcp_report.pdf )
• The SLCP Strategy is based on the current scientific understanding (IPCC Assessment Report 5, 2013-14) that in order to slow global warming, reducing SLCP emissions will be the most productive strategy.
• Of particular importance is its focus on black carbon, now recognized as one of the four most powerful climate pollutants driving global warming. Napa is a source of black carbon pollution from diesel engines, agricultural burning, etc.
• Additionally, tropospheric ozone is another major contributor to climate change. This short-lived climate pollutant should also be addressed.
• Let’s align Napa’s CAP with the latest statewide and regional plans, and the state of climate science. (See Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s 2017 Bay Area Clean Air Plan: Spare the Air and Cool the Climate at http://www.baaqmd.gov/plans-and-climate/air-quality-plans/current-plans )

2. Its three top measures for reducing emissions are not seen as feasible by community stakeholders.

• Measure BE-6: Replacement of residential and commercial gas water heaters with electric or alternatively-powered units.
➢ North Bay Association of Realtors (NorBAR) comments: “NorBAR is concerned that, given the potential time delays and costs of adding an electric water heater, homeowners will forgo permits and have the standard water heater installed.”
• Measure AG-3: Replacement of diesel and gas powered farm equipment with electric or alternatively-fueled units.
➢ Napa Valley Grapegrowers comment: “Many vineyards have no other need for being serviced by PG&E. In most cases, use of this service will be infrequent, while still incurring extremely high standby costs. This measure seems growth inducing and a poor use of resources.”
• Measure OR-2: Replacing diesel or gas with alternative fuels in recreational watercraft.
➢ Feasible??? How much time will be spent regulating and enforcing this?!?!

Napa needs and deserves a CAP that focuses on the following:

1. Reduction of Short-Lived Climate Pollutants (methane, black carbon, tropospheric ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons) with measures such as the following:

• Reduce methane due to solid waste by installing methane capture systems at food and pomace composting sites.
• Reduce methane due to wastewater treatment by installing anaerobic digesters at wastewater treatment plants in American Canyon, St. Helena, and Calistoga.
• Reduce vehicle emissions for hauling winery wastewater by expanding Napa Sanitation plant to handle this wastewater and capturing methane generated (waste-to-energy).
• Reduce black carbon through incentivizing cleaner diesel engines and alternatives to traditional ag burning methods.
• Note: The CAP does contain appropriate measures for reducing hydrofluorocarbons (Measures HG-1 and HG-2). We need an accurate inventory of these emissions.

2. Decarbonizing power and transportation

• The proposed CAP contains several measures toward this goal (BE-9, BE-10, BE-11, TR-13)

3. Reducing and mitigating loss of Carbon Sequestration during land use change in a realistic way

• Measure LU-1’s target of preserving 30% of existing woodlands was ”based on feasibility assessments made by county staff.” This target is far too low.
• Instead, let’s accurately account for carbon sequestration, then properly mitigate its loss (via replants, carbon farming practices, the use of a carbon “tax”, etc.).

The proposed County Climate Action plan will allow the county to check off a General Plan “to do” item—and that’s all. Let’s not waste our supervisor’s time and tax dollars enacting measures that may be cost-prohibitive, unenforceable, and won’t make a difference in reducing global warming. Let’s not make residents and businesses pay for measures that won’t make a difference.

We are Napa—we don’t need to check off a box; we need to do what we’re good at—thinking outside the box—and put in place REAL solutions to global warming.

I don't want to talk about any one development, but to express a concern for the future of this great community.

The Board of Supervisors, City Council, and Planning Commissions are our friends and we look to them to protect us and Napa. I'm not against all development and appreciate the contributions the wine industry and other businesses have made, but I am concerned about the unlimited pace at which development is happening.

Our economy is already overheated and finding workers is becoming a problem. Even with normal business cycles recession will come again, what will happen then or with an over-inflated economy?

1) I appreciate and enjoy many of the events that are taking place downtown and not saying we shouldn't have them, but the day before BottleRock it took me two hours to return home from Sonoma. Traffic can be a nightmare in and out of Napa a great deal of the time, and in all directions, not just for special events.

2) There is no way to build enough affordable housing to solve the problem and they aren't affordable to most of our residents. Locals are being forced to move away and local businesses are closing.

3) I hope everyone is aware of the impact this is having on our schools? Enrollment is going down because people with families can't afford to live here. Schools are being closed, programs are cancelled, support services are being reduced and over a hundred teachers are being laid off this year alone. This will continue into the future. The future education of our youth will be at risk.

4) It sometimes seems that houses are being converted to vacation rentals faster than they are being built and I question if they can be adequately supervised.

5) The problem isn't just with the city or county -- it is both. Somehow we need to find a way to work together and to help bring people with different views together. The problem is all of ours. I think we all have something to lose if we don't.

6) There are hotels and other projects proposed, being built or on the way: Town Center, 90-room Cambria Hotel, a five-story hotel at the Wine Train, Meritage’s 133-room expansion, Marriott’s 250-rooms, a resort at Stanley Ranch, multiple hotels at the Oxbow area, an Embassy Suites addition. This in addition to Napa Pipe’s 800 homes, Gasser Foundation’s 400 housing units and more and more and more. Each development with low salary jobs will require many outside workers and a car on the road. I have been told that the Archer Hotel alone will employ over 100 people and how many does the Andez have?

7) One of our leaders said, "We should be like Carmel", but we aren't. They have almost all one- and two-story buildings and slower growth, not the tall buildings being built and proposed here and with no parking.

8) I could go on about parking, water, police, fire, roads and other problems that are being created. I hope our leaders and all of the community will read the article by James Conway where he talks about the current level of development not being economically supportable due to the requirements of infrastructure and on-going maintenance.

9) What can we do? Take a step back. Slow it down a little and make sure the infrastructure is in place before approving more hotels, more wineries, more tall buildings, more of everything. What we have now seems to have little oversight. Napa is a jewel that can and will be destroyed if we allow the pressure of large sums of money to blind us. What is the rush? Consider the cumulative impact.

I urge the city and county to work together. Create the opportunity for concerned citizens to have equal opportunities to be heard and for opposing views to have the chance to meet and work together for the good of the overall community. It is time for all of us to get involved -- learn more, talk with our leaders to express your concerns, become a part of the solution.

NVR LTE version 6/23/17: Let's all work together

Geoff Ellsworth sends a link to the saga of a project in Sonoma County that bears a startling resemblance to the fight we have just gone through on the Mountain Peak winery. After the supervisor's approval of the project, residents sued and the county settled the lawsuit with reductions in tourism and cash for the residents lawyers.

Sonoma Index-Tribune 6/15/17: Sonoma Mountain Road’s Belden Barns settles with its neighbors

Sonoma Mountain Road, though not a dead end, is a very constricted loop off the main road that connects Santa Rosa and Sonoma. For visitors coming from Sonoma or Napa, the most direct route to Belden Barns is 6.4 miles east from Glen Ellen. A video in the article shows the dangers of this access. The settlement decision requires a "No Access to Belden Barns Winery” sign on the road - which contradicts the google map directions - so good luck with that. The owners have stated that most of their customers will come up from SF via 101 entering Sonoma Mountain Rd from the west, with only a 1.3 mile stretch of unstriped road. Unfortunately, from SF google maps also take you via Sonoma and Glen Ellen.

The similarities are remarkable: Belden is 6.4 miles from a highway vs 6.1 for Mountain Peak. Both envisioned 15000 visitors / year. While Belden will only produce 24,000 gallons of wine per year compared to Mountain Peaks 100,000 it will produce 10,000 lbs of cheese. And it is similarly the first tourism facility in its remote location.

One big difference, at Belden Barns, the area's Supervisor supported her residents as the one negative vote in a 4-1 decision by the Board of Supervisors. Our Napa Supervisor made the motions to deny our appeals, thumbing his nose at the concerns of those he represents in favor of absentee owners and vanity developments.

After the Board of Supervisors decision, the neighbors of Belden Barns sued the county, claiming that the EIR required by the county was inadequate. The suit was settled by the Supervisors in closed session. The decision restricted visitation to Saturdays only from Jan - Mar and only 5 days/wk the rest of the year. Only 1 post-sunset event per year. Event guest lists must be provided to neighbors!! And the neighbors get $100,000 to cover legal costs. Though many issures were raised in the suit, the significance of the decision is that, above all else, neighbors were concerned about tourism in their remote area of the county. It is the refrain happening in every wine producing area on the planet.

Mountain Peak has yet to be subjected to an Environmental Impact Report, being approved on the basis of the county's in-house environmental review checklist and a negative declaration indicating that county planners saw no significant environmental impacts. That EIR needs to happen.

NVR 6/14/17: Napa County's half-billion dollar budget ranges from jails to water safety
Napa County: 2017-18 Budget Recommendation (see page 20)

How telling of the sad state of affairs it is that Napa County has budgeted one quarter of a million dollars for the annual salary of a new deputy counsel to handle the increased load of land-use issues ending in citizens' appeal hearings and the courts. By the time the employment of this person ends, the County tax payers will have spent untold millions in salaries, continuing benefits and pensions until death.

These appeals filed by affected homeowners revolve around the basic policies solidly embraced by the Board of Supervisors (BOS); all involving accommodation of wineries: Their uncontrolled proliferation, their ever increasing use as entertainment and commercial activity centers and the scandalous reward policy for their most egregious use-permit violations. This in turn, brings hordes of tourists and low wage workers for dozens upon dozens of new resorts and hotels.

But most important is the deaf ear the BOS lends to the negatively affected neighborhoods from Mt. Veeder to the west, to Howell Mountain in the east and everything in between.

When a winery such as Reverie, having spread thousands of tons of cave tailings on a hillside next to a creek without an erosion control permit, when it also exceeded its permitted visitations and production many times over is given a clean slate just for the asking to be absolved and legalized and ends up walking away with several millions in ill-gotten profits, what is a community to do?

When the Mountain Peak winery is allowed to deposit cave tailings equaling one football field, 30 feet high next to the Rector Creek Gorge which supplies water to the City of Yountville, up six miles at the end of the winding Soda Canyon Road with over 600 recorded accidents and no secondary outlet for residents to get out in case of fire, what is a community to do?

When fake California Environmental Quality Act analyses by County Staff only consider winery traffic impacts around a convenient limited circle, ignoring those throughout the valley resulting in the unbearable congestion from American Canyon to Calistoga, what are residents to do?

The residents of this valley are increasingly aware that the BOS accommodation of the wine industry has lifted its veil, no longer embarrassed to show its ugly face of egregious partiality no matter what the costs to the environment and to the degradation of their common quality of life.

The Supervisors refuse to recognize the obvious, that appeals and lawsuits are a sign that something is fundamentally wrong in the way they conduct business.

If they acted on residents' concerns rather than bow to the wishes of the next violator or the next absentee multimillionaire coming out of the woodworks - eager to embrace the good life by destroying it with their help - those with no real stake in the community or in conduct that does not trample on neighbors' lives, appeals and lawsuits would disappear as if by magic.

But reason from our elected leaders is too much to ask for.

Instead, oblivious to their righteousness, beholden to their sell-out, they opt for the most offensive solution; that of beefing up their arsenal with additional legal help to fight those ignorant, audacious, adversarial ordinary citizens and saddle them with that cost as well. This is the way to teach them a lesson for fighting for their livable neighborhoods and to shut them up; make them spend more time at hearings, more money on consultants, more money in the courts.

Lowering their ears from their imperial thrones to listen to them is not an option.

Update 8/2/17

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The Local (Italy) 7/4/17: Venice residents protest against tourist influx
NYT 8/2/17: Venice, Invaded by Tourists, Risks Becoming ‘Disneyland on the Sea'

7/12/17

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George Caloyannidis sends over this link to the latest in Venice:

The Telegraph (UK) 6/12/17: Venice bans new hotels as crackdown on tourism continues

Which also references their article on Amsterdam: Amsterdam has become ‘unlivable’ as residents fight back to stop ‘Disneyfication’ of city (When it comes to wine tourism, the term of art is 'Napafication', and the negative impacts are just as onerous). And more recently the resistance is becoming aggressive: DailyMail (UK) 8/2/17: Majorca is hit by anti-tourism protesters


The international uprising of locals against the unwanted impacts of tourism has been building for some time, as chronicled in this 2015 article in the NY Times.

It is interesting to look at the ratio of yearly tourists to residents to ask if there is some breaking point at which rebellion occurs. Venice is the extreme example: 20 mil tourists/yr and 265,000 residents (including suburbs) or 75 tourists/resident/yr. (Just
look at this graph to see what the "success" of post-war tourism has done - and can still do - to a resident population, a goal that the tourism industry might prefer.)

Compare this to the other cities mentioned in the articles that have been experiencing tourism backlash:

Charleston: 38.4 tourists/resident
New Orleans: 27 tourists/resident
Ankor Wat 9.1 tourists/resident
Amsterdam: 6.5 tourists/resident
Barcelona: 4.4 tourists/resident
Berlin: 2.6 tourists/resident
Copenhagen: 1.5 tourists/resident
Buthan: 0.3 tourists/resident (a ratio that any place wishing to maintain its quality-of-life should strive for)

And now look at the growing discontent with tourism in Napa County which is currently at 24.6 tourists/resident. (Sonoma County is at 14 tourists/resident)

While it seems there is no universal magic trigger point at which resident anger over the threat to the character of their communities becomes actionable, clearly Napa residents, having moved firmly into the double-digit tourist-to-resident category, have begun to realize that a crisis is at hand.

Rusty Cohn has penned an editorial and placed a petition on change.org with the plea to "Slow the stampede of development in Napa".

While there are at least 2400 hotel rooms in the planning pipeline in Napa county, the urban growth issues go beyond just hotels and resorts. There are some 3700 dwelling units approved or under review, almost 4 million sf of commercial/industrial development, some 150 new and expanded wineries, and a 2300 acre vineyard estate project. And, of course, a quarry expansion to pave it all.

All of that will probably happen, and the golden goose is probably already a dead goose walking. But doing nothing in the face of such a loss is not an option. Signing the petition is one small first step.

The county's rural, small town character, open spaces and agriculture-based economy are the legacy of a previous generation of citizens and elected officials with a clear vision of the value of a rural place in an urban world. Beyond St. Helena, already at gridlock stage, current elected officials have shown little inclination to rein in the urbanization of Napa County happening under their watch. They are, in fact, enthusiastic promoters, beholden to the tourism, real estate and other development interests currently on a rampage to fill up the open space with their building projects in the guise of "protecting agriculture". We need a new generation of elected officials and level of citizen commitment if the destruction already happening is to be contained to a level that will allow this place to retain some of its rural character 40 years hence.

NapaVision2050 has also weighed in on the petition here.
More on the hotel frenzy in downtown Napa here.
Bev Rendel LTE 7/7/17: What is ruining our valley?

5/29/17

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Two days after the Mountain Peak BOS appeal hearing on May 23rd, the Register reported that Acumen Wines, Mountain Peak's brand, has just opened their tasting room downtown across from the Archer Hotel. How did we miss this? (We might have looked at their website, of course.) Not only is Mountain Peak successfully producing wine without a winery, but they have an extremely prominent location to sell their wines. (And we learned more about the owner of Mountain Peak in the article than we have in 3 years dealing with his developer. Our attempts to set up a meeting with the owner were ignored.) Napa County must have known about the tasting room. Did the Planning Commission, the BOS and the "wine industry" know that Mountain Peak already had a tourism venue to market their wines, rendering their request for out-of-scale visitation at their winery a debatable necessity? It is a better solution to the contentious issue of at-winery marketing, one that the county has lauded in other presentations. Why were they silent on it here?

A downtown tasting room at the entry to Napa's largest hotel is, of course, a significant bit of knowledge to counter an argument that Mountain Peak needs 14,575 yearly visitors and 19 daily employees coming 6 miles up a dead end road to insure their success in selling their product. Not to mention the benefit to the environment: The tasting room is 11 miles from the winery. At 2.7 visitors per car and say 10 hospitality employees, 199,059 vehicle miles would be saved each year by not using the winery as a tasting room. That's 8 trips around the earth, and 82 metric tons of CO2 (411 gram/mi).

This was the second Mountain Peak surprise in 2 days. At the hearing we learned that Supervisor Dillon, whose commissioner was the dissenting vote at the planning commission hearing, would not be attending the appeal hearing. Chair Ramos reminded us that it is incumbent on citizens to be knowledgable about all publicly published information, and that the documentation indicating that she would be out of the county was to be found in a BOS agenda line item from the previous week. It didn't occur to the county to add that information at the time that the Mountain Peak agenda was published 5 days before the hearing.

We were also surprised a few weeks earlier when, a few days after the planning commission approved an increase in the capacity of The Caves at Soda Canyon and approved their bootlegged portal and patio, the property, increased immeasurably in value due to the approvals, was put up for sale. Did the commissioners know? Residents, who spent enormous amounts of time and money is making a counter argument against the sleazy nature of the project from its inception, were left agog. Did the commissioners and the county and the "wine industry" know of the impending sale?

There is a sense that much of what happens between the county government and members of the wine industry operates sub rosa. The county exercises due diligence to provide open access to documents and public involvement in the planning process, and yet this is a one-industry county and the daily interactions of the dominant industry and its regulators is a bond that mere citizens can never hope to break into. (A couple of Mountain Peak's consultants started their presentations with a bit of jovial banter with the Supes. Toward the appellants the Supes seemed to have only stern looks and words.) In a world in which the dominant industry provides benefits and a sense of well being for the county's citizens, that sort of cronyism is acceptable. But now we find that the development that the industry continues to pursue and that the county continues to approve is having impacts that are definitely not a benefit to the quality of life of the rest of us. And the anger at a government unwilling to protect the interests of its citizens against the monied interests of its major industry is continuing to build.

Over 800 people in the county signed a petition opposing the Mountain Peak project including most of the residents of Soda Canyon Road. Sup. Pedroza's lament during the hearing about decisions being perceived as "either business or residents" is unfortunately not just perception, it has become the reality, with residents on the short end every single time.

There seems to be a sense among some that last November's election was the definitive rejection of the importance of citizen resistance to development projects throughout the county such as Woolls Ranch, Yountville Hill, Walt Ranch, Girard, Syar, the Woodland Initiative, Mountain Peak, and that we are now in the season of elections having consequences (as we are nationally!) And they may be right. Only time will tell. But thus far the injuries to a way of life have not been written off by those immediately impacted and the resistance and anger, at least in this quarter, are more keenly felt than ever.

6/2/17

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NVR 6/2/17: Design of south Napa Marriott hotel leaves city planners cold
NVR 6/1/17: Napa planners to get first a look at a Marriott hotel, winery
The project documents are here (large file)

The planning commission seems to have focused on the uninspired architecture floating in a sea of cars. One always hopes for good urban design, but the other chain-tenant shopping plazas and car dealerships they have approved on Soscol don't offer much guidance to the designers. What was not discussed, apparently, was the impact of another few hundred vehicles coming and going each day in this increasingly bottlenecked area of the county, once again highlighting the way in which the municipalities' development lust ignores impacts down the road (literally).

The junction between Hwy 29 and Hwy 12 has become ground zero in the carrying capacity of Napa County, with traffic congestion at the top of everyone's negative list about the county.

The fact that both visitors and workers are turned off by the commute is a good thing for those of us wishing to slow the urban development currently happening up valley. And that attitude seems to be taking hold in the county as well. The Napa Valley Transportation Authority recently decided against enlarging Hwy 29 at the junction. Building transport infrastructure just induces more development to fill the increased capacity, the reasoning goes. The theory, though perhaps not expressed directly at the meeting, is that you can control urban development just by making it impossible to get to the development sites. That theory was at the heart of the decision in the 1970's to stop building freeways in Napa county beyond the one small stretch through Napa City.

Unfortunately, based on approved projects, the bottleneck at this junction is only just beginning to build. Besides the many building projects in the pipeline further up valley that will be adding all of their visitors and employees to this junction, the proposed development around the junction itself, which the Marriott project again shines a light upon, is enough to make any traffic engineer blanch. It includes:

• Napa Pipe: apartments, commercial space, a hotel, 3300 parking spaces
  
• Costco: 763 parking spaces
  
• The Meritage expansion: 134 rooms, 230 parking spaces (less than required)
  
• The long-stalled Montalcino Resort: 379 rooms, perhaps 600 parking spaces
  
• The 2.2 million sf Napa Logistics Park just down the road, 2083 parking spaces
  
• The County jail , min 120 parking spaces
  
• Stanley Ranch, 100's of parking spaces
• and Now the Marriott Hotel and Winery, 441 parking spaces

These projects will add several thousand vehicles per day to the traffic already there. The gridlock distances and hours will continue to expand. The legal problem is that all of the developers already with approvals are now expecting government to insure that people can get to their projects, and they will exert a lot of pressure. And the municipalities, concerned as always only with economic expansion and no concern about the urbanizing pressure their developments exert on the unincorporated county, have no interest in limiting access. Even residents who see the value of preserving what is left of unurbanized Napa will not tolerate an hour to get through the junction for long. And, because these are state highways, Caltrans will be forced to do something. The county's desire to disincentivize urban growth by limiting access will be forced to mitigate the traffic they have already sanctioned before they can implement a restriction plan - or be sued. The road will have to be widened to 6 lanes and the Soscol flyover built. Napa residents and state residents will have to come up with the money to do it. But what happens after that? Once built the increased access will induce more development. And so on.

Controlling urban growth by limiting access is only half of the solution needed. The other must be to stop granting use permits and building permits, based on the unacceptable impact they will have to the access needed for businesses already in existence and those already approved. Unfortunately, since the Marriott is within the city's southern gerrymander, little can be done. But if the county is serious in their access restricting strategy, then the next step beyond saying no to infrastructure projects is to start saying no to new development throughout the county. It is either that or to begin making plans for the Hwy 12 and 29 freeways that will inevitably be necessary.

At every planning hearing, government officials and some residents have stars in their eyes over the tax revenues and fees projects are expected to bring. It is only years later that the real cost of those approvals are known. The widening of Hwy 29 and the Soscol flyover will cost about $150 million - just one of numerous infrastructure and service costs taxpayers must bear to insure that developers can make profitable investments. "Development doesn't pay for itself. It doesn't." Volker Eisele is sorely missed.

James Conaway, in a recent blog post and now in a Register letter, has called attention again to the dangers of life in an age dominated by developers (and now ruled by our first developer-in-chief) to those who would seek to preserve some of their cultural and natural heritage for future generations, not to mention its enjoyment in the here and now.

40 years ago Napa's agricultural preserve was created as a dam to hold back the floodwaters of development lust that was drowning the rest of Bay Area agriculture in building projects. The issue in Napa then was housing development, and it seemed for a while that the minimum-parcel-size zoning and the popular-vote-required re-zoning protections put in place to stop housing subdivisions have worked. An industry based on an agricultural product has survived and prospered and the housing projects have been held at bay.

But development lust is not so easily suppressed. Within the tight constraints of the Agricultural Preserve, the General Plan and Measure J the formulae had to be jiggled just enough so that a new generation of development interests could begin pumping money into Napa real estate ventures. The magic component: tourism and the hyping of a good-life destination. Define those as "agriculture" and the flood gates open.

It is often said that Napa has become a victim of its own success. It's success was created by careful legislative crafting by politicians and citizens concerned about the preservation of its agricultural heritage. But the victimization is wholly attributable to development lust of a few seeking ways to exploit and cash in (or out) on that success. Wine makers are bought out by good-life entrepreneurs, vineyard real estate is promoted as building sites for every plutocrat's fantasy of a winery-of-one's-own. And the buildings and parking lots and commuting tourists and employees continue to come. The urbanization of ag land in the rest of the county will not be as swift as the development of Watson Ranch, but in the long run it will be just as sure.

James Conaway has been a perceptive student of the cultural and physical transformation of the County for 25 years. The upcoming third book in his series on the Napa Valley will no doubt reflect on the change that has come to the county in that time. Its proposed name, unfortunately, is a bit depressing for those of us who have hoped the fight to save this place was not hopeless: Napa at Last Light.

The other books:
2002 Napa: The Story of an American Eden
2003 The Far Side of Eden: New Money, Old Land, and the Battle for Napa Valley

For a variety of reasons the city of Calistoga’s recent budgets are not bleak. Therein lies opportunity if we are bold enough to seize it.

The city’s budget anticipates revenues of over $10 million this year. More than half of that revenue is paid by visitors to local lodging, the so-called TOT tax. The budget’s expenditures, meanwhile, include provision for police, fire, public works, pensions, debt service, etc. The complete budget is available online or at city hall.

With the improving national economy, our city revenues have increased each of the last five years. The Budget Summary cautions however that “it is important to remember that the City’s budgets will, once again, be very tight.”

But there’s a bright side. The need for a tight budget in an expanding economy presents the opportunity for both spending more and spending less.

Spending more is easy. Indeed, our next budget proposes increased spending in most departments, including fire, recreation, and planning.

Spending less, however, as most of us know from personal experience, is harder.

The city's budget reports our payments to the Chamber of Commerce Visitors Bureau, for promotion and marketing. Since 2011 we’ve spent $300,000 or more per year (over $330,000 this year) to promote our city this way. The rationale is that the money spent is more than paid back by resultant TOT revenue.

For most of our expenditures we know what we get for our money: a newly-paved street, another officer on the beat. Not so with money spent to entice visitors. We may think and hope marketing matters, but we don’t know. There are assertions by large professional tourist organizations of remarkable (e.g. 15:1) returns on promotional efforts, but there’s no empirical evidence directly linking Calistoga’s promotional efforts with its TOT revenue. We guess the return justifies the expense. But we’re not sure.

Usually we in business are pragmatic; but spending money on marketing is instead an act of hope.

It’s not clear that any marketing is even necessary. It’s possible we’d collect the same TOT whether we advertised or not. In the last decade Calistoga’s TOT revenue has basically tracked the broader economy, increasing every year except for the 2009-10 recession.

This is the perfect time to save money on marketing. Today’s economy is still growing. People feel they have money to spend, and famous Calistoga is definitely on their radar. Our local budget is expanding so that a diminution of visitors, should that occur, could be absorbed. Meanwhile we’d have over $300,000 for more important expenditures. There’s no point in spending money to lure people who are going to visit us anyway.

There’s nothing sacred about the $300,000+ budget number traditionally spent on marketing. It’s just a habit -- and a good time to kick it. Besides, if promotional efforts were so certainly remunerative, why not spend even more on marketing? In that case it would be irresponsible not to.

Alternatively -- if we spend less, will TOT revenue decrease?

Unlikely, because even without any additional advertising, local tourism has momentum. It comes from Calistoga’s location in the Napa Valley, as well as from a strong national and regional economy. The city might fear that without marketing, tourists and their money will disappear: surely other north bay towns will continue to advertise?

So what! Are we not confident Calistoga is special? Let’s seize this opportunity to save. Our reputation is established: we are hospitable. If we advertise less, people are not going to suddenly forget we exist. They aren’t going to forget what we offer here. Besides, we’re not in a rooms race with other towns. Tourists will continue to come, and the TOT revenue too.

Responsibly ceasing self-promotion might seem radical. But recall the official admonition to keep a tight budget. Think of what we could get with $340,000 of public funds: longer pool hours, or lower water bills, or an improved shuttle system, or decreased debt, or whatever else we need. If after kicking our advertising habit the TOT revenue remains stable, we’re $340,000 ahead. If by chance TOT decreases, in this strong economy Calistoga is well positioned to manage that, and resume promotional efforts another year.

People of means know that accumulating wealth sometimes means taking risks. In the world of city governments, where little things are big things, less self-promotion may seem daring, but it’s really a sensible step to take when it (1) isn’t necessary to attract visitors in a strong economy, (2) saves $340,000, (3) won’t hurt the city hugely if TOT falls shorter than expected, and (4) can be reinstated easily next year anyway.

So let’s try it. Let’s take a leap. Let’s stop marketing Calistoga for a year and save some public money.

NVR LTE version 5/27/17: Maybe it's time to cut the marketing purse strings

3 days prior to the Mountain Peak appeal hearing before the Board of Supervisors, Chuck Wagner, of Caymus Vineyards, sent this letter to the Board offering his encouragement to deny the appeals. Considering the very slim chance that the appeals would be upheld it was probably an unnecessary gesture, but it represented a chance to perpetuate yet again (see here) a canard that has become widespread among development interests: that a small vocal group of residents was out to kill the wine industry.

As was stated in this response to Rex Stults' similar statement, nothing could be further from the truth. And the truth needs to be reiterated here: residents that oppose these projects are not against the "wine" industry; they are against the non-agricultural urban development that the wine industry is adopting to increase profits from the much more lucrative tourism and real estate industries. The development of wineries as tourism venues and of vineyards as part of housing estates have major impacts on residents and on the county infrastructure way beyond the practice of crop raising and processing.

If tourism and estate development is claimed necessary to the survival of the wine industry we need to see the facts to back up that claim. Many vintners, some of the best in fact, seem to survive in the high end wine business with little or no visitation at all. What percentage of total Napa winery revenues are attributable to at-winery sales, and is that percentage worth the impacts of urbanization, diminished quality of life and high costs resulting from tourism and real estate speculation that the Ag Preserve, Measure J and the WDO were originally intended to counter.

There are many people in the county who are concerned about the changing nature of the wine industry, and the impact of that change on the rural character of the county and the quality of their lives, and that have no interest in "taking down the wine industry". They recognize that the wine industry, built by resident vintners and growers that valued not only the success of their industry but the preservation of their rural communities, has always had the respect of the other rural residents that benefit from the maintenance of a rural environment and small town life that was its product.

But the industry, as the industry itself constantly mentions, is changing. And the nature of that change is toxic to residents who treasure the bucholic pleasure of an agricultural economy. It is difficult to know whether the wine industry is becoming, or is just acting as a cover for, the tourism, entertainment, real estate and consturction interests that are beginning to engulf us all with development. Traffic is only a symptom of a development boom that is filling the vineyards with buildings and parking lots, and clearcutting hillsides for estates, resorts and more vineyards to replace those paved over on the valley floor, and for the tourism conversion of the municipalities that eliminates affordable housing, local businesses and decimates the sense of small-town community life. And for the mining of parklands to build it all.

In a previous generation the wine industry fought the urbanizing trajectory that those industries represent. Urbanization is the death of agriculture. One is left to wonder why now, after 40 some years of the wine industry being the defender of a rural environment, it is now up to the residents, against all odds including the bullying of the wine industry, to try to save the rural environment which an agricultural economy needs to exist.

A couple of years ago, the Napa Valley Vintners launched a PR campaign dubbed Our Napa Valley, casting the urban impacts as solvable with more transport infrastructure and more housing, i.e. more development. Until the wine industry returns to the notion that curbing development is in its own best long-term interest, as well as the interest of all citizens concerned about preserving the rural character of this place, resident anger against the industry and the government that continues to do its bidding will only increase.

NVR 5/25/17: Napa County approves remote, controversial Mountain Peak winery

On May 23, 2017 the Napa County Board of Supervisors denied the 4 appeals of the Planning Commission's use permit approval for the Mountain Peak Winery made in January.

The agenda and documents for the hearing are here
The Staff agenda letter is here
The video of the hearing is here
The community powerpoint is here

The four resident's appeals were each denied in turn 4-0 with the appellant's own supervisor, Sup. Pedroza, making the motion to deny. Sup. Dillon was - unexpectedly, from the standpoint of residents - absent from the proceedings. (She did not mention that she would be absent when we led her on a site visit 5 weeks before the hearing.) While her vote may have been no different than the other supervisors, her insights into the long history of industry-resident relations and intimate knowledge of WDO issues would have been an illuminating part of the discussion. And since it was her commissioner who voted against the project, it was especially important to have her input here. We asked for a continuance based on her absence to no avail.

As they did at the first Planning Commission hearing, a last minute concession was offered up to ease the decision in their favor and provide some cover for the decision-makers. Last time it was the elimination of marketing events. This time it was a "75% estate grape" provision to be added to the conditions of approval linking approved capacity to the amount grapes produced on the "estate". I don't know if the county has an official definition of an estate, but the Napa Valley Vintners provides this definition of "estate-bottled" when used on wine labels.

In the discussion the implication was that the "estate" would include the winery property plus the 180 acre parcel up the road owned outright by Mountain Peak. Selling the larger parcel would mean a proportionate reduction in the approved capacity under the use-permit. Would the approved capacity also increase if Mountain Peak buys another parcel? Would the approved capacity diminish if the winery parcel is sold separately? More importantly, visitation numbers are based on a business plan projection to insure the sale of the yearly production. If the production drops considerably shouldn't the visitation numbers also go down. Does the business model morph into one based solely on serving expensive wine-paired lunches? There were immediate questions about how to work out this provision in a meaningful and enforceable way, in our minds and the minds of supervisors.

It was agreed that the finalization of their denials was contingent on the exact wording of the provision to be worked out by the Aug 15th BOS meeting. It may be a very trend-setting provision for winery development in remote areas in order to avoid the custom-crush fiasco of the Caves at Soda Canyon (that will be making its way to the Board in the future).

The "estate" discussion precipitated an interest by Sup. Wagenknecht to perhaps consider standards for "remote" wineries. While the suggestion seemed a bit off-the-cuff, Dir. Morrison seemed eager to take on the assignment. Given this letter to the planning commission two years ago prior to APAC and his valiant efforts there to create predictable development standards for wineries, I want to believe that the fire for true long term planning consistency regarding winery development was not stamped out by the BOS's "case-by-case" cave-in to the industry after APAC.

The hearing went from 10:00 until 5:30. Our side, led superbly by Anthony Arger, made 8 individual presentations limited to 2 hours total. Chair Ramos, much like Chair Gill at planning commission meetings, was a stern disciplinarian on time limits for us concerned citizens. (The professionals, representing development interests, make their points efficiently. Citizens, often less disciplined, are frequently cut off mid presentation.) That sense of sternness carried over into all interactions with the appellants (despite the fact that the hearing was on their dime). By contrast when the Mountain Peak representatives approached the podium there was often a bit of jovial banter between the rep and the Board prior to the presentation. This has probably always been the case, but it takes on a new ominousness in an era in which the wine industry is making its disdain for the interests of residents more apparent than ever after last year's APAC put downs and the election. One budding developer of an event center on Dry Creek Road, and author of the capitalist manifesto on winery development during the APAC hearing, was there to cheer on the Supes.

Sup. Pedroza lamented the current "business or residents" dichotomy of county relations, and he may have been behind the "estate" condition as an industry-acceptable (evidenced by Michelle Benvenuto's silence on the issue) mitigation of resident concern, but, as has often been the case, the words of concern don't correlate with real constituent support against the interests of the industry. As long as the Planning Commission and the BOS continue to side with the industry in every single decision they render, resident anger at their government will only increase, and the resistance will continue.

Update 5/17/17:

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The Airport Land Use Commission (ALUC) has not approved, by a 3 to 3 vote, the Palmaz heliport proposal. Commissioner Walker (a pilot on the ALUC but not the Planning Commission) and Comm. Cottrell both cited the ALU Compatability Plan's Commission Authority:

The Commission’s charge expressly stated being:

...to protect public health, safety, and welfare by ensuring the orderly expansion of airports and the adoption of land use measures that minimize the public’s exposure to excessive noise safety hazards within areas around public airports to the extent that these areas are not already devoted to incompatible uses.

Comm. Cottrell felt that the Palmaz project was not an "orderly expansion" of Napa's airports. Comms. Walker and Cottrell were joined by Comm. Gallagher in denying the project. Comms. Scott, Basayne and Gill voted in favor.

Just after the vote Dir. Morrison broke the slightly stunned silence by asking "Can staff request a 5 minute break?"

Not approved is not the same as a denial, it turns out. After the break Ms. Anderson, county council, indicated ALUC by-laws require a full 7 members to review the project in the event that a majority of the commission is not in agreement. This hearing will thus be continued to a date uncertain until all 7 members can be present. Comm Gallagher asked, if those are the by-laws, why a hearing was scheduled without all 7 members. And why at the Planning Commission a split vote meant denial, but not in this case. Ms. Anderson indicated that the by-laws are different. The Planning Commission will go ahead with its public comments, but no vote will be taken and the hearing will be continued until the date of the ALUC hearing.

As the subsequent Planning Commission began, Brian Russell, the Palmaz attorney, concluded his presentation with: "There are no noise impacts associated with this project." Christian Palmaz and consultants, for the last couple of years, have presented much "fact-based evidence" to prove that his helicopter noise will have a less than significant impact on sensitive receptors (people). The people, however, remain unconvinced and continued to present, during the rest of the hearing, the "anecdotal evidence" that helicopters do make significant noise. The hearing was then continued.

Update 5/10/17:

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NVR 5/15/17: Palmaz heliport hearing heads toward conclusion

The second day of the County Planning Commission Hearings on the Palmaz Helipad Project will happen on May 17th, 2017, beginning at 8:00 am at the County Building, 3rd Floor, 1135 3rd St Napa.

8:00am: Airport Land Use Commission (the ALUC includes Planning Commissioners plus other airport and county officials) will review the Project
The agenda and documents are here

After the ALUC hearing (perhaps 10:00-11:00am) the Planning Commission will review the Final Environmental Impact Report FEIR on the project
Agenda and Documents are here

Comments may be submitted to project planner Dana Ayres at
Dana.Ayers@countyofnapa.org

County's Palmaz Heliport page including Final EIR is here
SCR take on the hearing

The conclusion of the FEIR: "Project operation would result in helicopter noise associated with approaches and departures occurring at the heliport...This impact would be significant." Duh!

The SCR Palmaz page is here
The NapaVision 2050 Palmaz petition page is here
NapaVision 2050 hearing notice is here

2/27/17: Day 1 of the FEIR hearing

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NVR 3/1/17: Napa County planners open Palmaz heliport hearing
NVR 2/27/17:County prefers Mount George site for Palmaz heliport

The first day of the County Planning Commission Hearing for the Final Environmental Impact Report on the Palmaz Helipad Project happened on Mar 1st, 2017.
Agenda And documents for Mar 1st, 2017 hearing
Staff Agenda Letter
Video of the hearing

Supervisors,

I am Bill Hocker, 3460 Soda Canyon Road. I am a neighbor of the project and an appellant.

The Mountain Peak site is located 6‌‌ miles up a winding dead-end road, The road is the only access to the Rector plateau, going up a steep grade and through a narrow pass before reaching the project site near the edge of the gorge that drains the watershed. Although the wilderness has disappeared into vines in the last two decades, It is still, to most all who live there, a very remote place.

Mountain Peak would be the fourth winery built on the plateau. It would also be the first post-WDO winery and the first dependent on tourism to justify its existence. It would host 15000 yearly visitors, up to 60 visitors a day, and have 19 daily employees. Vehicle traffic to and from the site would add about 100 trips per day to the existing 400 or so generated by residents and the extensive vineyard operations. With the daily tourism, the sense and reality of remoteness will be gone.

In January, Mountain Peak was approved with a 3 to 1 vote by the Planning Commission. One Commissioner exercised discretion and did not support the visitation requested, heeding your interpretive guidance appended to the 2010 WDO:

"To insure that the intensity of winery activities is appropriately scaled, the County considers the remoteness of the location and the amount of wine to be produced at a facility when reviewing use permit proposals, and [the county] endeavors to ensure a direct relationship between access constraints and on-site marketing and visitation programs"

This guidance seemed intended as a caution against development in remote areas as a result of the expansion of tourism activities allowed by changes to the WDO at the time. We have felt from the beginning that this guidance was written with a project like Mountain Peak in mind.

At the January hearing both the applicant and the county provides examples of "comparable" hillside wineries to help commissioners evaluate the mountain peak visitation numbers.

During the hearing, Rick Marshall, the chief county road engineer, drew a distinction for commissioners to consider when looking at comparable wineries: "I think a tough decision for you today is the distinction between roads that are dead end versus those that are not." He elaborated on the funding difficulties faced in maintaining county roads, indicating that dead-end roads would be low on their repair priorities once funding arrives. He concluded by asking: "Is it appropriate to put this land use on this dead end road?" He left that answer to the commissioners discretion.

In our community presentation at the hearing, we looked at the details of those comparables with emphasis on the dead-end nature of our road. Our analysis at the hearing?

Of the Applicant's 5 examples, 3 were on state highways, and a fourth is at the bottom of the heavily traveled Oakville Grade. The last was on the well-travelled White Cottege Rd in Angwin. The 3 with more visitation than Mountain Peak were all pre-WDO. The other 2 had less than a third the visitation.

Of the County's four 100,000 gal "hillside" wineries, 3, in fact, had their tasting rooms or wineries on the valley floor and one was at the junction of Hwy 121 and 128.

Our conclusion? None of the 9 was comparable to a 15,000 visitor/yr winery 6 miles up a dead-end road.

At the hearing Mr. Marshall also tentatively added this in terms of comparables: "An example to me that's similar is the Diamond Mountain Winery. It's similarly narrow, windy, in mountainous terrain, and it's a dead end." He didn't know its capacity or visitation. We looked it up: 10,000 gal and 1500 visitors per year.

Looking at Diamond Mountain, it seemed that a more appropriate comparison might be made to many other wineries in the county in which "remoteness of location" could be an issue. "Remoteness" I defined as being a mile or more off a state highway or the Trail in the mountainous areas of the county. Using Google maps and correlating with the County's winery database, 70 some "remote" wineries were found.

The result of this effort was an online map and table of those wineries. I sent a link to it in my email submittal to the Board for this hearing. The table can be sorted to make comparisons based on capacity, visitation, distance from highways and distance on dead end roads, pre and post WDO wineries.

To summarize the conclusions that drawn from the exercise: Of all 71 remote wineries currently on the list, Mountain Peak falls almost entirely at or near the top 10% in each category.

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Capacity
Regarding capacity, it is the 7th on the list.
All remote wineries with a greater capacity than Mountain Peak are pre-WDO.
Mountain Peak has 1.7 x the average capacity.
It has 5 x the median or middle-range capacity, a better benchmark here because 3 large wineries at the top skew the averages.

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Visitation
in terms of Visitation, it is 6th on the list
It has 3 x the average visitation
and 6 x the median visitation

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Post-WDO wineries
Of the 45 post WDO wineries in the sample:
It has the largest capacity of any post-WDO winery in these remote areas.
It has the 4th largest visitation
(Note that 2 of the 3 larger, Palmaz and Woolls were also very contentious approvals.)

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Employees
In employees it is 3rd highest of remote wineries
Also in vehicle trips/day: 3rd highest
with 3 x the average trips per day
and 9 x the median trips per day.

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Distance to Hwy
in terms of the Distance from state highway or the Trail: not quite a third of the way down the list at number 21.
But of those 20 further, Mountain Peak has the most visitation.
it is 2 miles further from a major highway than average

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Dead-end roads
Of the 44 wineries on a dead-end road: 8th on the list.
Of the 7 further, it has the most visitation by far (almost 3 x as much as the next closest)
And it is 3 miles further up a dead-end road than average.

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Soda Canyon Road
Finally of the 8‌‌ Soda Canyon Road Wineries
In Capacity it is 2nd to the 450,000 gal year Pre-WDO Antica winery
In Visitation it is 1st by far on the road
It is almost 3 x the visitation of Antica. (Thankfully Antica uses very little of its allowed 5200 vis/yr. It is a winery built to process grapes not tourists. As such has been a good neighbor.)
Mountain Peak has 6x the average visitation of all other wineries on the road.
And 4 times the average trips.



In summary, while the Mountain Peak applicants argued that their numbers fell in the middle range of the comparable wineries originally presented, the reality is that, compared to a broader range of remote wineries, Mountain Peak's statistics are at the far upper end in every category. Looking at the intensity of production, visitation and remoteness together, Mountain Peak is clearly inappropriately scaled for the remote and rural location of upper Soda Canyon Road where it is being proposed.

Like Mr Marshall, I would like to end with my own comparable, recently approved at the planning commission, and one of the wineries on our list:

In reviewing the Black Sears Winery, the Planning Commission noted the remoteness of location and appropriate scaling of a 20,000 gal winery supplied by 26 acres of vines on a 100 acres of property, with 16 daily visitors and 4 employees. Black Sears is 2 and a half miles up a dead road from Howell Mountain Road in Angwin.

One commissioner said of the project. "It is unusually remote. I mean, literally it's at the end of the road. It's a long road."

A second commissioner felt it was "modest and to scale" and commented on the "great neighbor relations".

A third commissioner summed up the commission's consensus, saying the project "truly introduces modest visitation in a remote location... This is something we are trying to embrace."

All three commissioners voted to approve the Mountain Peak project as well: On a 40 acre site with a similar 25 acres of vines, the project has 5 times the capacity, up to 60 daily visitors, 19 employees, more than twice as far up a dead-end road, with a majority of households on the road having signed an opposition petition.

Unfortunately the inconsistancy in these decisions reflects a system of arbitrary requests and approvals based on speculative business plans in a case-by-case approach to land use planning. I was struck by the 100,000 gal comparables presented by the County for Mountain Peak: visitation ranged from 4400 to 151,000 visitors/year. Marketing plans to sell 100,000 gals of wine may differ, but that difference seems beyond the level of reasonable disparity. More interpretive guidance in making decisions was obviously needed.

The interpretive guidance in the WDO was a tacit recognition that changes made in 2010 would bring a faster shift from an industry devoted to wine making to one devoted to wine tourism, and that there was a value in constraining that transition in the more remote areas of the county where, as with Mountain Peak, tourism is making its first inroads. I think that the planning commission came to the right decision in the Black Sears project: an appropriately scaled project in a remote location can win the backing of the residents that must live with it. On Soda Canyon Road, the pushback by residents through their petitions and their efforts in this room are a better indication of innappropriate scale than all of the number crunching and fact-based analysis we have just gone through. The majority on the planning commission did not make the right decision on Mountain Peak. I appeal to you to right that wrong and require a more appropritately scaled project in this remote locaiton.


Thank you

Update 5/11/17

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NVR 5/11/17: Yountville Hill winery to receive more scrutiny

The cost of the EIR goes from $213,000 to $450,000 to sign off on the outrageous traffic problems to be created by a major tourist attraction at that congested stretch of Hwy 29. Even from the standpoint of developers, corporations and plutocrats used to throwing money at their fantasies of profit and fame to be made from good-life marketing, this is a substantial sum to address the political pro forma of an EIR.

The County Yountville DEIR page

Update 3/3/17

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NVR 3/3/17: Sklar makes case for controversial Yountville Hill winery

Prepping the public for more grief later in the spring over his plans to rubbish a prominent oak hillside in the center of the valley, the developer promises "this will be the end of my career". Sooner rather than later let's hope.

8/4/17

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NVR 8/4/16: Napa County taking another look at Yountville Hill Winery

At the Planning Commission meeting of Aug 3rd, 2016, Commissioner Heather Phillips announced in disclosures that she would be recusing herself from the review of the Yountville Hill DEIR. She read a statement (transcribed here) indicating that council for Yountville Hill would challenge her right to hear the project based on the fact that a member of her family had participated with a neighborhood group opposing the project, allegedly representing a conflict of interest. She chose to recuse herself rather than bear the intimidating legal costs of a defense. The video of the hearing is here.

As she notes and as you can read here, this is not an isolated incident. Heather Phillips, as the most outspoken commissioner concerning the negative impacts of continued winery proliferation, has been challenged now three times by those interested in furthering a development agenda in the county. In a one-industry place like Napa it is unlikely that everyone who serves in a public capacity will have no connection to the wine industry or be free from its impacts. As an example noted before, one commissioner has been an officer in a limo company that will ultimately benefit from each new winery and winery expansion approved, yet he has never had his ability to make a fair judgement challenged. This is an attempt to influence commission decisions through strategic legal intimidation and is another indication how aggressive the industry has become in response to community opposition to the ongoing destruction of the county's rural character.

An extension for the comment period to the DEIR was granted by the commissioners through Sept. 29th. The hearing was lightly attended and the opponents' attorney was brief in her remarks, which seemed to indicate that the extension was a predictable decision.

My most recent rant on the project is here. This project should really not be built.

May 9, 2017

David Morrsison, Director
Napa County Planning, Building & Environmental Services Dept.
1195 Third Street, Suite 210,
Napa, California
Email: David.Morrison@countyofnapa.org

RE: SUPPORTING APPEAL OF NAPA COUNTY PLANNING COMMISSION ACTION APPROVING MOUNTAIN PEAK WINERY-USE PERMIT #P13-00320-UP

Dear Napa County Board of Supervisors,

My name is Steve Chilton and I own property on Soda Canyon Road, Napa, CA 94558.

My wife and I constructed our home on a small acreage that has been in her family for nearly 100 years. While designing the house we worked around the 100+ year old oaks and Soda Creek. No oaks were removed for the house nor was the creek impacted. We practice positive environmental stewardship and expect the County and others on Soda Canyon Road to do the same. I recently retired from a career of 35 years with the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I strongly support the Appeal of the Napa County Planning Commission approval of the Mountain Peak project and request that you uphold the appeal.

The Planning Commission demonstrated an arbitrary decision making process when they considered the Mountain Peak Project and other projects such as the Flynnville Winery Project. The Flynnville Project was a smaller winery (60,000 gallons a year versus 100,000 gallons per year for the Mountain Peak winery), that was bordered on four sides by roads, including Highway 29 and was essentially a redevelopment that was opposed by several neighbors (I believe four neighbors testified in opposition to the project). Mountain Peak is larger, is six plus miles up a narrow, steep dead end road, will have numerous impacts upon the environment and is opposed by over 900 citizens. At the urging of the Planning Commission, the Flynnville applicants reduced the winery to 40,000 gallons per year and the Commission approved it.

What did those four opponents bring to the Commission that caused them to require this reduction in gallons per year that hundreds of opponents to Mountain Peak did not? Or was it merely a matter of clout or personal influence?

Additionally, the Commission abused their discretion when it found that the Mountain Peak Project will not have a significant effect upon the environment and adopted a Negative Declaration. The Board of Supervisors must reverse the decision of the Planning Commission and deny the project or remand it for further consideration.

The size, scope and lack of environmental documentation of the project dictates that an Environmental Impact Report following the requirements of CEQA is mandatory. A negative declaration for a project this large and with its concurrent impacts upon water quality and quantity, wildlife, traffic, public safety, noise and vegetation cannot be supported by the facts. The Initial Study Checklist includes the finding that the proposed project could not have a significant effect on the environment. Section IV. A) of the checklist shows that the project will have a less than significant effect (not a no impact determination) upon unnamed species. The Rector Creek Watershed contains yellow-legged frogs and California giant salamanders, both listed species of special concern, but the negative declaration checklist mentions neither. Either county staff did not conduct a thorough survey of the area or they relied on consultants hired by the project proponents who apparently limited their survey to present a report that supported their client and not the facts. Also the California Red-Legged Frog is a federally listed threatened species by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and populations have been identified in Wragg Creek near Capell Valley Road. Similar, if not higher quality habitat occurs in the Rector Creek watershed.

Did county staff conduct or request a survey of possible special concern or threatened populations within the watershed? What is the basis for the statement that the project will have a less than significant effect rather than no impact?

CEQA regulations require that counties acting as lead agencies circulate CEQA documents to all Responsible/Trustee Agencies for comment. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDF&W) is one of those responsible agencies. Apparently the County did not follow that regulation prior to the Planning Commission approving the Mountain Peak Project. The CDF&W was not informed and therefore did not comment on the CEQA document. It is unknown what they would have commented or informed the County of and just maybe would have averted the need for this hearing and additional costs to the County and its citizens.

This apparent violation of CEQA regulations and state law on its own is reason enough for the Board of Supervisors to reverse the Planning Commission decision, require an EIR and rehear the entire project. Continuing to support this project without knowing the full impacts could open the county to challenges from wildlife advocates such as the Center for Biological Diversity and others.

Thank you for your time,

Steve Chilton

Redefining "agriculture" will also do the job.

An open letter to the Board of Supervisors:

The current definition of "agriculture" in §18.80.040 (and the proposed markup here) is already a hodgepodge of unrelated provisions. The specificity on farm management building lighting or the number of roosters that qualify as "agriculture" makes one's eyes glaze over. This seems like an ideal opportunity to bring some clarity, a "bright line" in the words of Ginny Simms, between "agriculture", and the myriad types of residential, industrial and commercial uses (houses, wineries, other processing and sales facilities, farmworker housing, kennels, hunting lodges, nursing homes, day care centers, satellite stations, etc.) that the County allows to be built on AP and AW zoned lands either with or without a permit.

Those uses are listed in §18.16.020-18.16.030 and 18.20.020-18.20.030. Why not just reference those code sections in the definition of agriculture as uses allowed on agricultural lands. If there are new uses to be added or qualifications to be made, or, even better, uses to be eliminated, then make them there. But start with a decent and clear definition of agriculture, perhaps like the State definition.

The need to define some uses as "being" agriculture, rather than just uses allowed on ag lands, is a bit of a mystery. The fact that the wine industry is so concerned about turning them into agriculture (in 2008 and now) indicates that there is some intention to place non-agricultural development under the protections of the "right-to-farm" and immune from the pesky concerns of the citizens of the county impacted by ever more urban development in the name of "agriculture". If so, we are right to ask whether the marketing activities at wineries now included in the definition are "agricultural processing" and whether winery employees are in fact "farm workers" allowed housing in the vineyards.

Tourism is not agriculture. The event-centers that continue to consume the vineyards are one facit of a cascade of development that will eventually overwhelm the agricultural base of the county. The encouragement of more tourism means more hotels and resorts, more employees needing more housing and shopping centers bringing more employees, all of which will need more roads and other infrastructure. Those new employees, living perhaps in the huge developments at Napa Pipe or Watson Ranch, as Sean Scully has pointed out, will add to the voters more concerned with urban rather than rural issues, and the ability to protect an agricultural economy will diminish exponentially.

Eventually agriculture will be tolerated only to the extent that it is a backdrop to draw in tourists, like Cape Cod lobster pots and fishing shacks. The St Helena Window brought up the Butler Report on Tourist Area Life Cycles a while back to illustrate the point. Already those people looking for an authentic wine producing region are headed to Oregon. and even those that have long supported the ag preserve are saying change is inevitable, why fight it. But it is not too late.

All agree that if agriculture were not a profitable investment then the wine industry would die. The industry does need a sustainable level of profitability, and many wineries have produced sustainable profits for decades with minimal or no tourism, some of the best with no tourism at all. Tourism is already a substantial part of the county's economy and the current ratio of wine production to tourism has been successful.

But the amount of Napa wine that can be produced is leveling out. Tourism can continue to expand indefinitely if encouraged. The creation of a glut of inefficient and unnecessary vanity wineries now vying for a relatively fixed grape crop exacerbates the shift from an agriculture to a tourism economy. As grape and land and bottle prices rise in response, Napa wines become a harder sell on in the world market and profits must increasingly be found wine pairings and event hosting, even by the larger players.

The denial of unlimited profits was at the heart of the creation of the ag preserve. The wine industry exists here not because it is the most profitable use of the land, but because the voters of Napa county decided in 1968 that retaining a rural, small-town, agriculture-based life was worth curtailing individuals' right to maximize their profit. The wine industry exists because it has the respect and protection of residents for the quality of life that is its byproduct.


Unfortunately the impacts of development, of congested traffic, of the loss of affordable housing and local businesses and a sense of community, of the deforestation of hillsides, and the littering of the landscape with buildings and the loss of a rural character, of the demand for more tax hikes and bond initiatives to pay for the infrastructure of urbanization, all are plainly beginning to overwhelm the life in this treasured place. The environment that is the byproduct of a more profit oriented industry is no longer so bucolic, no longer so easy to support.

Napa's citizens have confronted the County on many projects in the last three years: Woolls Ranch, Yountville Hill, Reverie, Girard, Walt Ranch, Syar, the Woodland Initiative, Raymond, Mountain Peak, Palmaz and in the municipalities on Calistoga Hills, Davies, Napa Oaks. In each of the contested projects, the interests of developers have won out, or seem to be winning out, over the preservationists. Each community has specific concerns, but all are united in the concern that continuing development is threatening the rural, small-town character and environment of Napa County that is the special legacy of a commitment to an "agricultural" economy four decades ago.

The county's definition of agriculture does need to be changed if this place is to remain an agricultural economy for the next 35 years. - but you are going in the wrong direction and the county is filling up with buildings.



This discussion does present one more opportunity, perhaps now being passed up again, to ask: what do you want this place to look like in 35 years? How many more tourist attractions do you want to see, how many more buildings and cars and and subdivisions and parking lots and highway expansions do you want construct?

At what point does a place nominally devoted to "agriculture" become one more Bay Area suburb with an agrarian past? Listen to what your concerned citizens have been telling you - those with no financial stake in the outcome but only a desire to perpetuate the "agricultural" quality of life that is currently so successful here.

Thank you for the opportunity to vent.

Bill Hocker
3460 Soda Canyon Road

Update 5/7/17:

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It has been a bit over two weeks since The Caves at Soda Canyon was granted a permit modification for an additional 30,000 gal/yr, the use of its bootlegged portal and terrace, exceptions to allow its perilous driveway, allowed use of the ridgeline for entertaining, and the continued operation of a diesel generator to power the entire operation. The winery with its new expanded use-permit was immediately put up for sale. How much did the approval by the planning commissioners add to the $12,500,000 asking price? How profitable is the forgiveness-not-permission attitude on the part of the county?

This project has been a blemish on the county process at each stage: a winery approved on a totally inappropriate site, substantial aggravation of neighbors subjected to generator power, bootlegged construction, forgiveness of transgressions coupled with expanded production and marketing areas. And now sale of the property before the ink is dry on the expanded use permit.

Perhaps this is another example of the winery-glut sell-off that Ross Workman points out here. Perhaps it had to do with the loss of future Stagecoach grape contracts after the purchase by Gallo. Perhaps the owner got tired of battling with the residents of Soda Canyon Road. More than likely, the revenues were not being sustained by a tourism venue in such a remote location. Unfortunately for us, should someone be willing to buy the property, they will have expansions of their own to pursue and the battle will begin anew

It will be interesting to see what impact the proposed sale will have on the appeal hearing for the project - and what impact the impending appeal will have on the sale. No doubt real estate agents will point out that the Supervisors never approve citizen's appeals.


Update 4/20/17:

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NVR 4/20/17: Amid drama, Napa planners approve changes to Soda Canyon winery

In a 3-1 Commission vote (with some drama over Comm. Scott's temporary indecision about his vote), The Caves at Soda Canyon will be allowed to expand its production from 30 to 60,000 gal/yr, continue to operate under generator power, build a cover over its crush pad and host marketing events on the ridgeline and the bootlegged patio.

In the director's report before the hearing, Dir. Morrison indicated that more winery projects (15) have been approved this year than in the whole of 2016. Add one more. The development boom continues.

4/11/17

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Napa Custom Crush, aka The Caves at Soda Canyon, is requesting a Major Modification to its 2006 use permit to increase allowed processing capacity from 30,000 to 60,000 gallons/year. The request also includes the installation of a previous approved wastewater treatment system to handle the increased water usage and a permanent canopy over the chushpad, in addition to the "recognize-and-allow" approval of the bootlegged patio and cave portal, and an exception to the county's road and street standards for the perilous driveway. An Addendum has been added to the original 2006 Mitigated Neg Dec that discusses the impacts of the modifications.

The project goes up before the Planning Commission on Apr 19th, 2017.
The staff agenda letter is here
The meeting agenda with project documents is here

This project should never have been built in this location. It is an agricultural processing facility on a remote piece of property with no agriculture, no power source, up a steep driveway unsuited to the movement of trucks or busses. It was placed in this location solely to provide a view for tourism activities.

The winery predates the 2010 WDO guidance that asks you to consider the "remoteness of location" and "access constraints" in reviewing use permit proposals. Possibly this project spurred the need for such guidence. Hopefully the requested expansion will be viewed in light of it.

This application seeks road exceptions for a driveway too narrow and curvy to meet county standards. It has grades up to 17%. Trucks get stuck on it now, as they will even with improvements. Buses bringing people to its large marketing events will suffer the same fate. The Soda Canyon grade up to the Rector plateau is only 11% - yet we can show examples of buses and trucks becoming stuck there now.

Truck stuck on Caves driveway

Bus stuck on Soda Canyon grade

But a better indication of the road is given in this anecdotal description of the access from a Yelp customer:

The location is a feat to see! The wines were good and the view of the surrounding landscape was magnificent. Public service announcement: don't drink and drive; there's a higher likelihood you will meet a fiery death, Wile E. Coyote style, after driving off a steep embankment on the windy road that leads to this venue.

The access road is inappropriate now and will be more so with a doubling of production capacity: twice as many grape deliveries, barrel and bottle deliveries, case shipments. But will it eventually be just a doubling? The project application states:

The member families of Napa Custom Crush LLC currently have more grapes produced at their properties and contracts on other parcels on Soda Canyon Road than can be processed at the winery under the current 30,000 gallon capacity.

The concept seems to be that as the members continue to expand their supply, (or potentially as the number of members continue to expand) the capacity of this remote winery, difficult to access, without power, will continue to expand to accommodate them. This was not a proper location for a winery in the first place, and it is not a proper location for a wine factory serving the needs of vineyards throughout the county now. If the members are successful will there be a future request for expansion of the facility using the same rational. What are the limits? If Napa Custom Crush wishes to expand its custom crush operations, now is is time to move to an industrial location more appropriate to continued expansion.

A majority of the residents on Soda Canyon Road have already petitioned the county to protect their community from expanding commercial development on the road. Each new building project and expansion increases the threat to the "agricultural lands and the rural character we treasure" envisioned in the General Plan and diminishes the remote, rural quality of life that is our reason to be here. And each approval will also increase the discontent toward a county government always willing to sacrifice the concerns of residents to the desires of entrepreneurs. That discontent has led to resident pushback throughout the county these last two years. Lacking a rebalance of interests, the discontent will continue.

This winery is obviously here to stay. I will probably be condemned by some for a forgivness-not-permission and whatever-exceptions-it-takes approach to land use planning, but there are things in this application that will make the project better and safer with few impacts. Permit the road improvements. Permit the wastewater system. Permit the awning. And only after a clean and silent power supply is in place and the generator is gone - permit the bootlegged portal and patio.

But don't permit the expanded capacity. In that metric you have wide discretion and you should use it. Make clear that this winery, on this very inappropriate site, should live within the capacity and visitation conditions of its original use permit, in perpetuity, or be moved elsewhere.

Update 5/6/17

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On Tues May 9th, 2017, the Supervisors will be approving a final revision of the definition of agriculture in County Code §18.80.040 (markup here) to try to square it with the General Plan definition in Policy AG/LU-2 (see Norma Tofanelli's dissection here).

IMHO they've just further scrambled the relationship between "real agriculture" (as defined by ordinary human beings and the State) and the myriad types of residential, industrial and commercial uses (houses, wineries, other processing and sales facilities, kennels, hunting lodges, nursing homes, day care centers, satellite stations, etc.) that the County allows to be built on "agricultural" AP and AW zoned lands either with or without a permit. They are listed in §18.16.020-18.16.030 and 18.20.020-18.20.030. The need to also define some of those uses as being "agriculture", rather than just non-ag uses allowed on ag lands, is a bit of a mystery. The fact that the wine industry is so concerned about doing so means that there are probably implications for the rights of owners, decipherable only by their attorneys in consultation with the county staff, to allow increased development of their properties in the name of "agriculture".

Though seemingly arcane, these code redefinitions are a big deal in the ongoing conversion of ag lands into urban uses (like tourism processing and "agricultural" worker housing), and to the changing meaning of the "right to farm", all of which is beginning to impact and diminish the rural, small town character that is a legacy of a previous generation of community leaders. NapaVision2050 encourages you to write a letter to the Supervisor here.

Update 4/19/17

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Stephen Donoviel LTE 4/19/17: The definition of agriculture

Dr. Donoviel gives the historical context for the County's unique definition of agriculture and its use, first in service to protect the agricultural future of the county and, and more recently, its re-crafting to serve the needs of development interests. And finally, a proposition to place the definition before the voters.

Update 4/9/17

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NVR 4/9/17: Napa County's new definition of agriculture to include marketing and sales

On Apr 4th, the Board of Supervisors approved (5-0) changes in County ordinance §18.08.040. The revision markup is here. (As Dir. Morrison noted the following day, it was the first of the APAC recommendations to be completed - almost a year after being made.) It adds farmworker housing ("agricultural employee housing" in the General Plan, another definitional discrepancy needing clarification), agricultural processing facilities and marketing facilities "accessory" to production facilities to the list of buildings that can be built in the ag zones of the county. I was pleased to see that wineries and event centers were placed below chicken coops in the pecking order of buildings permitted under the ordinance, though I expect that we will continue to see more event centers than chicken coops being built.

The meeting was contentious with residents negatively impacted by the "marketing of wine", i.e. tourism, up against the "wine industry" that sees greater profits to be made in tourism development. Sup. Pedroza acknowledged the resident-vs-industry angst and tried to calm the room by pointing out that this redefinition was simply to bring the code into conformance with the general plan, (just as arguments were made in 2010 that changes to the WDO were merely clarifications) and that re-visioning the definition of agriculture was appropriate for another forum. Of course that forum was the APAC process, in which changes to the General Plan were never seriously considered. While much hot air was given to the subject at APAC (e.g. here), AG/LU-2 remained fixed in stone. Debra Dommen spoke up then, as she did today, to state that "we've" been working on this since 2006 and that the General Plan update in 2008 settled the issue. By "we" of course she meant the wine industry, not the citizens of Napa County.

Geoff Ellsworth's philosophical take on the issue is here.


Update 3/29/17

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On Apr 4th, 2017 the Board of Supervisors will weigh in again (item 9H here) on the proposed update to the definition of "agriculture" in the County Code of Ordinances to bring it into alignment with the "marketing" aspect of the definition in the General Plan that has fueled the rapid transition from an agricultural economy into an entertainment economy.

Of interest are 2 documents from staff, demanded by the Board at the last meeting to give context to the issue, detailing the histories of Napa's peculiar definition of "agriculture" in both the General Plan and in the County Code.
Update 3/21/17

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NVR 3/23/17: Napa County still struggling with its agriculture definition

After a presentation by Dir. Morrison to the BOS today on changes to the definition of agriculture in county ordinance §18.08.040 (item 9B here) and a stream of citizen arguments about the apparent equation of processing, marketing and housing in the definition and the confusion and inconsistencies that the definition portends for the "right to farm" and for unintended development in the county (and a couple of industry reps supporting approval as being in line with the developer-friendly definition they created for the General Plan in 2008), the Board had their say.

Sup. Dillon started out expressing frustration that the definition was not given appropriate context for the benefit of the two new board members and others unfamiliar with the long and fraught history of the definition in the county, seeming to feel that the definition was being presented as a fait accompli for their approval and not given appropriate due diligence appropriate to its primal significance to the county's soul. Chair Pedroza, obviously anxious to despatch the issue as quickly as possible, after rigorously enforcing the 3 minute rule for public comments, ran into wordsmithing issues from Sups. Gregory and Ramos who, with fresh eyes, were concerned about the ambiguity of the relation of agriculture to agricultural processing and agricultural processing to marketing.

Dir. Morrison spent a fair portion of the last two years dealing with this issue and seemed vexed that it was headed back to staff and council for yet another editing session. The item was continued and the Board will consider the definition of agriculture again at its April 4th, 2017 meeting at the very precise time of 11:15am.

Norma Tofanelli has updated her letter on the real dangers and conflicts of placing marketing activities, farm worker housing and all other accessory uses, under the "right to farm" protections of the code of ordinances. Her letter is here.

Geoff Ellsworth reiterated his opinion that the definition might be called the "Knott's Berry Farm ordinance", an issue more discussed here.

Ginny Simms (the only speaker with enough status to be able to ignore the 3 minute admonitions) brought forward the need in the definition for "bright-line" conditions that separate farming from processing and that separate processing from marketing. The various conditions sprinkled throughout the General Plan and the Code of Ordinances present some very muddy lines indeed, and this current proposal seemed to do nothing to brighten things up. A muddy definition is, of course, a boon for developers seeking to turn ambiguity into building projects.


Update 9/23/16

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The vote was 4 to 1 (Comm. Phillips voting no) to send the revised definition on the BOS with recommendations for some staff clarifications on the verbiage.

NVR 9/26/16: Napa wrestles with definition of agriculture

Correspondence received at or prior to the meeting is here. The correspondence, particularly the two legal letters, reinforce the points made by Norma Tofanelli below. It has become obvious that, from the 2008 General Plan revisions on, there has been a consistent effort on the part of corporate development interests to weaken the protections that have allowed Napa County to remain an agricultural economy and kept it's agricultural lands free from development. Following the squashing of community concerns in the APAC hearings and the election a development candidate in the Supervisorial primary, re-defining the meaning of agriculture to allow urban development in its name is a principal part of the process, as James Hickey recognized in the quote at the top of the WDO page.


Update 9/21/16

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Today, Sept 21st 2016 public comments will be heard on the proposal for changes as shown in Dir. Morrison's email below to the definition of agriculture as set out in Napa County ordinance 18.08.040

NVR 9/19/16: Napa planners to discuss agricultural definition

While my initial view was that the additional convolutions generated by the changes will just create more uncertainty about the definition of agriculture (an uncertainty that tourism entrepreneurs and real estate developers will continue to milk), Norma Tofanelli has shown just how easy it will be to create milking stations going forward - the probable intention of the changes. The new definition, if adopted, will give the legal basis to claim that winery event centers, country stores and other tourist venues (Nut Tree comes to Napa) no longer need use permits to be built. They will be allowed "by right" just as real agriculture (you know, the growing and harvesting of crops) currently is.

She writes:

If the additional uses (ag production facilities, ag product sales, marketing events, farm worker housing) are added into the base definition of §18.08.040 you will be mandated by at least §§18.16.020 and 18.20.020 to allow such uses without a use permit:

Chapter 18.16 AP AGRICULTURAL PRESERVE DISTRICT
§18.16.020 - Uses allowed without a use permit.

The following uses shall be allowed in all AP districts without use permits: A. Agriculture;

Chapter 18.20 AW AGRICULTURAL WATERSHED DISTRICT
§18.20.020 - Uses allowed without a use permit.

The following uses shall be allowed in all AW districts without use permits: A. Agriculture;

In addition, the uses will be protected by:

Chapter 2.94 AGRICULTURE AND RIGHT TO FARM
§2.94.010 - Definitions.

"Agriculture" shall have the same meaning as "agriculture" as defined in Section 18.08.040 of this code.

Her 3/20/17 version of the letter is here.
Her previous 9/19/16 version is here


8/29/16

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At the coming planning commission on Sept. 21h, 2016, Planning Director David Morrison is asking for public comments (and commissioner recommendations to the BOS) on a revision to the Napa County Ordinance 18.08.040 definition of agriculture, to bring it into alignment with the Napa County General Plan policy AG/LU-2, the County's prime definition of agriculture. It seems to go a bit further than just alignment by clarifying that the "related marketing sales and other accessory uses" mentioned in AG/LU-2 are "incidental and subordinate" to agricultural production uses. "Related accessory uses" are defined in other parts of the county code as being incidental and subordinate to production, but omission of that clarification from the two principal definitions of agriculture has been a lingering concern. The notice for the subsequently re-noticed Sept 7th hearing is here.

Director Morrison sent along the email below [superceeded by this 3/20/15 markup] which shows proposed changes (in red) to the principal county ordinance defining agriculture. He also sent along a second email modifying the changes (shown in blue), cobbled on at the recommendation of staff and the county council.



Focusing a light on ordinance 18.08.040 frankly raises more questions than it answers. Agriculture "means" the raising of crops and livestock which "includes" a bunch of other things that are not the raising of crops and livestock? Huh? The ordinance begins with the lofty goal of defining "agriculture" but then spends 75% of the text in the weeds of farm management and roosters. If farm management is so well covered what about other agricultural uses. Wineries get entire additional sections of the code. But it seems like canneries, dairies, slaughterhouses, tanneries are also allowed under this wording. As well as their incidental and subordinate accessory produce stands, produce/dairy grocery stores, butcher shops, leather apparel stores, seed or hay supply stores. As will be, I assume, the facilities needed to process and market marijuana in the (near?) future.

The blue additions add even more confusion. Although there may be a different legal meaning, the dictionary indicates the word "notwithstanding" is synonymous with "in spite of" - meaning what?, that the requirements for obtaining a conditional use permit contain a different definition of agriculture? (the latest 3/20/17 ordinance mark-up is here and I'm glad to see that "notwithstanding" is gone.) Are these the requirements? Shouldn't the requirements be changed to reflect this prime definition, rather than this definition be qualified to accommodate inconstancies elsewhere? Should the conflicting requirements have to be stated here as well? (Recall also the county's recent dismissal of the Oak Woodland Initiative for not including the text of referenced documents.) More questions about the County's definition of agriculture seem to be raised than answered here.

Independent of the eccentricities of 18.08.040, the effort to introduce one more repetition of the "incidental and subordinate" nature of marketing to production into the county code is greatly appreciated. It would be even better if that language was also included in AG/LU-2 itself. But I have to admit that the concerns over the definition of agriculture now seem to be a somewhat academic exercise. There is nothing incidental or subordinate about the impacts that the "marketing of wine" is having on the quality of life and rural character of Napa County. Those impacts, whether in traffic, housing shortages, deforestation, infrastructure costs, are beginning to dominate life in the county, just as they threaten to dominate our lives in the remote area at the top of Soda Canyon Road. Nothing in the General Plan or Code of Ordinances has been altered enough in the last year to change the trajectory of urban development that threatens the rural character of the county.

Last year, in the public angst that led to the formation of APAC, and before Sup. Pedroza received his developers' mandate, there was some optimism that those impacts might be engaged with an expectation of abatement. And that the continuing winery proliferation that is the leading edge of the transfer of a resident-based agricultural economy into a corporation/plutocrate-based tourism economy might be slowed. As the three winery use permits that will probably be approved on Sept 7th may attest, that transfer continues unabated.

Related:
Many articles on this WDO page fret over the definition of agriculture.
APAC posts on the definition of agriculture are here and here and here and here

Update 5/4/17

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NVR 5/4/17: Possible Truchard winery, Napa Oaks subdivision developers clash

A clash between tourism urbanization and housing urbanization: The natural landscape of the county loses both ways. The Napa Oaks site should never have been incorporated into the city limits and the housing project is the infinitely more egregious insult to the rural character of the county. The site plan, which shows the tops of the hills being sheared off for building pads, is truly heartbreaking. Let's pray they lose the coming battle with their city neighbors to the east and the Truchards (who seem to be the county ideal of the family farm vintner) to the west. The housing developer's letter does just look like harassment in retaliation for the Truchard's opposition to their project. (The Truchard's opposition letter (at the bottom here), however, is a dead ringer for all of the letters we have written opposing tourism wineries these last 3 years). The best outcome, of course, would be for both to abandon their development plans in order to preserve "the sheer natural beauty of this place".

Napa Oaks II DEIR
Truchard documents Item 8B here

Update 3/1/17: Napa Oaks Development

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The Greenbelt Alliance, an organization dedicated to preserving open space in an urbanizing world for 60 years, has just issued a 2017 report At Risk: The Bay Area Green Belt which features the Napa Oaks Project as open space under threat of development. (No mention of Walt Ranch?) More here from the Stop Napa Oaks group.

Stop Napa Oaks petition
Stop Napa Oaks Facebook Page

LTE 6/10/16: Development will have huge impact
LTE 5/4/16; A test of character
LTE 5/3/16: Don't destroy gateway to Napa
LTE 4/18/16: Development would scar the land
NVR 5/3/16: Homebuilder revives plans for rejected Napa development
Napa Oaks II DEIR
NVR 8/1/12: Neighbors demand study of Napa Oaks II hillside subdivision

In true developer fashion this project is named for the environment it destroys. (I grew up in an LA suburb called Sherman Oaks, none of which remained). A part of the oak studded hills that define the rural character of the Napa Valley is to be littered with suburban McMansions. The immediate question when looking at Google maps is why this parcel is within the city limits, surrounded as it is on 3 sides by identical county open space. Not as bad as the absurd Napa gerrymander of Stanly Ranch, but still one of those unfortunate bumps in the urban-rural line that just invites urban expansion into the countryside.

The battles of communities throughout the county these last two years to maintain what is left of Napa's rural character in the face of a resurgence in developer zeal and money has been both heartening, because the desire still exists to retain this place as separate from the rest of the suburban sprawl of the bay area, and discouraging in that governments seem ever more willing to sacrifice that character to developers' interests.


9/4/16: Anderson Ranch Development

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Now a second housing project, by the same developer pursuing the Napa Oaks project, is proposed to carve up more of the few remaining Oak Hillsides within the city:
NVR 9/4/16: Planners endorse 37 east Napa homes despite privacy, tree concerns

Ross Workman NVR LTE 5/2/17: Sell the wine or sell the winery

Mr. Workman has crafted another of his insightful looks at the "wine industry" in Napa County. (I've begun to collect links to his LTE's here.) As an outsider to the mechanisms of the industry I have always been a bit nervous in voicing conclusions that seem obvious but don't seem to be shared or voiced by the industry. I'm glad that someone more connected with it seems to have the same concerns, especially when they are stated in such a clear and concise form.

From the SCR Calendar:

This upcoming planning commission meeting is a good window into the future of Napa County. The three winery projects being reviewed and the one that will become feasible with the road exception represent:

• at least 66,100 new visitor slots to be filled meaning perhaps 22,000 more visitors/yr to be accommodated by county infrastructure and services
• 28-36 more employees driving to work each day and needing affordable housing
• 142,000 gal/yr of unnecessary processing capacity to make wine already being made elsewhere in the county.

Just one day's work for the Planning Commission.

If all are approved it will be a notable but not extraordinary addition of urban building projects in the ag zones. After preservationists' defeat at APAC and the election of development oriented Supervisors last year, the county has been on a push to draw down the large backlog of building use permits and modifications being requested. Can they do it faster than new projects are being submitted? Prior to this hearing, the Planning Commission has approved 7 new wineries and 9 major winery modifications this year, more, as the planning director seemed to boast at a recent hearing, than in all of 2016. They represent about:

• 85,000 more visitor slots, meaning perhaps 28,000 more visitors to the county each year
• 150-160 more employees on the roads and looking for affordable housing.
• 270,000 gal/yr of additional unnecessary capacity to make wine already being made elsewhere in the county

Dan Mufson got up at the Supervisors strategic retreat on Apr 24 th with a simple recommendation to begin to address the affordable housing issues (and the traffic issues) that everyone, even the Supes, now sees as the lamentable future of the county: stop building wineries. The same amount of Napa wine will be sold each year whether theses projects are built or not. And some of the County's service costs to deal with the ever increasing tourism population will be curbed. It should be a no-brainier.

The Poetry Inn road exception request was an unexpected addition to he agenda. It shows the limits that the county may be willing to go to insure that all 4500 10+ acre parcels of land in the county's ag preserve and ag watershed zones can be maximized to their urban development potential. Vineyards may survive in the county, as vanity statements of the good life, but the price to be paid will be 3 houses and a showpiece winery on each parcel to cater to a burgeoning tourist population. Most will require setback variances and road exceptions to be feasible.

As with the Caves at Soda Canyon this would appear to be a totally inappropriate site for an industrial facility, up a road with substandard curves and in this case with a slope exceeding 22%.

And 'A determination was made that the winery use permit was "used" on April 15, 2017.' - 2 weeks before this hearing? Normally there is a 2 year sunset period on use permits if they are not "used". What's going on here?

And the Poetry Inn, a hotel, apparently built on ag land in the mid 2000's based on a b&b that may have been created in the 1990's? The 1983 General Plan allows only agricultural processing (and accessory activities) and farm labor housing. "No other use or development of a parcel located in an agricultural area shall be permitted unless it is needed for the agricultural use of the parcel." What is the story with this developer and why is none of this history at least mentioned in the agenda letter?

This meeting should be about more than just road exceptions.

Update 5/1/17

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NVR 5/2/17: Housing needs dominate Napa supervisors' 'coffee shop' talk
NVR 4/26/17: Napa County supervisors want to get a handle on winery code compliance

I wasn't there. It sounds a bit like the "big picture" strategic planning, i.e. asking what can be done to stop Napa County's continuing urban development in the next 35 years, (and allow an agriculture-based industry to survive), is getting lost in the weeds trying to accommodate the urban problems from previous planning approaches: traffic congestion, affordable housing and, it seems, legitimizing the scofflaws who have been flaunting the rules in expanding their commercial and industrial development into the vineyards.

Dan Mufson suggested one sustainable approach to the problems facing the county going forward: stop building wineries. When you're in a hole stop digging. Affordable housing shortages are the result of the County pushing tourism as the economic engine, an economy dependent on low wage workers.The need for more wineries to process Napa grapes ended long ago. In the first 4 months of this year the planning commission has approved winery projects that will add 150-160 new workers in the county all needing affordable housing, not to mention all of the other services a county provides to its citizens. An upcoming commission hearing will feature 4 more wineries adding 25-36 more employees. [3 approved, 1 continued]

Not only does the county encourage low wage workers by building more tourism venues, but they allocate millions of dollars each year to promote tourism, and events and the good life to be found here. As Supervisor Dillon pointed out existing housing becomes converted into vacation homes and rentals, and a sense of community disappears. And land speculation for vineyard estates puts increasing development pressure on the watersheds.

Sup. Gregory noted that the wine industry provides the tax base of the County, yet as we have seen, a wine industry devoted to tourism creates more problems than it solves. All that tax revenue from Napa's principal "growth" industry doesn't seem to be enough to provide affordable housing, or build a jail or upgrade the sanitary systems or keep the roads paved, and it is left to the residents to vote taxes and fees on themselves to support the growth of the tourism industry. That need for residents to pay for the long term costs of the wine industry's embrace of tourism doesn't seem to be a part of the thinking when talking about a balance between the interests of the industry and the residents. It should be.

Update 4/20/17

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The Board of Supervisors and leaders of County departments will have another strategic planning retreat on Monday, Apr 24th, 2017 to discuss the future of Napa County in light of citizen comments gleaned from 5 community roundtables held in the last month. While there were few outside attendees at the first retreat, the meeting will be open to the public and you are encouraged to attend. The notice with time and location is here.

Gary Margadant sends along these shots of the work of the community roundtable in Yountville on Apr 3rd. Not a great outcry for more tourism development.

A report on the Mar 23rd community roundtable in Napa is here


3/15/17

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NVR 3/15/17: Napa County looks at strengths, weaknesses during retreat

A few community members attended this County workshop on Mar. 14th designed to allow Supervisors and County department heads to sit down together and discuss county strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the coming years. It was a good exercise in team building and displayed a congenial county staff interested in the county's future.

The brief agenda described it as "the first of three strategic planning retreat sessions to identify the Board's priorities over the next three years and develop metrics to evaluate progress in implementing these priorities". There will be two more such staff workshops, on April 24th and May 22.

But before April 24th there WILL be 5 community (public) workshops on Mar 23rd, 28th, 30th, Apr 3rd and Apr 10th to to gather input and ideas for a community vision that can help shape the Board of Supervisors priorities. Meetings will be conducted in English and Spanish.

The notice and locations are here, and meeting dates and locations are also shown on the Calendar.

Update 4/25/17:

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NVR 2/25/17: Napa County says groundwater picture continues to be good

2/15/17:

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This is a summary of documents and posts on Napa County's sustainable groundwater management alternative plan, titled Napa Valley Groundwater Sustainability - A Basin Analysis Report for the Napa Valley Subbasin, in response to the State's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA).

State Links:
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA)
Sustainable Groundwater Alternative Plan description
List and Map of all water district SGM Alternatives with comments
Comments specifically on the Napa County Plan

County Links:
12/13/16 Staff Presentation of supporting documents for the Napa Valley Groundwater Sustainability - A Basin Analysis Report for the Napa Valley Subbasin to the California Dept of Water Resources (DWR), Item 9A on the Board Agenda.
The County's Groundwater Basin Analysis page
The Nov 3rd WICC workshop and draft report
Napa Grand Jury 2014-15 Report on groundwater

Individual Responses:
Donoviel LTE 2/26/17: Concerns over water plan
Gary Margadant:
What is Happening to Our Most Precious and Irreplaceable Resource: Our Water
Letter sent to the BOS on Dec 19th 2016
Chris Malan, Mike Hackett: Napa's Sustainable Groundwater alternative
Dan Mufson: got Water? Will you have water?
Responses to the Draft Napa Valley Basin Analysis Report

Use permits regulate development and activities on properties in Napa County (e.g. at wineries the size, production, visitation, etc.), loosely defined in the Zoning Code. The county Supervisors have a great deal of discretion in adjusting the conditions of the use permits as they see fit upon applicants' requests. On the face of it, one would think there is nothing wrong with that. This, however, presupposes a fair and equitable government that enjoys the trust of the people.

The use permit process begins with the applicant spending thousands of dollars in preparing detailed plans, environmental reports and other studies for staff to review for a recommendation to the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission conducts public hearings attended by the applicant, county staff and legal counsel and the public. Such hearings may extend over two, even three, sessions before the commission approves or denies them. Its decisions may be appealed to the Supervisors involving additional public hearings. The Supervisors' decisions can then be contested in court at enormous costs, as is recently the case with the Syar quarry expansion and the Walt Ranch development.

While the applicant pays for the cost of staff time, he or she does not pay for the long-term costs of staff benefits and pensions, nor for the costs of the county facilities such as utilities, equipment, maintenance and depreciation. Nor does the applicant pay for the tens of thousands in consultants' fees paid by appellants, overwhelmingly meaning the impacted public. One must also consider that a proliferation in use permit applications necessitates ever-increasing numbers of staff. These enormous long-term costs are all borne by the public.

There are also unaccounted costs in lost productivity. The recent application by the Palmaz family to allow it to fly a personal-use helicopter from its property on Hagen Road, has already had three public hearings, each time attended by over 100 citizens, with a fourth scheduled. By the time appeal hearings are over, this use permit process will have cost the citizens between 3,500 and 4,000 hours of unaccounted for loss in productivity. Whether it is for one winery to increase its visitors or for a single person to use his property for the recreational activity of flying his helicopter, this system, in terms of public expenditure and in human capital investment, is grossly out of balance in favor of the applicant.

Equally, if not more important, are ethics issues arising when commissioners and supervisors have more and more discretionary power, which is what use permits give them.

The amounts of money spent on supervisors' election campaigns has mushroomed to obscene levels, primarily funded by wineries and other special interests certainly not motivated by charity but in the hope of gaining favorable outcomes to their use permit applications. The system is so grossly out of kilter that even wineries, that for years have been violating their use permits, not only receive forgiveness but are rewarded with many times over their production and visitation.

When the Reverie Winery received its forgiveness last year, including for serious environmental violations, it was also rewarded with triple its production levels and tenfold its visitation. Before the ink had dried on its new use permit, it turned around and sold it within days after the supervisors added millions of value in scandalous rewards.

If you are the director of corporate development for a winery tour company that relies on good winery relations for access, as one of our commissioners is, or a supervisor voting for a large donor's use permit, would it not be fair for the public to question the independence of their vote?

This is not a government that can be trusted - even in appearance - to make equitable and unbiased administration of the power it keeps giving to itself in the form of the use permit process?

There are measures that can be employed toward a solution.

First: For the government to regain credibility, any commissioners and supervisors who have a direct or proximate interest or have received substantial financial contributions from an industry or an individual seeking a use permit must recuse themselves from voting on them.

Second: A serious effort must be made to substantially tighten the Zoning Code - perhaps review it every five years - so that what is permitted and what is not, is clear. This will reduce the number of use permit applications, limiting the discretionary power of commissioners and supervisors. It will also reduce the cost in both monetary and human capital expended in the inefficient and unfair current system.

Finally, it will free up staff, commissioners and supervisors to allow them to devote their energy in addressing the fundamental issues the county is facing now and into the future.

NVR 4/19/17: Napa County's 2016 crops worth a record $737 million -- nearly all wine grapes

The numbers of the latest Napa County Crop Report are out. The county's Crop Report archive is here. The crop reports make for interesting reading even if you're not into crop reports because of the agrarian drawings and paintings of budding young artists that illustrate them. The 2016 contest winners are here. There are other graphs and photos and news and historical articles as well which liven up the raw numbers.

The ever increasing value of the Napa grape crop is always of great interest to everyone: it is a nominal sign of the health of the industry and the potential for the survival of an economy based on agriculture rather than, say, tourism. The value of this increase was put into a chart in the 2013 Report, page 6 here. Economists and stock market analysts might have some concern when seeing price gains such as these, but obviously the industry takes pride in the numbers. The increased value of the crop probably comes from different sources. The often stated reason is that the wines made from them are so good that the price is justified. In fact, it is probably simple supply and demand: as the total crop is divided among more and more vanity labels (175 new wineries have been created since 2006), each willing to pay any price to build their high-end brands, the price has exploded.

From an urban development standpoint it is not the rise of the crop value, but the stability of the supply that has interested me. In 2016 43,000 producing acres of grapes were harvested in Napa County. In 2006, the number was 42,188 acres. In 2008 it was at 42,870 and has gone up and down by less than 2% since, a normal seasonal variation.



Yet my intuition over these 10 years, as I have driven up from Berkeley each weekend, is that a fair number of vineyards have come online in that period. Is it true that vineyard creation stopped in 2006?

In the article (and later directly verified), Planning Director Morrison indicated that 4,347 gross acres of vineyard development has been approved since 2006, a period in which approvals have been slowing. That would translate to perhaps 3477 net acres of actual vines. While not all of those would be producing acres in 2016, it can be assumed that there is an equal quantity (or more) of vineyard acres approved before 2006 that began producing in the 2006-2016 period. So at least 3400+ acres of new vines have probably been added to the "producing" acerage since 2006, but only a 1000 acre increase has shown up in crop reports.

Why are approvals for new vineyard developments not translating into a similar increase in the Napa crop acerage being harvested? Where are the missing 2400+ acres? From the perspective of someone concerned about the urban development of the county, I would like to know what that missing acerage is currently being used for.

Regarding "Supervisors OK definition of ag zoning,” (April 10):

Defining agriculture, a seemingly simple task, (Webster New World Dictionary: "The science and art of farming; work of cultivating the soil, producing crops, and raising livestock" but, as it relates to the county General Plan, land use policy, codes and ordinances, thoughts of various trade and citizen groups, etc., has proven vexing over the past decades and an exemplar of the saying, "the devil is in the details."

On April 1, 2008, the Board of Supervisors proclaimed April to be Agricultural Preserve Appreciation Month and pledged to support the letter and intent of the Ag Preserve. That proclamation honored the visionary leaders who in the late 1960s, "...realized that agriculture is and should continue to be the predominant land use in the fertile valley and foothill areas of Napa County, where uses incompatible to agriculture should be precluded and where the development of urban type uses would be detrimental to continuance of agriculture and the maintenance of open spaces, which are economic and aesthetic attributes and assets of Napa County."

The proclamation also summarized several milestones:

• April 9, 1968, the Supervisors adopted Ordinance 274, establishing the Ag Preserve District (APD) protecting 25,950 acres from urban development;
• 1979, Supervisors adopted Ordinance 610, increasing the minimum parcel size in the APD from 20 acres to 40 acres;
• 1980, voters passed Measure A, limiting the population growth in the unincorporated county areas to 1 percent per year;
• Nov. 6, 1990, voters passed Measure J, which spoke to certain land use elements of the General Plan of June 7, 1983 and prohibited changes without a vote of the people.

The Finding and Purpose Section of Measure J reads, in part, "Uncontrolled urban encroachment into agricultural and watershed areas will impair agriculture and threaten the public health, safety and welfare by causing increased traffic congestion, associated air pollution and potentially serious water problems, such as pollution, depletion and sedimentation of available water resources. Such urban encroachment, or 'leap-frog development,' would eventually result in both the unnecessary, expensive extension of public services and facilities and inevitable conflicts between urban and agricultural uses.”

Measure J was tested all the way to the California Supreme Court where it was upheld. Subsequently, Measure P, which readopted portions of the General Plan land use tenets of J, viz., agricultural, watershed and open space lands could not be re-designated and made available for more intensive development without a vote of the people.

Over the years, something has gone terribly awry with the codification and implementation of the vision and wisdom of the leaders in the 1960s, the drafters of Measures J and P and the wishes of the people who voted for them. Decades ago, the activities of agriculture, (for which there was little or no regulatory restriction) were pretty much as Webster's definition encompassed and the "rural lifestyle" people enjoyed and many still seek, existed. Over time, more and different activities have been added or changed to those originally assigned to agriculture.

Recently, activities related not to agriculture, per se, but to the business of it, such as housing, marketing, branding, entertaining, serving food, and it seems from the level of limo and general traffic, have taken center stage ahead of the product (wine) and have resulted in the uber-glitzy experiences that have been leapfrogging through the Valley.

The regulatory language related to the implementation of what was meant to protect the Valley, its farming and its citizens has been ratified without attention to California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and environmental impact report analyses, resulting in the problems we experience currently and those that the visionaries hoped to avoid. They include multiple ecological degradations, markedly increased traffic congestion, resulting in increased driving hazards and road damage, pressure on all infrastructure spheres, to name a few.

It seems there are two basic camps regarding the latest revisions to the definition of agriculture and modification of the zoning code that the Supervisors favored in their vote of the first reading on April 3. One seems to view it as "no big deal" and a mere alignment of regulatory language, and the other, to which I belong, views it not only as an assault on the English language, but, more importantly, as an assault on the hope and expectations of the visionaries and the will of the people who passed Measures J and P.

Land-use changes can only be made solely by the Supervisors if certain, specific conditions are met, and they are not in this case. Therefore, I think the Supervisors should place this as an initiative for the voters to decide in 2018. If you agree that the electorate should have a say in this matter, please let your Supervisor know ASAP since their second vote will probably be coming soon.

NVR LTE version 4/19/17: The definition of agriculture

Update 4/19/17

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Some of the members of the Soda Canyon community on their way to the hearing on the very inaccessible Caves at Soda Canyon winery almost didn't arrive because of a typical example of inaccessibility on our road.



Update 3/27/17

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Just another day on the road.





Update 2/15/17

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Residents send along these photos of an encounter that may become all too familiar along the grade: stranded tour buses awaiting reinforcements in their assault on the Rector plateau.







And the final indignity below: being towed from in front of the Mountain Peak site (probably the first place they were able to turn around after being hauled up the grade?).



It appears that the van was headed to the Beau Vine vineyard as part of a release party at their nascent winery on the Trail at Soda Canyon Road. Approval of modification to the Beau Vingne winery just happened at the planning commission (the hearing is item 9B here) in what one could only consider as a love-fest about what Napa "family" wineries should be about.

The visit to the vineyard in conjunction to a event at the winery does raise a question that I have always had about visitation to vineyards as opposed to wineries. Visitation to wineries is regulated to the nth degree, implying that unpermitted tourism visitation to vineyards might be illegal. Is that true? Even as an opponent of tourism to remote areas of the county, if the allowance of vineyard visitation defuses the need to build wineries in remote vineyards, that is a much preferable alternative. Provided that visits to vineyards don't become events, with food service and large quantities of people, there should be some codification of the process which does not now exist. (Of course, containing the extent of a privilege once codified has been at the heart of problems now confronting the county.)

2/2/15

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It begins again, our first for 2015, overloaded vineyard truck dead on last curve, had to be towed with tractor.

Why is the Napa County Chain of Command plaque in the basement of the County Administration Building, where almost no one sees it? CITIZENS are at the top of the organizational chart of Napa County, so why do supervisors hold public input sessions where none of the supervisors show up? In their place they send expensive, paid consultants to make expensive reports about what we say, paid for by our taxes. You do not hear it from US.

Supervisors and Commissioners: here are some suggestions for more transparency in decisions that affect our county:

1. Be clear about who you have talked to and what about, before taking any vote on a new winery, vineyard, heliport, etc.Disclose not only these conversations but also fiduciary and business relationships, including cumulative campaign donations from project owners. If a campaign donation surpasses $500, recuse yourself from from discussions about or voting on the issue.
   
   
2. Without a strict Conflict of Interest Ordinance/policy the public’s trust is violated and suffers.
   
   
3. During the decision-making process, treat citizens’ expertise with respect. There is an apparent lack of regard or weight paid to citizens’ knowledge of issues, concerns of risks/negative impacts to their well-being and damage to the environment. Three minutes for public comment is too short. It is insulting to let a project’s consultants go on and on, and then cut off citizens who often have more accurate and critical information than the consultant . There is also no serious deliberation about the points we raise.
   
   
4. Hold town hall or public comment meetings on evenings or Saturdays in larger venues where more can attend, including working families. Involve Youth. Make sure so-called town hall meetings are attended by two supervisors and/or commissioners.
   
   
5. Provide supporting data of any project to the public at least a week before a hearing.
   
   
6. Have district supervisors and their appointed commissioners hold monthly town hall meetings in their districts with the electorate.
   
   
7. And last, but not least, move the chain of command plaque to the main lobby and have a copy of it outside the 3rd story, Board of Supervisors chamber, where we all can be reminded of it every time we meet!

And By The Way! Join us at the all day Board of Supervisors' Strategic Planning Session on Monday, April 24, 2017, 8:30AM-5PM. They need our input! Held at the Napa Valley College Community Room. Details to follow.

Occasionally, in Planning Commission and Board meetings, references are made to the Environmental Impact Report done for the 2008 General Plan update. (As mentioned in this NVR article.

The county's 2008 General Plan documents are here. The DEIR and FEIR for the General Plan, unfortunately, are presented somewhat randomly as atomized documents in the PBES archive. The PBES archive is here. Select the pull down menu "Filter by Category -> Planning - Environmental Document" to bring up the documents.

I have take the liberty of organizing some of the documents here:

2008 General Plan DEIR
Full Document
Appendices Table of Contents (find appendix documents in PBES archive)

2008 General Plan FEIR Vol I
Cover
Title Page
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
Text Changes to DEIR
Preferred Plan
References

2008 General Plan FEIR Vol II (Comments and Responses)
Cover
Title Page
Table of Contents
Introduction
responses - agencies A-Z
responses - agencies AA-II
responses - letters 1-50
responses - letters 51-100
responses - letters 101-125
responses - letters 126-150 (missing)
responses - letter 151
responses - Letter 152
responses - letters 153-188
responses - Public Hearing comments

Update 4/14/17

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NVR 4/7/17: Napa County approves a winery on an 'eyesore' Calistoga site
NVR 4/14/17: Napa County planners approve South Whitehall Lane winery

Update 2/19/17

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NVR 2/19/17: Napa County Planning Commission delays winery decision amid flood concerns

The Flynnville proposal was continued just before lunch. Surprisingly, it was not to be the major time-consumer of the day. That honor fell to the tiny, 10000 gal/yr, no-visitation Whitehall Lane Winery, a proposal so modest that it was hard to imagine any controversy given the now weekly approval of multiple wineries at the planning commission. The difference? The project is surrounded by respected resident growers and winery owners who don't want another building project (particularly one done by a spec developer) in their neighborhood. Yes, many of the complaints revolved around the drainage issues of Bale Slough that flows through the site (just as the depletion of groundwater became an issue for a respected neighboring vintner on Flynnville.) But as we know, and as Comm. Scott mentioned earlier in the day, these battles must be fought on the technical, "fact-based", nitty gritty issues that can be reduced to numerical "standards" and CEQA subsections. They are not fought over the real and non-quantifiable concern that the ever proliferating building projects are destroying the rural character and way of life that residents, growers, vintners and weekenders alike all treasure. It is that visceral concern that (IMHO) brings forth the energy and money necessary for the fight. Technical problems can be negotiated with technical fixes and CEQA "mitigations". There is no mitigation for the loss of a treasured rural character and way of life.

One of the great disappointments in the ongoing proliferation of winery projects these last 3 years has been the unwillingness of growers and vintners to confront the urbanization of agricultural lands until the buildings are proposed in their own backyard. Growers and vintners ("people who don't normally come to speak to us" in Chair Gill's words) have a great deal more power in convincing county officials than other residents. By remaining quiet they are insuring that eventually their backyards will be filled with building projects, and the rural character of the county that they appreciate and that is their livelihood is sure to disappear. [The project was a continued]

2/15/17

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NVR 2/15/17: Worried about size, Napa County delays proposed Calistoga winery
2/15/17 hearing agenda and documents

Napa County Planning Commissioners sent the Flynnville Winery proposal back to staff indicating that the "size and scale" of a winery of 60,000 gal/yr, 25 visitors and 15 employees/day located on Hwy 29 next to the Castello di Amorosa on a brownfield site was inappropriately large. A month and a half earlier 3 of those commissioners approved a winery of 100,000 gal/yr, 60 visitors and 19 employees/day 6 miles up a mountainous dead-end road in an area with virtually no previous tourism, on a site that a requires the removal of 10% of existing vineyards to accommodate the project. I don't disagree with their decision on Flynnville. I strenuously disagree with their decision on Mountain Peak.

Despite many proscriptions in the county's winery definition ordinance, there is no definition of appropriate capacity or visitation. County Planning Dir. Morrison attempted to reduce the arbitrariness with Proposal X in the APAC hearings last year tying both to parcel size, an idea pooh-poohed by the wine industry members and eventually shot down by the Supervisors. Applicants are free to propose capacity and visitation based on their "business plan" which itself is never scrutinized. Staff shows the commissioners comparable existing wineries with similar capacity to assess the appropriateness of visitation. There is no metric to assess the capacity. The grapes grown on the gerrymandered Flynnville site might be enough for 2500 gallons of 75% wine each year. 60,000 gal/yr is just an arbitrary number.

As shown in the county crop reports, the number of acres in vines in the county have not increased much since 2006. But some 6mil gallons of capacity have been approved in that same period. At present all new wineries and winery expansions in the county will have to poach grape sources already used to make wine elsewhere, merely shifting the location of grape processing. Winery capacity, a permanent entitlement that "goes with the land" is often justified on the basis of grape contracts that developers claim to have. Those contracts may have been owned by someone else in the previous year and can be bought by another (desperate) new winery developer before this winery is even built.

The capacity and visitation decisions are left to individual commissioners' sense of appropriateness. (They are given the discretion to deny a project as well but have done so in only one previous project - the original, over-the-top Flynnville proposal made in 2013.) The arbitrariness of their decisions often leaves one shaking one's head in despair as tourist venues continue to proliferate in the agricultural zones.

Most new projects and expansions are in fact being proposed simply to provide additional venues for wine tourism. Unfortunately the growth of the tourism industry has much different impacts on the environment than agricultural processing. By presenting the marketing and sales of wine ( i.e. tourism) as "agriculture" in the 2008 General Plan (policy AG/LU-2 on page 13 here), the analysis of the impacts of tourism development were conveniently avoided in the EIR leading to 2008 General Plan adoption.

A wine-tourism economy has impacts. It inflates rural land values and labor costs and urbanizes the rural environment, undermining the profitability of an agricultural product that must compete in a global market to exist. Winery tourism brings an ever increasing labor force into rural areas and an ever increasing number of tourists to be housed and fed and transported by ever more employees in the municipalities. It is a cascade of urban development impacts that we are already experiencing in traffic, loss of affordable housing, infrastructure taxes, natural resource degradation and the changing rural and small town character so important to us all.

ACEagle 4/5/17: City officials criticize Watson Ranch talks with Caltrans

The hardest work developers do is probably not the building of projects, but the cajoling, coercing or bamboozling of taxpayers and governments into paying for the infrastructure necessary to make their projects, and profits, possible. It is no coincidence that our current developer-president is proposing a massive public expenditure in infrastructure in opposition to his own party's conservative orthodoxy. Developers everywhere are no doubt slavering at the thought.

The real question is who, beyond the developers and their campaign contribution recipients, benefit from the projects. The taxes and fees that developers and government officials claim will be generated by the projects will never offset that costs of the impacts that must be addressed at public expense. Taxpayers and residents will end up paying more to accommodate the increased costs for road, sanitation and water systems, for emergency services, and school expansions. In the process the environment becomes more dense, urbanized and congested, and the rural small-town character of the county, often extolled by officials in comparison to the suburban sprawl of the rest of the Bay Area, will continue to disappear.

There are places willing and committed to turn their open space into urban agglomerations, providing jobs and housing for an ever expanding population and they should be encouraged to do so. But Napa County has a viable agricultural resource and industry that requires a different vision of its future, and it should be acting, even in its municipalities, to protect that vision from the constant promotion of urbanization by developers.

NVR LTE 5/2/17: Sell the wine or sell the winery
NVR LTE 6/6/16: Enough to focus minds?
NVR LTE 10/25/15: Question: What's in it for Napa County?
NVR LTE 9/28/15: Why the bombast and ad hominem attacks?
NVR LTE 8/28/15: Wine industry should work for transparency

NVR 3/25/17: Citizens pepper Napa County leaders with ideas for the future

The BOS strategic meeting at McPherson Elementary 3/23, was attended by 27 residents, 14 staff (including 2 moderators) BUT no Supervisors.

Staff included Leanne Link (CEO), Helen Franchi, Molly Rattigan, Greg Morgan, etc.

Kathy Felch and David Hallett walked out - Yerios, Barry Eberling, Myself, David & Cindy Heitzman, Tony Norris & Chris Malan, Jana Waldinger and Lowell Downey.
Kathy and David had a long contentious discussion with Leanne Link and Molly Rattigan outside the door after leaving.

The meeting started off badly when the crowd realized the Supervisors, not even one for welcome, would show. They are living in a bubble and only want public interaction on a 3 min or private office basis. Both Diane and AP attended the WICC meeting from 3-5:30, so they were both mobile and nearby, but no show.

Excuse from Leanne: Brown act problems if all the supes were in the same room with the crowd.... Also, the public talks too much and too long (my words - but her emphasis)

The staff & moderator questions were geared to public with little experience with Supervisors - I will be sending around a copy of their guidance flyer used. Essentially it was humiliating to experience their perception (paradigm) of the public's government experience.

More to follow.

WineSearcher 3/27/17: Napa Vineyard Sale's Knock-on Price Effect

SRPressDemocrat 3/23/17: Gallo buys Napa County vineyard

Winespectator 3/23/17: Gallo Buys Stagecoach Vineyard and its 600 Acres of Napa Valley Hillside Vines

NVR 3/23/17: Gallo buys Napa's Stagecoach Vineyard

Winespectator 6/9/16: E. & J. Gallo Purchases Wine Brand Orin Swift Cellars

Please note in the articles that Gallo is considering planting another 100 acres, the same acres, no doubt, that Dr. Krupp decided to back away from in the face of a $220,000 EIR, and the knowledge that someone else would be along shortly to deal with it.

At the Yountville City Council on Mar 21st, 2017, the residents of Soda Canyon Road presented a white paper on the dangers of the potential pollution of Rector Creek and Rector Reservoir caused by the construction of the Mountain Peak project. The project envisions moving massive amounts of earth around on a constrained site bordering one blue line tributary to the reservoir and bisected by another.

The construction calls for 29,500 cubic yards of cave spoils, another 19,000 cy of other excavation, the removal of approx 7 acres of topsoil so that the excavated spoils can be distributed on the site and then the recovering of the spoils with the topsoil (calculations here). The excavated crushpad, through which all of the cave excavation must be moved, is within 100 ft of Rector tributary. A major fill area, comprising 2 acres of soil removal, placement of spoils and redistribution of topsoil, is just adjacent the tributary that bisects the site. A second area of fill surrounds a wetlands area of the site that also drains within a few hundred feet into the canyon.

The environmental concerns are obvious. Silting from vineyard development in the Rector watershed in the 1990's caused damage to the Rector Reservoir filtration system resulting in millions of dollars in repairs. The county should be requiring Environmental Impact Reports (EIR's) to assess similar impacts on this project and other land clearing projects now going on in the watershed. The Mountain Peak project was approved by the Napa County Planning Commission on a 3-1 vote at the beginning of the year and is now on appeal to the Napa Board of Supervisors. An EIR should be required.

Rector Watershed White Paper

20 March 2017

Napa County Board of Supervisors
Chair Alfredo Pedroza and Supervisors:
Brad Wagenknecht
Ryan Gregory
Diane Dillon
Belia Ramos

re: Changes to Definition of Agriculture (§18.08.040)

The stated “purpose and intent of the proposed ordinance amendments are to conform the definition of agriculture in the County Code with the definition adopted in the 2008 General Plan." AG/LU-2.1 is relied upon for authority.

Action Item AG/LU-2.1: Amend County Code to reflect the definition of “agriculture” as set forth within this plan, ensuring that wineries and other production facilities remain as conditional uses except as provided for in Policy AG/LU-16, and that marketing activities and other accessory uses remain incidental and subordinate to the main use.

AG/LU-2.1 does NOT mandate amending Napa County Code §18.08.040 to include additional uses into the definition of agriculture. These additional uses have already been populated into the code, ie: §§ 18.08.370, 18.08.620, 18.16.030 and 18.20.030. Marketing activities at wineries have been further clarified by Ordinance No. 1340 and Resolution No. 2010-48.

The mandate of AG/LU-2.1 is to ensure that the identified uses remain conditional uses that require a use permit. As currently proposed, the ordinance, instead, has the potential to undermine our agricultural land protections by unnecessarily creating conflict and uncertainty within the code itself.

1) The proposed ordinance amendments §18.08.040.D & .E create conflict within current code.

§§18.16.020 and 18.20.020 mandate that “Agriculture” shall be allowed in all AP and AW districts without a use permit:

Chapter 18.16 AP AGRICULTURAL PRESERVE DISTRICT
§18.16.020 - Uses allowed without a use permit.

The following uses shall be allowed in all AP districts without use permits:
A. Agriculture;

Chapter 18.20 AW AGRICULTURAL WATERSHED DISTRICT
§18.20.020 - Uses allowed without a use permit.

The following uses shall be allowed in all AW districts without use permits:
A. Agriculture;

If §18.08.040 is amended to include additional uses to be conditioned by use permit (§18.08.040 D & E), those sections will be in conflict with the mandate of §§18.16.020 and 18.20.020 to allow “agriculture” (as defined by §18.08.040) without a use permit (“by right”).

How will such conflict and uncertainty ultimately be resolved? Instead of ensuring that these uses remain “incidental and subordinate”, addition of these uses into the definition of “Agriculture”

§18.08.040 may ultimately allow them by right, without a use permit, in any zone that allows "agriculture" as defined by §18.08.040.

2) Such accessory uses will also be protected by Napa County’s “right to farm”:

Chapter 2.94 AGRICULTURE AND RIGHT TO FARM
§2.94.010 - Definitions.
"Agriculture" shall have the same meaning as "agriculture" as defined in Section 18.08.040 of this code.

§2.94.010 (4)
"Agricultural operation" means all operations necessary to conduct agriculture as defined in Section 18.08.040 of this code...

§2.94.020 - Right to farm - Conditions.
No existing or future agricultural activity, operation or facility, or any of its appurtenances, ... shall be or become a nuisance, public or private, due to any changed condition in or about the county, ...
(Emphasis added)

Marketing and such “accessory” uses clearly are not intended to be afforded Napa County’s right-to- farm protections. But, the word "shall" is mandatory and legally binding - it allows no discretionary interpretation. Once the proposed definition is adopted, all uses identified in §18.08.040 will be protected by Napa County right-to-farm regulations. Napa County will have no means to mitigate the detrimental impacts of such urban uses on ag lands.

Not only does the ordinance as presented have the potential to create conflict within County code, it is redundant and not necessary to achieve the mandate of AG/LU-2.1, which is to ensure that the identified uses remain conditional uses that require a use permit. Current code already requires agricultural processing facilities to obtain use permits; “marketing, sales and other accessory uses” are already conditioned by use permit and required by code to be “incidental and subordinate to the main use”.

I urge you NOT to carelessly approve changes to the definition of agriculture, §18.08.040. The consequences, unintended or otherwise, will ultimately facilitate even more destruction of our ag lands, which we are losing daily, inch by inch, through conversion to increasingly urban uses, under the mask of “agriculture.”

Norma J. Tofanelli
Fourth-generation Calistoga farmer

PDF version of this letter is here

Update 3/16/17: Editor's note: On Mar 21st 2017 the Board of Supervisors will consider changes to the County Code of Ordinances to reflect 2008 changes to the General Plan which include agricultural processing, tourism processing (marketing) and farmworker housing projects all as part of the definition of agriculture. (item 9H here)

12/1/17
[letter first published in this NapaVision2050 newsletter in Dec 2016]

Prior to the 2008 County General Plan (GP) update, the definition of Agriculture in our County ordinance was quite simple: Agriculture is the growing of crops, trees, and livestock. Many other uses may be permitted/allowed but must remain related, subordinate, and incidental to the main use.

We are a county that has valued our Ag lands. In 1968 the Napa County Board of Supervisors (BOS) put in place the Ag Preserve, the first ever in United States, which protects most of our lands outside of cities and towns from development.

However, the huge success of the Napa wine industry during the 80’s necessitated an ordinance to keep winery development consistent with the protection of Ag Preserve. On January 23, 1990, the Board of Supervisors (BOS) approved the Winery Definition Ordinance (WDO). This ordinance defined a winery as an “agricultural processing facility” for “the fermenting and processing of grape juice into wine.” The ordinance also allowed for wineries to sell and market wine, but such marketing activity must be “accessory” and subordinate to production.

THE CHANGES IN 2008 AND WHY THESE SHOULD CONCERN YOU:

Every 10 years the Napa County General Plan (GP) is updated. The Steering Committee for the 2008 update was comprised mostly of industry representatives and winery owners eager to expand their business options. The updated GP, approved by the Board of Supervisors on June 3, 2008, expanded the definition of Agriculture to include not only the raising of crops, trees, and livestock, but also the production and processing of agricultural products and related marketing, sales and other accessory uses. Agriculture now also includes farm management and farmworker housing.

The second event began with the economic downturn of 2008. The wine industry pressured the BOS to include direct marketing as an accessory use of agriculture. The BOS approved this in 2010. This means that VISITATION, WINE AND FOOD PAIRINGS, AND RELATED EVENTS, are consistent with “accessory use of agriculture”.

RIGHT-TO-FARM COMPLICATIONS

For parcels zoned Ag Preserve (AP) or Ag Watershed (AW), agriculture is a use “by right” (without a use permit). And the Right-to-Farm ordinance (signed by everyone buying property in Napa County) states that the County will not consider the inconveniences or discomforts arising from agricultural operations to be a nuisance. If you live next to a vineyard or winery, you have to accept the noise, odors, dust, chemicals, and operation of machinery which go along with agriculture. If you object, your alternative is to go to court.

VIOLATIONS OF MEASURE P AND MEASURE J

What happens, then, when visitation, wine and food pairings, often four or five course meals, and outdoor marketing events are included in the Definition of Agriculture— not just accessory uses?

Are these marketing events provided the same level of protection under the Right-to-Farm as those of actually farming? Are these uses consistent with the protections of Measure J, the 1990 initiative amending the Napa County general plan that sought to preserve all agriculturally designated land? Any change in agricultural land use must be with voter approval. RESTAURANTS ARE SPECIFICALLY CITED AS GROWTH THAT HAS TO GO INTO THE CITIES OR ONE OF THE VERY SMALL URBAN NODES IN THE UNINCORPORATED AREA, UNLESS VOTERS ARE WILLING TO ALLOW AN EXCEPTION.

What about Housing on Ag lands in this Change of Definition of Agriculture? Who really qualifies as a Farmworker – often called Agricultural Workers? Are the chefs or kitchen/wait staff at wineries and event centers the new Farmworkers? Can high-density housing be built on our Ag Preserve and Ag Watershed lands to accommodate them?

Changing agricultural lands to include expanded commercial uses (by right) violates the intensity of uses and protections under Measure P, which extends Measure J’s protections until 2058.

One of the key phrases in Measure P: to protect the County's agricultural, watershed, and open space lands, to strengthen the local agricultural community and preserve the County's rural way of life. By expanding what is allowed (whether by right or by permit), the rural way of life is/can be destroyed. The number of unintended consequences is significant.

This issue will be coming to the Board of Supervisors soon. Please contact your Supervisor requesting that the definition to Agriculture not be modified until all the unintended consequences are understood.

Diane Dillon
Alfredo Pedroza
Ryan Gregory
Brad Wagenknecht
Belia Ramos

At the Mar 15th, 2017 use permit hearing for the Raymond Winery, in her dissenting opinion to the 3-2 approval of the project, Commissioner Anne Cottrell made a statement that should be considered as a "standard condition of approval" for any winery asking for forgiveness for use permit non-compliance. After citing several objections to the application, she said:

"My biggest issue of concern about this project is the issue of non-compliance... We have several violations that have occurred over quite some length of time. I think about other projects that this commission has seen. Two that jump to mind are the Caves at Soda Canyon and Summers Winery, both of which had fewer violations than we have at present. In both those situations the Planning Commission said to the applicant you need to live within the terms of your use permit before we will grant an expansion of entitlements. We've also heard from the community the importance of this body being consistant in applying the rules and regulations. I feel that if we have asked other violators to live within the terms of the use permit, we need to ask that of Raymond as well. It's worth noting that problems with non-compliance are not just about checking boxes to say we're following the rules. It goes beyond that. It's not only an unfair business advantage to other wineries who are following the rules, but it's also straying from the General Plan's goal to protect the Ag Preserve. The General Plan and the county codes flow from the concept of ag protection, and the violation of those codes undermines the ag preserve."

Two articles point to big problems for the agriculture and and tourism industries:

LA Times 3/17/17: Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job
NVR 3/15/17: Napa hospitality businesses collaborate in new ways to find workers

Update 3/16/17

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Editor's note: NVR 3/16/17: Napa officials talk about scrapping Hwy 29 widening in American Canyon

This is one of the few government acknowledgements that road widening doesn't relieve traffic congestion, it enables future development and induces traffic increases to fill the lanes available, a fact already known to traffic researchers. This comes one day after the City of American Canyon presented their plans to widen Hwy 29 to encourage more development. The NVTA director then took issue with the reporting on this article in an editorial here. Kudos to the NVTA.

10/4/16

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Dignitaries always flock to ribbon-cutting photo ops, but established traffic findings throw a damper on the champagne.

Research at UC Davis -- one of the best in the nation on traffic studies -- has shown that the widening of traffic arteries does not alleviate traffic congestion. In fact, as Professor Susan Handy who was a contributor to that research explained during her last April's presentation at the NV2050 Forum on the Tourism Economy, the widening of traffic arteries alleviates traffic congestion for between one and two years and then makes congestion even worse than it was before. Though Caltrans has not yet adopted that policy, it has posted it on its website. In the face of overwhelming evidence, it will surely follow in time.

That the widening of arteries alleviates traffic congestion is intuitive but the reason why it makes it worse is more complicated.

During the congestion easing phase, all traffic increasing projects which undergo CEQA review evaluate current traffic conditions and are given a green light on their traffic impacts which they might not have gotten had those improvements not taken place. In other words, more traffic-increasing projects are approved than would have been otherwise. This facilitates more traffic until the previous saturation point is reached. But the net effect is that more traffic is dumped on the side streets of communities and overall congestion gets worse. Not to mention increased parking requirements.

A great example of this pattern is the Highway 29/Trancas Street underpass. For those who remember traffic conditions before those improvements more than a decade ago, there was a bottleneck at that location but nowhere else further Upvalley. That ribbon cutting celebrated the easing of traffic congestion. But here we are today, the percentage of pass-through traffic remains at less than 10 percent, but additional development was facilitated by valid CEQA review and here we are with the intolerable conditions of today.

It is great that the eyesore utilities have been placed underground and that the easier left turns will facilitate better traffic flow for a while, but overall traffic will increase because of them. When the rest of the developed world is abandoning traffic lights in favor of roundabouts, St. Helena will get one more of those traffic-delaying relics to facilitate an unwise development project. Make no mistake; even more development will slip under the CEQA radar during the coveted window and the quality of life of local up-valley communities will suffer.

Sip the bubbly with caution!

Weekly Calistogan 10/4/16: Highway improvements will increase traffic
Barry Eberling series: Traffic Tales of Napa County

It's in there. Will it kill you?

Update 7/12/17

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Nvr 7/12/17: Napa County offers information on glyphosate (Roundup)

Update 6/27/17

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Reuters 6/26/17: California to list glyphosate as cancer-causing; Monsanto vows fight

Update3/14/17

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NYTimes 3/14/17: Unsealed Documents Raise Questions on Monsanto Weed Killer

KGO-TV 4/28/16: Weed Killer could be lurking in some California wines

"A lab test of 10 California wines concluded they all contain the active ingredient from weed-killer, glyphosate, a chemical classified a 'probable carcinogen' by the World Health Organization. This I-Team investigation is sending shock waves through wine country."

NVR 5/23/16: Activists stir debate over reported weed killer in wines
Wine Industry Insight 5/3/16: Some see conspiracy in missing wine-pesticide story pulled by San Francisco TV station
WineWaterWatch page on the issue with screen shots and transcript of the piece
The original Moms Across America article is here