Bill Hocker | Sep 17, 2015

NVR 9/17/15: Depleted Planning Commission tackles winery recommendations

Another bit of theater occurred at the Sept 16th, 2015 County Planning Commission. Agricultural Protection Advisory Committee chairman Ted Hall was due to present the recommendations of 3 months of APAC meetings to the commission. But a very unusual procedural matter needed to be attended to first: an anonymous charge of conflict of interest, as defined by the regulations of the state Fair Political Practices Commission, was lodged against Chair Phillips within the previous 24 hours because she is the owner of a winery and vineyards and might have a stake in certain APAC recommendations.

The charge was not completely unusual. She had also recused herself under a threatened conflict of interest action by developer Eric Sklar in the Yountville Hill hearing. In that case it was for potentially (though not in fact) owning property too close to the proposed winery.

In most cases conflict of interest charges are made against officials that might profit financially from the decisions that they make. An argument might be made, for example, that one commissioner, as a director at a limo company that makes the rounds of all the wineries, improves his business potential with each project he approves. Yet he has never been challenged. As Dan Mufson of Napa Vision 2050 asked skeptically at the meeting: Why today? Why on this issue?

The answer: Commissioner Phillips has been challenged both times because of her critical attitude toward tourism-winery development and proliferation, an attitude that runs afoul of every wealthy developer wishing to maximize winery visitation to increase profits. But it is also an attitude that, if translated into policy, would actually diminish the potential profits to be made from her own business.

The intent of the FPPC statutes, if not their exact letter, is to protect the political process from the greed of public officials. In this case, however, they have been used as a weapon to eliminate officials that might stand in the way of private greed.

By the luck of the draw, in a process sanctioned by the FPPC, this attempt to thwart critical governmental oversight of development interests may have backfired. Commissioner Phillips has been retained and will have a larger voice in the commissions deliberations than she might have otherwise had. And I hope that she takes every advantage of that fate. Yet it is still sad to witness the attempt to manipulate government oversight through anonymous letters or open threats, and I would rather see the full commission, now, just as in the Yountville Hill hearing, debating the issues together.

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With the formalities over and Commissioners Scott, Phillips and Cottrell on the dais, Mr. Hall made his presentation.

He said something in his opening remarks that struck me as an effort to clarify some of the angst the industry has toward this process. "For most of us [the Napa Valley] is a beautiful scene, one well worth preserving in its current form ... Importantly we are not trying to alter or unwind the pattern of land use that has already evolved, but we are here to address the future pattern of land use in the ag preserve." I was heartened by the expression "worth preserving in its current form". In that consideration "landscape" would have been a better term to use because the current "pattern of land use" that he is not trying to alter or unwind involves the construction of ever more buildings in the landscape. Was the intention to suggest a similar pattern of land use in the future? Probably not. I know this is being a bit precious with semantics. But as we have discovered in the discussion around the definition of agriculture, semantics have consequences.

After the discussion the Commission voted to send the unanimous APAC recommendations, the "low hanging fruit", on to the Board. They included:
1. avoid the use of variances to enable projects
2. use of Framework X for winery guideline development.
3. implement self-certification program for use permit compliance
7. prohibit hold and haul wastewater disposal at wineries
11. share production reporting with and encourage reporting from municipalities

and one supermajority recommendation:
10. a laundry list of good government exhortations plus a commitment to CAP, traffic mitigations, and the "growth" summit.

The other APAC recommendations will be tackled by the "depleted" commission in subsequent meetings outlined on the calendar here.

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