Bill Hocker | Oct 18, 2015

In response to Derek Anderson's letter, Napa County a victim of CEQA abuse.

What can one expect from someone with a strong real estate development background but a lament on the abuse of a process set up to protect communities from the impacts of urban development. Is this really what the voters of district 2 want? More development, more buildings, more roadways, more traffic - a substantial increase in Syar's production over the next 35 years. Certainly there are many who have a financial interest in the continuing development of Napa's open spaces who would welcome a lower price for Syar products and wish them relief from the pesky residents concerned merely about the quality of their lives. Call them the n-word, that will put them in their place. NIMBYS are to be reviled for trying to protect the place that they live in, while those who profit from consuming that place are to be considered suffering victims of an abusive governmental process.

NIMBYS are rising everywhere in Napa County because urban development is beginning to affect everyone that thought they were living in paradise. Traffic is the main symptom - more than we can bear right now yet much, much more coming once all of the development projects already approved come on line in the next few years. But the NIMBY concern is also about neighborhoods hollowed out to accommodate short term rentals, and local stores priced out for the tourist trade, and schools converted to shopping malls, and the forested hillsides clear cut for resorts and vineyard estates, and event centers cropping up in the vineyards next door, and warehouses and tractor-trailers filling the marshlands that separate Napa from rest of the bay area. And wilderness areas being converted to gravel pits.

The character of everyone's backyard is changing rapidly. It seems that those who will profit from more development often denigrate those who oppose them as NIMBY's. In their eyes, the self-interest of protecting the quality of life that residents enjoy has no value compared to the self-interest of making money. That attitude needs to change if this place that everyone lauds for its scenic beauty and agricultural environment, everyone's beautiful backyard, is to survive as something other than an extension of bay area urban sprawl.

Syar is not the cause of the sprawl, merely the necessary ingredient. Syar's future is the future of this county, and our attitude toward it reflects what we want this county to be in 35 years. Is that future to be about a growth economy with ever more construction, ever more buildings, ever more roadways, parking lots, and traffic in which Syar will play a major part? Or is it to be about a stabilized economy that includes the protection of our agricultural industry, water resources and natural environment and the maintenance of a rural community that attempts to reduce traffic, in which Syar may play a smaller role that it does now? It is the vision of Napa's future that makes this decision so compelling for us all.

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