Bill Hocker | Sep 11, 2019

Update 9/11/19

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The Ellman Winery is up for review at the Planning Commission on 10/2/19; another tourist venue to be added to the winery strip mall developing at the base of Soda Canyon Road. Comments specifically on the Ellman development are here.

Update 1/10/19

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Yet another winery has been proposed at the Soda Canyon Junction. It is the Ellman Winery. As I have lamented below the winery congestion at the Soda Canyon intersection with the Trail has been a particular concern both on the impact in this one corner of the county and as a harbinger of and prototype for continued winery development on every possible parcel in the county.

Update 11/5/17

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NVR 11/5/17: Reynolds Family Winery wins Napa County expansion approval

Update 11/3/17

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The expansion of the Reynolds winery was approved 4-1 by the planning commission on Nov 1st with Comm. Cottrell (and Comm. Gallagher) concerned about the cumulative impacts of ever-expanding visitation demands by wineries.

Planning Manager Vin Smith (a new county position?) repeated the mantra that the number of new wineries is still within the parameters laid down in the 2008 General Plan EIR - so no problem. The number of new wineries predicted in the 2008 DEIR was 150 from 2005 to 2030. (page 3.0-23 of the DEIR - page 120 of the pdf . This was inexplicably raised to 225 in the "Preferred Plan".) The reality is that 108 new winery permits have been issued since 2006 (88 through 2015 and 20 since) . Continuing at the same rate will mean 245 new wineries by 2030.

Of course the EIR only quantified the number of new wineries, not the expansion of existing wineries. And it said nothing about the impacts of visitation generated by each.

Allowed visitation continues to grow at a much faster rate than the historical trend before 2008. The Reynolds approval is an example of the trend: a 100% increase in capacity and 350% increase in visitation. (The Reguschi modification, approved two weeks after Reynolds, really emphasizes the trend: 100% increase in production, 5000% increase in visitation.) The DEIR does not have one reference to the impacts that the growth of additional winery visitation will have on the environment of Napa County. In that omission, the EIR for the 2008 General Plan was a farce. We are now facing not only the significant and unavoidable impacts recognized in the DEIR, but the significant impacts of the growth of the tourism/visitation/hospitality industry (the most expansive industry in the county) not even mentioned in the DEIR. And our County government, controlled by development interests as local governments always are, is quite content to pretend that as long as tourism is defined as agriculture, the impacts are simply an unregulated and unobjectionable "right-to-farm" issue, beyond the purview of cumulative impact analysis.

10/27/17

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The Reynolds Family Winery will be up for a modification at the Planning Commission on Nov 1, 2017 to add 12,500 more tourism slots, 16 more parking spaces, and 5 more employees. (Agenda item 8B here). it is the last of the proposals around the Soda Canyon Junction under review in the last few years. The Krupp Winery was approved in June 2012. The Corona winery was approved in Nov 2013. The expansion of the Beau Vigne was approved in Sep 2016. The Sam Jasper Winery and the Mountain Peak winery were approved in Jan 2017. The Grassi Winery was approved in Feb 2017. And now finally the last of the pending projects, Reynolds, will no doubt also be approved. (Approved 4-1)

It will not be the last. Just north of the Reynolds winery a new "estate" is being constructed for the very un-residential appearing Ellman Family Vineyards brand.

The junction map is a sad predictor of the direction that the rest of the Silverado is headed. Somewhere near 35 wineries have been approved along the Trail since 2010. Most have not yet been built and their tourists and employees and deliveries have not yet arrived to further clog up what is already becoming a continuous stream of traffic at times of the day.

In all of the development projects that the county has continued to approve each year, each project was given a "negative declaration" from the county staff relying on consultants who massage numbers to certify that project impacts, such as the traffic they generate, will be less-than-significant as defined by some arbitrary metric. And yet, can anyone deny that the Trail has become significantly impacted? As long as the wine industry and the Supervisors continue to lust after the money to be made by urbanizing Napa's open spaces those spaces will be urbanized, one lest-than-significant project at a time, until they are all gone.

A similar but more extensive rant on the death of the Silverado Trail is here.

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