Bill Hocker | May 10, 2018

Bill Dodd NVR LTE 5/10/18: Thoughtful, good-hearted people can disagree

Sen. Bill Dodd will vote no on both measures. He feels that the initiatives bypass the deliberative public process and will have unintended consequences. The deliberative public process in Napa County, unfortunately, consists of a deliberation between "the stakeholders", i.e. the major county corporations and plutocratic entrepreneurs, and the government, who (it appears after attending 4 years of public hearings) represents their interests rather than the majority of the citizenry.

APAC was the county's big test when it came to public deliberations between the government, the stakeholders and the residents of the county. Following demands by residents for action on the proliferation of tourism oriented wineries, the flaunting of use permit limits to increase winery tourism, and the impact that tourism development was having on traffic, housing, and rural character in the county, the Supervisors called for a deliberative process to address the concerns, the APAC committee. The Planning department made a good faith effort to propose methods of reducing the number of wineries being proposed and of reducing the amount of tourism they generate, and a system for policing use permits. Those proposals were rejected or severely diluted by the committee which was heavily populated by industry insiders. Then even those diluted proposals were rejected out of hand by the Board of Supervisors who proposed instead a system to recognize and allow the wineries illegal activities and formalize vested rights, before the whole process seemed to peter out. Wineries got a promise to help legalize their illegal or ambiguous operations. The residents got nothing. New winery approvals and increased visitation at existing wineries have continued apace. Tourism development in the municipalities, the "big picture" issue that the Supervisors proposed to confront after APAC, has since exploded, unconfronted.

Citizen initiative Measure C was a direct result of the failure of an extensive deliberative process over Walt Ranch with the government unable to halt, despite enormous resistance from the county's citizens, a vineyard estate housing project that will endanger water resources needed by the Circle Oaks community and the city of Napa and allow further urbanization of the watershed areas of the county, all to the benefit of one plutocratic real estate developer.

Bill Dodd's out-front opposition to Citizen Initiative Measure D, based clearly on contributions made on his behalf by the Palmaz family, points to the difficulty of the deliberative process in which elected government officials give preferred treatment to those with money to spend, over the interests of the majority of the citizens they nominally serve. The Palmaz heliport was vehemently opposed by a vast section of the citizenry that will be impacted, all to benefit one plutocrat. Without the intervention of Measure D, the elected officials of the County would probably have already approved the project. The deliberative public process in action.

In a world with ever more money moving from business interests to government officials' campaigns, residents have less and less real say in the public deliberative process. The initiative process, as it was intended to do, is a check on that dynamic.

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