Bill Hocker | Oct 23, 2018

NVR 10/22/18: Survey shows Napa residents satisfied but wary of future

The County, under CEO Minh Tran's guidance, has made an amazing effort to plumb the feelings of its citizens in trying to chart a path for the next 3 years.

Meetings held over the last 2 months with a couple dozen "stakeholder" groups are catalogued on the County Website here with links to recaps of the meetings. The recap documents give bullet point analysis and solutions to achieve each group's aspirations. The bullet points in their brevity are often ambiguous, but there are real intriguing nuggets that hopefully the County's consultant will pull out. (Like the Wine Growers idea of turning the Trail into a paid "7 mile drive" tourist attraction. [did they mean 17 mile, or 27 mile?], or like the Napa Valley Vintners desire to build more housing in the unincorporated areas, the anthesis of the Ag Preserve!) Just reading the red comments first is helpful in sorting it all out. In only two of the meetings was there a summary of the group presenting their goals in their own words, those of the Vintners and Farmers for Responsible Agriculture and Napa Vision 2050. ( My District 4 meeting is bullet-pointed here.)

The County also solicited citizens to fill out an extensive online survey. The Register provided a copy of the responses here.

The obvious finding seemed to be that we like our quality of life and that we feel it's all downhill from here. Why else would we spend time on a tedious questionnaire but for the hope that our fears are less likely to be realized by doing so.

The responses to the rate-from-most-to-least-important questions were a pain to fill out because one tends not to have strong opinions about everything the county does. And yet most people voted "extremely" or "somewhat important" for everything. Seldom does a question get less than 70% of the total in those two rankings combined.

The most interesting part of the responses to the questionnaire were the comments, 1000 of them. And I was very pleased to see that a good number that dealt with the negative impacts of winery tourism. It is, IMO, the heart of why this process is happening.

The one aspect of the Napa Strategic Plan that I find a bit odd is its 3 year horizon. There are undoubtedly issues that can be addressed in three years. But in terms of land use issues, the next 3 years and beyond have already been determined by the number of projects that have been approved but not yet built. Those projects will deteriorate the county's rural quality of life over the next decade at least, with increased traffic and demand for housing and the need for more taxes for infrastructure and service upgrades required by an increasing population of workers and visitors. The decisions that the County will be making now are for a future beyond the next decade. I would be more than pleased if the county were to stop issuing and expanding use permits tomorrow. And I hope that they do. But that has little to do with changes to our lives that will be happening in the next 3 years.

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