George Caloyannidis | Nov 29, 2018

Editor:

On December 4, the Supervisors are scheduled to adopt the so called Winery Compliance Resolution. If this sounds reassuring, think again.

The way the County defines winery compliance is far from what the common man understands under this label. When wineries exceed wine production, visitations and numbers of events above their use permit levels, this is when they are out of compliance. One would expect that when the County proposes to bringing them into compliance, it would compel them to operate under their use permits for at least some substantial period of time. That would not only be respect for the law, restore unfair competition towards law abiding wineries and rectify their escape from environmental review thus adding to our traffic without mitigations.

Regretfully, the way the County proposes to treat "compliance" is to legalize violations with revised use permits, in essence adjusting the law to fit the crime; even better, it brings the County rather the wineries into compliance.

"Words matter" as president to be Barak Obama once said in 2007. Words can inspire and can fool the public.

And since I am quoting presidents, most peoples' moral sense was offended when President Trump decided against placing sanctions on Saudi Arabia for the horrific dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi by risking a $100 barrel of oil. "This is not who we are" reverberated throughout the country. But here we are in Napa County.

Without claiming a moral equivalency to a horrific crime or national interests, if there is any doubt how corrosive this loose play with our collective moral values is even beginning at the local level, one can look back to the Summer of 2015 when I unsuccessfully appealed the County's decision to forgive numerous egregious violations at the Reverie winery with a new use permit by bringing it into "compliance" (it sold a few weeks later with several millions of ill gotten gains added to its value). At the time we asked Mr. Rothman, teacher at Angwin Elementary School to pose the following question to his 7th and 8th graders: "If I passed around a cookie jar and asked each of you to take no more than three cookies but some of you took six, should they be allowed to keep them?". We can still celebrate; not one single child said they should.

At least in 2015 these children understood morality, but if we continue down this path from a small county to the entire nation where money trumps it, we will end up in the kind of society which we will have deserved.

On December 4, the small children at Angwin Elementary will be looking down at the Supervisors' desk.

George Caloyannidis
Calistoga

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