Bill Hocker | Jan 4, 2019

The first recommendation of the Final APAC Report:

Although the actual changes in County policy and practice as a result of the APAC process are still a bit nebulous, there was, at least, an overwhelming consensus from both sides of the development debate on recommendation 1, which was not to my knowledge, challenged as the Report made its way through PC and BOS review.

Proposals such as Anthem are the reason this recommendation was made. The project requests a trifecta of ordinance stretching - variances, road exceptions and viewshed mitigations - in order to be built on this site. It is hard to see how these can be seen as anything other than principal tools to achieve compliance here, and I would encourage the Planning Commission to reject the project on this basis.

The consideration of access to accommodate winery tourism was also on the minds of Supervisors when they approved changes to the WDO in 2010, advising Commissioners to endeavor to ensure "a direct relationship between access constraints and on-site marketing and visitation programs." In the Anthem case, 15500 visitors/yr, and 12 hospitality employees/day will use a constrained access that doesn't meet County road and street standards in an area that the CDF assesses, and that experience now shows, is a high fire risk. I would hope that the County would make a prudent assessment of its own liability in approving tourism activities on non-compliant access roads in documented high fire risk areas, and I would encourage the Planning Commission to reject the project on this basis as well.

There are issues of water depletion in an area of known shortages, and in an age of global warming which I would also hope that you also consider . And the deterioration of the quality of life, as neighbors have expressed, when the rural character that attracts people to the county becomes commercialized to the benefit of corporations and the wealthy.

But, as I have argued - since a tourism facility was proposed next to us at the end of Soda Canyon Road - there is a bigger question concerning the place of tourism as the motivating element of winery development in the County that should be a part of the discussion on every winery project being proposed in the county.

The county already has an existing processing capacity several times beyond that needed to process all of the county's grapes. Yet new or modified use permits have added some 6 million gallons of capacity in the last 10 years. In the same time about 1000 acres of new vineyards have been added enough for 1 million gallons of wine. New wineries, in order to fill their barrels, will need to poach grapes from existing wineries, at inflated prices, while the amount of wine produced in the county will hardly budge.

At the same time 3 million new visitor slots have been approved, with the pleading by each applicant that without those visitors their wineries, that add nothing but cost to Napa wine output, will not be profitable. The profit is in the visitation not the wine; new wineries will not expand the wine industry, and may serve to make it less competitive, but they will expand the venues for a tourism industry.

What is the County's mission is in granting ever more building permits and encouraging ever more visitors and employees and traffic to come into the county? Is it to protect the agricultural lands and rural character that the General Plan envisions, and that residents and many in the wine industry support; or is to promote a more profitable tourism industry that urbanizes and stretches the resources and infrastructure of the county under the guise of raising tax revenues to pay for the impacts of that urbanization, and the fiction that such urban growth will not ultimately bury the vines.

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