Bill Hocker | Aug 13, 2021

Update 8/26/21

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NVR 8/26/21: Napa County OKs Scarlett winery despite opposition from rural neighbors
Video of 8/24/21 BOS meeting

Another rural community is sacrificed to Napa's tourism industry; another 2 acres of prime vineyard land are urbanized with a building project. As defined by the Board Chair, this is just agriculture in the 21st century; get over it.

As with the Mountain Peak appeal, Chair Pedroza was a martinet in enforcing procedures and timelines to the disadvantage of the appellants, rejecting any effort to augment the record with new revelant material unavailable at the time of the PC hearing. His disdain for the neighbors, with the audacity to value the privacy of their rural community over the promotion of winery tourism, was palpable.

"And when I drove by I just looked at the neighborhood and these are homes in ag zoning, folks that made a choice to live around vineyards. That was the choice everyone made and I have all the expectation that the neighbors should be respectful -- those that are doing business whether vineyard or a winery. Same thing for those that choose to have a residence in those areas. Facts matter and I just quickly look at the size of these homes, some of these homes are bigger than the hospitality building for the winery. So again we just need to be mindful of the balance we're trying to strike especially in the ag zoning. You can build a home anywhere in the world. There's very little place where you can have a winery and a vineyard. "

All of the neighbors are grape growers. No one's debating about living around vineyards here. The message from the Chair was "If you don't like your farm community being converted to a tourist attraction, move somewhere else".

Update 8/6/21

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The appeal to the BOS of the Planning Commission's project approval will be held on 8/24/21. Given the thoroughness of the CEQA presentation at the Planning Commission, it seems unlikely that the project will not be litigated if the appeal is denied by the Board.
Notice for the BOS appeal hearing
Appeal documents

The documents from the PC hearing are here.

Update 1/20/20

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NVR 1/20/20: Scarlett winery approved over neighbors' objections to a narrow road
1/15/20 PC Agenda and documents
1/15/20 PC video

Donna Oldford: "Wineries and residents have existed copacetically. They’ve co-existed in the Napa Valley quite nicely for decades.” Of course it's only in the last decade (chronicled here) that the County and the wine industry have decided that the only way to sell wine is to bring mass market tourism down small country roads and into the lives of residents who thought they lived in a rural paradise away from the urban chaos of the rest of the Bay Area.

10/7/19

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The Scarlett Winery, a new 30,000 gal/y facility, came up for review at the Planning Commission on Oct 2, 2109. While the Ellman Winery approval at the same hearing was a loveliest, there was considerable community pushback against Scarlett including 175+ pages of documentation, letters and public comments from most of the roads residents, and a complete CEQA challenge from the Shute, Mihaly, Weinberger law firm representing one resident. Public comment was taken and the project was continued to give staff and commissioners time to digest the document submittal.

It is on the narrow Ponti Road, a road not meeting the county's road and street standards for winery access, which should be enough to deny the project. The property backs up onto the Trail, and residents of Ponti Road argued that access off the Trail was much more logical. There is a modest grade differential from the trail, but less than many of the other wineries along this section of the highway. That change should be a no-brainer.

The neighbors complaints about water drawdown, increased traffic and noise from a event center were backed up with expert witness reports contradicting the usual less-than-significant-impact claims of the applicant's consultants. Unfortunately, as we know from every contested project, the County gives short shrift to the opinions of outside consultants.

I was pleased to see that that Ellison Folk in the Shute Mihaly argument brought up the much broader issue of the cumulative impacts that are changing the character of life in Napa Valley as more and more tourism generating projects are approved.

From the SMW letter:


Environmental Impact Reports were done for the two major documents that underlie landuse policies in Napa County: the Winery Definition Ordinance EIR done in 1989 and the Update of the General Plan EIR done in 2007. The continued reliance on negative declarations in approving wineries is conditioned on the projections of vineyard and winery development made in those 2 EIR's.

The 1989 WDO EIR did, in fact, consider the impacts of increased tourism at wineries. In doing so it presented an extensive list of mitigations that would be required to create less-than-significant impacts from the creation of the ordinance. The list is long, and it should be noted that the vast majority of the mitigations were not mentioned in the WDO and have never been realized.

While the 2007 General Plan EIR posits a rate of new winery creation, it is silent on the impacts of winery expansions and even more silent on the expanded use of wineries as tourism venues. There is no analysis of the direct-to-consumer trend in wine marketing that has exploded since its writing, a trend that is at the heart of most requests for new and expanded wineries taking place. 2010 changes to the WDO codified this expansion of tourism uses to help the industry move from 3-tier to d-t-c marketing, but no EIR was done to analyze what environmental impacts those changes would create.

The impacts of the direct-to-consumer event-center business model are far different than the impacts of wineries as production facilities. The increase in visitors and the employees needed to cater to them create a demand for road and utility expansions, restaurants, shops, hotels, employee housing and services, i.e. a level of urbanization that is at odds with the General Plans stated desire to maintain an agricultural economy and a rural way of life.

In the last 12 years the number of producing vineyard acres in Napa County has not increased. Yet in that time the county has approved over 150 new and expanded wineries, not to process a nonexistent new supply of grapes, but to process an ever increasing supply of visitors. Unfortunately the environmental impacts of that expanding visitor population were not subjected to an analysis on a county-wide basis. The increased traffic, the demand for affordable housing for the growing workforce, the loss of existing housing and resident-serving shops to more profitable tourism uses are all impacts of prioritizing tourism over an interest in maintaining a rural, small-town quality of life.

The battle by residents to defend the rural character in Napa County, as the residents of Ponti Road are doing, has been repeated over and over as wineries have come up for approval in the last 5 years. In the face of an exploding tourism industry and the flood of goodlife entrepreneurs, and of a County government that has embraced the "fairy tale of eternal economic growth" residents are losing the battle.

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