Bill Hocker | Sep 23, 2020

On Sep 23, 2020 Napa County gave an administrative review and approval to the despoiling of another of the valley's remaining isolated wooded knolls, this one between Yountville hills and the Trail. The hearing lasted 20 minutes.

The agenda letter and documents are here.

The project involves the removal of 52 mature trees, flattening the knoll and topping it with a 13,685 sf house, 1000 sf guest house and 4 water tanks. A driveway will be cut in the face of the hill. The approval requires adminsitrative review, and a chance for public comment, because its exceptional visibility from the Trail and Highwy 29 requires compliance with the county's Viewshed Protection Program, enacted to protect the Napa Valley's iconic landscape from exactly the deleterious effects of this kind of development. As anyone casting an eye around the Valley's encrusted hillsides will see, it is an ordinance without teeth. Show a couple of trees in front of the building on the plan and a prominent piece of the valley's natural landscape is forever disfigured by human detritus which no amount of planting will ever really mitigate. Mother nature has been forever fouled.

All things are relative, I suppose. This disfigurement is only a bit less egregious than the gross deforestation for the estate atop Oak Knoll just down the Trail, as well as the homes sprouting again on the once-beautiful craggy ridgeline at Stag's Leap. Viewshed protection, just like agricultrural preservation, should mean something when it comes to land use policy, and if the policies can't protect the virtue of the isolated wooded knolls and open vineyard vistas at the visual center of what people think of as "The Napa Valley" from being ravaged by a few wealthy egos, the effort at regulation and due diligence would seem just a fig leaf to deny responsibility as "the agricultural lands and rural character that we treasure" are slowly developed out of existance.

Staff contact was Sean Kennings, Contract Planner, (415) 533-2111, or sean@lakassociates.com (A private contractor to oversee the public interest?)

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