Bill Hocker | Dec 23, 2014

In 1968 Napa made history by being the first county in the nation to create an agricultural preserve. The essence of the act was to allow policies that maintained agricultural land in the face of more profitable uses. Agriculture was to be considered the "highest and best use of the land". At the time it was audacious. It denied what was regarded as a fundamental right - to divide and sell one's land for something more profitable than agriculture. And every use was more profitable than agriculture.

For 45 years Napa has managed to retain much of its agricultural land because of the ordinances created. But the profiteers have always been there, like water behind a dam, waiting for the crack that would allow them to force their way through. In 1990 a crack was codified in the Winery Definition Ordinance. The processing of tourists, like the processing of grapes, was defined as agriculture and the tourism wineries began to trickle in, aerial trams arrived along with French and Persian palaces and Tuscan castles. Every manner of architectural ego statement began to fill the open vineyard plots. In 2010, with a wine industry tanking from a lack of financiers willing to buy $100 bottles of wine, a fissure was widened to a breach with a revision to the WDO. As newly wealthy techies replaced the financiers the tourist-winery projects began to fill the valley floor and slosh into the remote areas of the surrounding watersheds. Since then 70 have been approved, most of which have not yet been built, and 40 are waiting in the planning department wings.

Most of the Napa valley and surrounding watersheds still retain a bucolic character. But it is an illusion to think that it will remain so for long unless drastic measures are taken now to prevent further development. In the last 20 years American Canyon has changed beyond recognition from pasture land to suburban sprawl. Already the projects are in hand that will continue the suburban sprawl into the city of Napa. In the next few years the city will lose its identity as something separate from the bay area metropolitan area.

Everyone seems to laud the rural beauty of the valley. Elected officials tout it at almost every meeting. It is an inherent claim in every developer's promotion. And yet they continue to approve and build the projects that will eventually suburbanize and destroy that beauty. Each new left turn lane or traffic signal added, each new parking space, each new business marquee, no matter how tasteful, is a sure harbinger of the death of a rural, agrarian environment.

In the traffic that we confront each day in the valley we get our first taste of an urban future. It is time to look now not for ways to make the traffic more tolerable, but for ways to eliminate the traffic. It is time to plug the leaks in the dam and to begin bailing the development bilge. It is time to make a commitment to a rural preserve that is every bit as audacious and trendsetting as the commitment made in 1968, a commitment to sustainable but modest profits from a rural economy and not an economy based on the maximization of profits through development. The American mantra of ever increasing returns on investment will not allow a rural economy to exist here.

Are development interests too powerful to be stopped at this point? It is up to the citizens of Napa to decide again what the future of the county is to be. If the votes are not here now to protect a rural environment in an urban world, then the wineries, and the hotels and the employee housing and shopping centers, and the parking lots and roads and signals and traffic will just keep coming until anything rural is gone, the vines have been paved over, and "wine country" will only conjure images of Oregon.

According to the Napa Register the growing dissatisfaction of Napa county residents with the expansion of wine-industry development was the #8 story of 2014. Early in 2015, the county planning director, David Morrison, will begin once again the process of seeking consensus on new legislation to guide the future of Napa County. I want to believe that he has created this opportunity because he wants the rural-agricultural vision realized in 1968 to survive another 45 years, and he knows that it will not do so under current law. It is a courageous decision, and not an opportunity that any who make their living in agriculture or cherish their life in a rural, small-town community can afford to waste. Let us resolve that finding a stable and sustainable agricultural economy that doesn't depend on ever expanding development will be the #1 issue of 2015 and another milestone in Napa's history.

copyright © sodacanyonroad.org