Bill Hocker | Jun 18, 2015

NVR editorial board: Identifying the problem

Editorial Board editorials are on a different page than the regular ones and since those about development issues are rare I missed this one - and it is important.

The development issues impacting the protection of agricultural land at present are indeed larger than just the impacts created by the tourism industry. And in controlling future development that threatens that land, the municipalities and the county need to work at the problems together (although the negotiations over Napa Pipe don't augur well). Yet of the various economic sectors, it is the tourism sector that has the most explosive growth trajectory. The Napa wine industry is constrained by its grape resource. The service industries, government, health care, education, public safety, retail-commercial will grow only at the rate set by other job creation. The growth of tourism and to a much lesser extent the light industrial in south Napa (including non-Napa wine processing) will become the drivers of population expansion in the county and should be the targets of control.

New job creation is a sign of profitable economic growth and too many jobs for too few houses, and roadways jammed with busy workers, is a problem that most governments would probably hope to have ("good" problems in Supervisor Luce's words on Mar. 10th). That is unless the goal of that government is to maintain undeveloped land for agriculture. Both the cities and the county should be working on their own solutions to curb the rise in visitors and tourism workers if the needs of those tourists and workers are not to continue rapid urban development and push the wine industry in to an ever more subordinate and incidental role in the county's economy.

It is probably too late to solve the problem that over-population (of residents , visitors and workers) poses in maintaining an agricultural economy. Housing creation in the county has been successfully curbed by Measure A, passed in 1980, to a maximum of 1%, but unfortunately similar restraints have not been placed on job creation or visitation, hence ever increasing traffic problems. The only solution now suggested is an increase in housing - more development to ease the problems created by development, a cycle that will never end as the vines continue to disappear.

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