Close to Home: Mapping a future for Napa Valley

There is much buzz in Napa these days about where our valley is headed. Each new “world class” resort or hotel is applauded and further secures our position as one of our country’s playgrounds for the wealthy. Meanwhile, two hotels have declared bankruptcy. Winery tasting room fees have surged, as has the average wine price.

Is this a healthy direction for Napa County — one focused on catering to the very wealthy, applauding all new high-end development proposals coming to an increasingly saturated market? The phrase “strategic drift” is sometimes applied when an organization sets a strategy but loses focus, fails to adapt to changes in its environment and hardly notices its rudderless drift. Does this description apply to Napa County?

While our revered Ag Preserve is celebrated now, it had strong opposition when it was adopted in 1968 from many farmers and grape growers opposing government restrictions on their land that they labeled “confiscatory zoning” and “brutally unfair.” Farmers dubbing themselves Napa Valley United Farmers filed suit to kill the preserve, calling it “unconstitutional, arbitrary, unreasonable, oppressive, confiscatory and discriminatory.”

The Napa Farm Bureau was split and barely supported the preserve’s creation by a vote of 11-10. Napa County will always be subject to development pressure from big-money, out-of-county, interests. Napa Valley has been preserved mostly because of citizen initiatives.

I served as a Napa County supervisor, elected six years after adoption of the Ag Preserve. During a productive six years, our board rezoned most of the county to large lot zoning, preventing the urban sprawl threatening at the time and adopted a new general plan. However, our initial preservationist 4-1 majority was reduced to 3-2 two years after I was elected. Four years later, following another election, Dowell Martz and I found ourselves in a 2-3 minority for our final two years. Development interests had prevailed. What saved our county was citizens’ initiatives that bypassed the board and locked in preservationist policies.

Serious discussions are needed involving all stakeholders about the future of the place we call home and about its drift toward becoming known mostly as a playground for the wealthy. Does Napa County have an ideal holding capacity before it begins to choke on high-end tourists and service workers commuting into the county on increasingly congested roads? Do we want to continue to see spiraling home prices, driven partly by demand for second homes with a decreasing pool of full-time local residents fully vested in our communities?

Our county has avoided the path followed by Santa Clara County where some of the world’s richest farmland was lost to sprawl and overdevelopment. But the risk of over- development is always present. Environmental gains are generally holding actions, while development is permanent.

The most important document that guides the future of Napa County is its seriously out-of-date general plan. The Board of Supervisors will be holding hearings and adopting a new general plan that will guide us into the coming decades. If we, as a county, are in a period of strategic drift we again need citizen involvement in planning our future, and we will need leaders who recognize the situation for what it is and who have the courage to act.

Sam Chapman, a Napa resident, was a Napa County supervisor from 1975 to 1983 and served as chief of staff for Barbara Boxer in the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate for 22 years.

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