“It’s a nice honor, but my head doesn’t grow because of it,” said Ed Barwick, a straight-shooting ex-Napa car dealer, ex-council member and for 35 years running the announcer of Napa High School football games.

And another thing. The honor will cost taxpayers a pittance, Barwick said. To a fiscal conservative who idolizes Ronald Reagan, that’s important.

What is this inexpensive, non-ego-inflating honor? The city’s Jamieson Canyon water treatment plant will be dedicated Friday event in Edward I. Barwick’s honor.

The city is embarking on a $48 million plant expansion that will strengthen Napa’s ties to the State Water Project. When the project is finished in 2010, the Barwick facility will become the city’s most important treatment plant.

Barwick, now 80, was a council member for nearly 12 years in the 1960s, late ’80s and early ’90s. His far-sightedness in obtaining State Water Project supplies is one of the reasons that Napa, population 75,000, has adequate supplies today, said Phil Brun, the city’s water general manager.

Napa made a serious mistake in the ’50s, passing on water rights to Lake Berryessa, Barwick said. In contracting with the State Water Project in the early ’60s, Napa redeemed itself. “I thought we’d better wake up,” he said.

As Barwick tells it, a top official with the California Department of Water Resources with whom he had gone to school at the University of Redlands called one day to say that the State Water Project’s North Bay Aqueduct was coming this way. Napa County needed to climb aboard, he said.

Barwick, who was acting mayor in 1963 and 1964, lobbied hard for the new water. The county and every city but St. Helena decided to sign up. No longer limited by what local reservoirs could hold, Napa Valley communities had new security and a capacity for growth.

Advocates of little or no growth might cringe at the results, said Barwick, who remembers Napa as a “country town” of 15,000 when he moved here in 1936 at age 10.

Barwick knew Napa would grow “until something stopped it.” He never wanted water to be that limiting factor.

Wheeling and dealing

That said, Barwick considers himself a “controlled growth” advocate. He was never a pushover for developers, he said. As a council member, he tried to whittle back the size of proposed subdivisions, but not kill them.

As a retiree, Barwick is frightened that the former Napa Pipe property could urbanize outside the city. “It needs to be under city control and city water control,” he said. “We can’t have 3,200 houses out there.”

Because of his community activities and auto dealership, Barwick was a major public figure for most of the second half of the 20th century.

Anyone who attends Napa High football games has been listening to Barwick’s voice over the PA system since 1973. Barwick, NHS Class of ’44, was a star football player in his day.

He sold his Plymouth/Dodge/Chrysler/Volvo dealership in the mid-’90s, but his name can still be seen on license plate frames.

“I was a nut from the beginning when it came to automobiles,” said Barwick. His home office contains hundreds of die-cast model cars from his boyhood years. As a kid he paid as little as 69 cents for a dozen. Now he fleshes out his collection with antique specimens costing hundreds of dollars.

Horace Craigie, a Cadillac-Buick dealer, gave Barwick his first job. Cars were in such short supply after World War II that dealers didn’t need salesmen, so Barwick became Craigie’s bill collector.

“You weren’t very popular,” said Barwick, who learned to knock on doors at night and confront customers in restaurants. “If they can afford to buy dinner, I’m going to go over and talk to them,” he said. “Nobody deserves a free car. You either buy it or you don’t buy it.”

Yet Barwick also had a soft side, giving credit to many families with shaky financial histories. In eight out of 10 cases, his faith was justified, he said.

In his best year, Barwick said he sold 5,367 vehicles, a record that comes with an asterisk. Most of those cars went to Enterprise Rent-A-Car in three Western states.

He made as little as $50 per new rental sale, but cleaned up later selling them used, Barwick said. Enterprise gave him the choice of used vehicles.

‘Started with nothing’

Barwick and his late wife Dorothy were married for 57 years, raising three children who went off to become, respectively, a city manager, a newspaper executive and the wife of a Sony Pictures honcho.

None went into the car business. “They probably heard too many stories about sales, lack of sales or repossessing too many cars,” he said. Barwick recently married Linda, a longtime Napa State Hospital administrative worker who was a friend of Dorothy’s.

Barwick considers himself a guardian of the public’s purse strings and a no-nonsense guy whose word is his bond.

“I’m not some Billy Clinton baloney artist. What I said I’d do I did,” he said. “My dad taught my brother and me, if your word isn’t any good then neither are you.”

Barwick looks askance at current city pay practices. Back in the ’60s, when city employees were not unionized, his auto business paid better wages than the city, he said.

By the ’90s, city wages and benefits had far outpaced what he could pay his workers, he said. Today’s “entitlements” are breaking the city’s back, he said. Tying wages to those paid by surrounding cities was a “bogus idea.”

Soaring employee costs are one reason that Napa’s infrastructure has not kept up with growth, he said.

Barwick was not on the council during downtown redevelopment in the ’70s and ’80s. The goal — the economic preservation of downtown — was noble, but Napa lost many buildings that would be valuable today, he said.

Barwick supports a new redevelopment project for the Soscol Avenue entry to downtown. Only if the city builds new roads and solves drainage problems will a blighted part of the city prosper, he said.

From his home in Alta Heights, Barwick has a bird’s-eye view of the city he loves, including downtown. He is comfortable in his perch and proud of his city.

“I started with nothing. I made it happen. I was lucky enough,” he said.

Does Barwick drink the product that comes from the plant that will carry his name? He does. “I’ve drunk city water all my life,” he said.

His wife is of a differing opinion. “She doesn’t like the taste of city water. I always say it tastes great to me.”