What should Napa Valley look like? Should it be home to the world’s biggest retailer? Should teens be able to wear whatever they want to school? Should downtown Napa reinvent itself for tourists? Should Angwin reinvent itself at all?

These questions, and who decides them, drove many of the biggest local stories of 2007. Plus, tragedy struck in Angwin, American Canyon, and on the streets in Napa. Here’s a look at the most captivating stories of the year. On Monday, we look ahead to five local stories that are likely to capture our interest in 2008.

Downtown construction reaches new heights

A building boom of historic proportions was under way in downtown Napa this year, adding hotel rooms, stores and offices to the city center.

The city’s statistical reports tell the story. A year ago, four commercial projects valued at $6 million were under construction, including George Altamura’s on-going renovation of the Uptown Theater.

The total this month: eight projects worth $236.5 million, including two upscale hotels, two mixed-use projects, a three-story office building with retail and a public market.

Never in the city’s history has so much downtown construction occurred at one time, city officials say.

During the past nine years, as downtown’s fortunes began to rise, $127 million in private projects were completed. Projects under construction in 2007 are worth nearly twice as much.

Downtown is finally getting the hotels that were promised early in the decade, before tourism declined in the wake of 9/11. The $100 million Westin Verasa is scheduled to open next fall, while the $43 million Avia hotel is expected to begin rising soon on First Street on the cleared site of the former J.C. Penney’s store.

Channel Properties’ mixed-use development, the Riverfront, on Main Street south of Third Street, is the biggest of the non-hotel projects. Valued at $73 million, it will bring stores, restaurants, offices and condominiums to the edge of the Napa River.

Napa Square, a $25 million, three-story office and retail development, is already altering the skyline of the west end of downtown.

The $12 million Main Street West office/retail project at Main and Clinton street will soon open. The $10 million Oxbow Public Market opened its doors this month, with more vendors to come in weeks ahead./Kevin Courtney

Big winners on the gridiron

Hometown pride scored big this year as the Napa High School football team took home the CIF Sac-Joaquin Section Division Î title for the first time ever.

Thousands hit the road to watch the Indians take the trophy at the University of the Pacific in Stockton against the St. Mary’s High School Rams. The 38-36 victory capped Napa’s 12-game win streak, for a 13-1 overall mark on the season.

“I’ve always said this in the playoffs — you have to be really, really good and a little bit lucky, and I felt like we had that this year,” Indians head coach Troy Mott said.

The game’s momentum swung back and forth, keeping fans on their feet at the University of the Pacific and glued to their seats at home as they listened on the radio or tracked the game on the Web.

The key exchange happened midway through the fourth quarter, with Napa trailing 36-32.

Napa quarterback John Boyett and running back Jake Croxdale starred, as they did all year, and Indians linebacker Daniel Burgess made a key play down the stretch to seal the victory.

On Dec. 11, the Napa City Council bestowed its congratulations and a key to the city upon the football team and its coach./Register

Gang violence escalates

Napa was rocked by an uprising of gang violence in 2007.

In December, almost a decade after Napa’s first fatal gang shooting, a known gang member named Ricardo “Grumpy” Gonzales, 19, was fatally gunned down.

Gonzales’ death came on the heels of two shootings and a stabbing between rival gang members on a single weekend in November.

The trouble started Nov. 23, when several gang members went to the Collier Boulevard apartments in west Napa seeking revenge for the beating of a gang member’s brother. Rival gang members confronted the visitors, who fled. One of group that drove to Collier was shot as he tried to leave.

From there, gang violence escalated. A Napa High School student who was hanging out on a street corner during lunch hour was punched in the mouth by a man who police believe is part of a rival gang. Police did not disclose whether the student had any gang affiliation.

Although no arrests have been made in Gonzales’ death, police have been aggressively following leads and have pulled in resources from the Napa County Sheriff’s Department, Napa County District Attorney’s Office and Napa County Probation Department to assist in the investigations. Their efforts have netted two arrests in the Napa High School incident. Three others, including two juveniles, have been arrested for the rash of gang violence in late November.

On Dec. 23, detectives arrested a 17-year-old boy, who is a friend of Gonzales and known gang member, for possession of loaded semi-automatic pistol. They have not disclosed whether the weapon could have been used in any of the gang-related shootings.

Napa was not the only community to feel the violence. On Oct. 1, Emanuel Macias, 24, of Vallejo, was fatally stabbed during a fight between rival gang members on a street corner in American Canyon. Two days later police arrested Edgar Adrian Aguilar, 15, of American Canyon, and charged him with murder. Aguilar is being tried as an adult, and his preliminary hearing is set for Jan. 28./Marsha Dorgan

Wal-Mart opens in AmCan

American Canyon’s Wal-Mart Supercenter, Napa County’s biggest retail store, opened in September after a three-year court battle.

The city was sharply divided on the superstore, with opponents arguing that the city violated state and local planning laws in approving the shopping center that contains the store, while supporters said residents of the growing city need convenient shopping opportunities.

Two groups filed suit against Wal-Mart over the city's approval of the project and the mostly-constructed store remained dark for months as the challenge meandered through the Napa County Superior Court and California’s First District Court of Appeal. The city reapproved the project in the spring after conducting new environmental studies that drew no objections from legal foes.

Wal-Mart is the anchor store of Napa Junction, a development that includes a 216-acre apartment complex and retail stores.

Within 30 minutes of the grand opening, 500 shoppers had walked through the doors and headed for the aisles.

Wal-Mart officials said during the hearings that the store could bring an estimated $60,000 in sales tax revenues to the city. The 187,000-square-foot store is open 24 hours a day./Kerana Todorov

Changing Chefs Market

Few topics generated as much community debates in 2007 than the fate of a downtown Napa institution, the Friday night Chefs Market.

Some members of the Napa Downtown Association announced in early summer that they wanted to pull the plug on the market, saying its very success in drawing crowds for fresh produce, prepared foods, beer, wine, music and other entertainment had made it a liability.

The summertime event was attracting so many people, including vast numbers of teenagers, that customers who wanted to dine in downtown’s high-end restaurants were being driven away, they said.

If the market were to continue, it should be moved to another evening when it wouldn’t conflict with downtown’s active dining scene, restaurateurs said.

What ensued was a passionate community debate. Defenders praised the Chefs Market for providing locals with an affordable, festive way to launch the weekend.

The market had been started 13 years earlier as a way to promote Napa Town Center at a time when downtown had many empty storefronts and was suffering economically.

Subsequently, the Napa Downtown Association picked up sponsorship. Running the market from Memorial Day to Labor Day cost merchants $300,000, paid for by sponsorships, booth rentals and alcohol sales.

In August, merchants narrowly voted to move the 2008 market to Thursday nights.

A committee of merchants will be meeting with an events consultant in January to suggest ways to retool the market, said Joe Salerno, president of the Napa Downtown Association.

Almost certainly, next summer’s market will be smaller, with a reduced budget, Salerno said.

The committee will recommend what kind of music should be offered and will reconsider policies for selling alcohol, Salerno said. Napa Town Center is weighing whether it will continue to participate, he said.

The Napa Downtown Association wants to put on an affordable summer event that avoids excesses of past markets without being boring, he said./Kevin Courtney

Tigger triggers battle over what to wear

Redwood Middle School’s decision to bar one student from wearing Winnie the Pooh socks turned into a lawsuit and a national news event, resulting in the Napa Valley Unified School District paying $95,000 in lawyers’ fees and agreeing to a settlement that limits the north Napa school’s dress code policy.

The dress code, introduced in the 1990s in response to rising gang activity on campus, prohibited students from wearing denim or clothing displaying stripes, logos of any size or colors other than white, yellow, green, blue, brown, khaki, black and gray.

Several Redwood families challenged the dress code, claiming it violated students’ constitutional right to free speech. The controversy arose after then-Redwood student Toni Kay Scott was reprimanded for wearing socks with the Winnie the Pooh character Tigger.

With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the families sued the school district in March. In July, a Napa judge granted a preliminary injunction, temporarily suspending the dress code.

The school put in place an interim dress code at the beginning of this school year. The code does not explicitly ban clothes with most logos or writing, but retains restrictions on fabrics and certain types of clothing.

In December, the district and plaintiffs reached a settlement agreement, under which the district agreed not to prohibit lettering or pictures unless allowed by the state education code. Future dress codes at Redwood Middle School that limit colors, fabrics or patterns must be implemented as part of a school uniform that allows parents to opt out.

Redwood will keep the interim policy in place for the rest of the school year. According to NVUSD Superintendent John Glaser, the school and district are considering a uniform policy for the future./Jillian Jones

Angwin Eco-Village stirs debate

Pacific Union College has for years been a quiet citizen of Napa County, educating thousands and keeping the flame burning strong for the Seventh-day Adventist tradition here.

But 2007 saw the Angwin school thrust onto the main stage of the county’s political circus, with two separate land use controversies.

In January, the college unveiled plans for an Eco-Village, hundreds of new homes designed to conserve water and generate much of their own electricity. Eco-Village plans also included expansion of Angwin’s modest commercial center and upgrades on campus. PUC officials said the plan would help generate $80 million or more needed to keep the school viable and growing in the 21st Century.

The plan drew criticism from many Angwin residents and county slow-growth advocates. Led by a new group called Save Rural Angwin, critics said the proposal would dangerously increase traffic on Howell Mountain Road, improperly add residents to a rural region and undermine the area’s tranquility.

The second matter that drew the school into the political realm is the so-called Angwin Urban Bubble. A rough circle drawn over county planning maps, county planners created the bubble years ago to mark which lands in the heavily-forested area were suitable for residential or urban uses.

Current officials, aware the bubble does not match existing uses or logical land contours, launched an effort to redraw the bubble. Altering the bubble in the way the county seeks would not stop the proposed Eco-Village, but would prompt a vote of the people and would remove from potential development other PUC property.

Inevitably, the two issues became enmeshed.

An August Napa County Planning Commission meeting about the bubble overflowed with speakers there to condemn or support the Eco-Village. The crescendo came in October, when more than 1,000 people – including busloads of students brought in from PUC – attended a joint meeting of the Napa County Board of Supervisors and Napa County Planning Commission.

At the meeting, a bare majority of supervisors indicated they would go forward with a redrawn bubble and would remove from it nearby agricultural lands that the PUC wanted to set aside for potential future development.

Yet the controversy is far from over.

The county has yet to schedule the required popular vote on altering the bubble, and supervisors have yet to take their own vote formally preserving the nearby PUC ag lands. Meanwhile, the lengthy environmental review of the Eco-Village project is just now getting under way./Bill Kisliuk

Schoolteacher shoots boyfriend

In a year in which local Napa men — Michael Posey and Onesimo Garcia —were sentenced to prison for shooting the women closest to them, a Napa woman was charged with shooting her lover.

In September, longtime Napa elementary school teacher Roxanne McWilliams, 49, was taken into custody after she told police she shot her boyfriend James Talley five times.

Talley, 50, recovered after spending three weeks in intensive care at Queen of the Valley Medical Center.

McWilliams met Talley in May after he moved from Mississippi to Napa to be with family. Soon after, he moved into her home on Redwood Road.

After the shooting, Talley testified he had problems with McWilliams’ family members. It seems one of them told McWilliams that Talley had two outstanding warrants for domestic violence in Texas.

McWilliams said Talley told her to flee with him before he was arrested on the warrants. She refused. She said Talley threatened to kill her and her daughters, mother and two former boyfriends if she did not come with him. She also accused Talley of physically, emotionally and sexually abusing her.

The night of the Sept. 8, prosecutors say, after Talley fell asleep, McWilliams shot him three times in the back with a a 9mm Glock handgun. He staggered to the bathroom, where he fell, bleeding to the floor. McWilliams fired the gun twice more, hitting Talley in the chest.

McWilliams fled the house, hid the gun at a nearby school and returned to her home, where she was taken into custody.

McWilliams’ attorney Merv Lernhart has argued she suffered from battered women’s syndrome.

During the preliminary hearing, Talley adamantly denied ever harming or threatening to harm McWilliams.

McWilliams is scheduled to go on trial on April 7. If found guilty, she is looking at 32 years to life in state prison./Marsha Dorgan

Tragic death of baby in Angwin

Angwin mother Haley Wesley and her husband have suffered a parent’s worst nightmare — the death of their child.

However for the Wesleys, the tragedy had a greater impact as Haley Wesley, 27, was charged with involuntary manslaughter in the May death of her 10-month-old daughter, Maddison.

The child died after being strapped in her car seat for six hours in the family’s car. Wesley forgot the baby was in the back seat of the car when she went to work at 9 a.m. at Pacific Union College.

She was late to work and forgot to drop the baby off at day care. She found the lifeless child when she returned home that afternoon and went to her car, intending to pick her daughter up from day care.

In August, the Napa County District Attorney’s office charged Wesley with involuntary manslaughter.

However, at her preliminary hearing, Napa County Superior Court Judge Stephen Kroyer ruled Wesley had no criminal intent in the baby’s death and that it was a horrible accident. He threw out the charge.

In November, the district attorney’s office filed a motion requesting Kroyer’s ruling be reconsidered by another Napa judge. If the judge disagrees with Kroyer, the case will be set for trial. If not, prosecutors will likely take the matter to the First District Court of Appeal.

The district attorney’s motion is set to be heard in Napa County Superior Court on Jan. 29./Marsha Dorgan

Teen killed at AmCan party

The new year started the wrong way in American Canyon, where Two Vallejo teens have been charged in the shooting death of 16-year-old Anthony Gee.

Gee, a former resident of American Canyon and Calistoga, was shot and killed at party in American Canyon on Jan. 27.

Marquis Douglas, who was 16 at the time, and his brother Junor Douglas, who was 17, are awaiting trial for the death of Gee.

Police say Gee was not the intended target, but was in the line of fire when Junor Douglas fired a bullet into a group of partygoers. Douglas, who had not been invited to the party, was apparently seeking retribution after being told to leave by a chaperone.

Witnesses say Marquis brought the gun to the party, retrieved it from a car and gave it to his brother just moments before the fatal shot was fired.

Although there were at least 100 people at the party, investigators had their work cut out for them when it came to making an arrest. Nearly a month after the shooting, detectives arrested the Douglas brothers and two other juveniles. The Douglases were charged with murder, and the other teens were charged as accessories to the crime.

Although the boys are minors, they are being prosecuted in adult court because of the seriousness of the crime. If found guilty, they face 25 years to life in prison./Marsha Dorgan