County votes to keep Angwin bubble intact

Supes call for full review of all urban bubbles in coming years

By DAVID RYAN
Register Staff Writer

The Napa County Board of Supervisors split 3-2 over whether to change the Angwin urban bubble, with the majority voting to maintain the status quo after an hours-long, detailed discussion of the subject.

The decision is a win for Pacific Union College and a defeat for critics of PUC’s plans to add more housing and development to a portion of college-owned property.

The Angwin urban bubble is an oval-shaped county land-use planning area drawn over Pacific Union College and a piece of the village of Angwin. For the most part, it does not follow property lines or zoning borders.

It allows some land inside the bubble to be developed without a countywide vote to rezone the land, called a Measure J vote. Countywide votes to expand uses on agricultural property have been a historically high hurdle for developers to surmount.

Supervisors Bill Dodd, Mark Luce and Harold Moskowite voted to keep the Angwin bubble from being changed, with the county to come back within the next few years and analyze each of the county’s 12 urban bubbles equally.

That would be done along with a county-wide study of housing, a task that would bring together representatives from the cities and the county to address the problem of state-mandated growth.

Supervisors Diane Dillon and Brad Wagenknecht wanted to cut agricultural land out of the Angwin bubble now, rather than leave hundreds of acres of land potentially vulnerable to development.

The 3-2 vote came after a more than six-hour meeting that saw nearly 60 speakers, most seeking to protect the status quo in Angwin. A crowd of several hundred filled the Lincoln Theater in Yountville, including many PUC students who were bused in from the college.

Pacific Union College President Richard Osborn said the college had accomplished its mission for the day: the elimination of a proposal to limit the college’s development options. That plan was floated by Save Rural Angwin, a group of Angwin residents and others considered about growth in the rural parts of the county.

“We’re very pleased our property rights have been retained,” Osborn said after the meeting. “We wanted to make sure the General Plan process was not used to thwart the project.”

Dodd said he didn’t understand why Dillon and Wagenknecht wanted to change the Angwin urban bubble now, rather than wait to review all the bubbles.

“Why the rush?” Dodd said, later saying he wanted to make sure Angwin was treated the same as the other rural areas that may see further development. “I don’t want to do anything that’s going to help PUC with their development and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to hurt PUC’s development. I want to be neutral.”

Alan Reinach, a lawyer and president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church State Council, sent the county a letter late last week warning it that changes to the Angwin urban bubble could be interpreted as a form of religious discrimination under a federal law. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, according to Reinach, protects the college from an otherwise neutral land use planning that infringes on the ability of the Adventist campus to prosper.

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