I am shocked and angered by the contemplated attempt of those who lost the Measure N vote to immediately put the same attempt to scuttle Napa Pipe before us. This is a way to flip off the community that voted against this once, and reeks of being sore losers.

There is no way this community needs to go through another battle we just fought yet again.

f they think this is going to be any different than what we already went through, they are dreaming. In fact it is going to be much worse and they are going to lose by an even bigger margin, wasting yet more of the community’s time and money. Someone needs to tell them to stop this, now.

Right off the bat we are back to the same major problem. Who is the "prominent environmental figure" that promises to be a major player now in getting this passed? Another secret group of supporters? The original group of unidentified secret supporters are still in play here that started this, and that was the number one reason it went down. Now we have added one to that list. Why all the secrecy? Do you really think that issue is just going to go away? It won’t.

Trying to pass this off as an attempt to do it the way the Register said would work better is totally lame. No one is going to believe that, I sure don’t. Did I miss something, is the Register running the county now? It’s a pathetic attempt to justify what you want to do anyway by using a Register editorial opinion piece as cover.

I have seen the proposed draft of the initiative and one of the things it says is that they need to get it done by July 1 to get it on the ballot in November. That’s two weeks from now, and they haven’t even decided on wording yet. It seems like I remember something about a rush job that led to legal problems in the last initiative? Remember that? Here we go again. What is the rush?

The draft initiative I saw was based on Land Preservation, and the land they want to "preserve" is two polluted industrial sites, Napa Pipe and what’s called Boca/Pacific, a parcel near Syar and Kennedy Park along Soscol. Those two sites were included in the recent General Plan as study areas, meaning that consideration of redesignating them as some other possible use besides industrial would be studied.

The reason for this is that the County most needs housing, and residential development could be studied and considered, which is why the whole Napa Pipe thing is going on right now. So what we have is a draft initiative that would "preserve‚ these polluted industrial sites as industrial.

There are so many problems here, we just gave American Canyon 300 acres of new industrial land (Napa Pipe totals 155 acres), we don’t need industrial land anyway because no heavy industry wants to locate here, the ones that are here have left already, and we have plenty of industrial land anyway should that change. Moreover, we have a developer that is willing to spend millions of dollars that the County does not have and will not have to clean up the pollution at Napa Pipe.

Now, on top of all that they are proposing an initiative based on Land Preservation.

Is the goal of land preservation making sure we don’t clean up polluted sites? Are we trying to preserve pollution now? I can see the campaign now, vote for Measure N Redux to make sure Napa preserves its most polluted sites for perpetuity! That is a sure fire seller, don’t you think?

The fact that this initiative is being drafted to strictly change the General Plan regarding two sites only suggests even more strongly that it is being funded by a competing developer. Why? Because there is no growth limit in the draft, no nothing else for the community, only the guaranteed preservation of two polluted sites. It is becoming poundingly obvious that this is about business competition between developers and not about anything that is good for the community.

What the community needs right now in regard to Napa Pipe is for the planning process to move forward and see what we are really looking at. We need time to absorb the meaning of the election result. If the Napa Pipe proposal gets out of hand, we can have a community wide vote then. There is nothing to stop that and those involved know that. That alone is already guiding the development plans. There is no need to strangle it in its infancy — unless of course, you are a developer who is afraid that their development will get delayed or denied if Napa Pipe gets built.

Whoever is behind this, quash it now. This is the absolute worst idea I have seen in Napa in a long time. And please stop hiding who is behind it.