Feeling crimped by neighborhood development, directors of Napa Valley Exposition are talking about moving the fairgrounds to the Napa Pipe property south of town.

The idea is both audacious and highly conceptual, fair directors said. Serious talks have not yet occurred with Napa Redevelopment Partner’s Keith Rogal, whose firm owns the Napa Pipe site. But directors voted Tuesday to authorize preliminary discussions.

Citing aging facilities and a neighborhood increasingly sensitive to noise and parking aggravations, several directors said the Expo might be better off in a new location by the Napa River.

“We’re looking down the road. How will it impact us if we’re surrounded by homes?” director Mark Gasster said in an interview. “We’re a fairgrounds. We make noise.”

Rogal has proposed 3,200 homes at the former Napa Pipe property off Kaiser Road, but there is additional acreage under the airport flight path that might be ideal for a fairgrounds, Gasster said.

“Down by the water would be perfect,” he said. “If we made noise, it would be channeled out onto the flood plain.”

Gasster stressed that Napa Pipe would be just one of many locations that directors consider as they ponder the Expo’s future. “The name of the game is patience. We have a lot of work to do,” he said.

Expo interest in the southern 50 acres at Napa Pipe just might make sense, Rogal said Thursday.

“It’s a substantial piece of ground,” he said of the southern acreage. “It can’t be used residentially.”

If he swapped for the 35-acre Expo property, Rogal said he would invite the city and the community to tell him what kind of redevelopment made sense.

“I have no idea what the city, city staff and most importantly the neighbors want” on the Expo grounds, he said. “We just don’t know enough about it.”

A former Expo board looked at moving the fairgrounds to Skyline Park on East Imola Avenue and the Napa Valley Horseman Association on Foster Road, but talks never went far, said Greg Rodeno, a director who served on the Expo board from 2001 to earlier this year.

Because of state rules, the Expo is better off looking at a land swap, not a sale, which complicated things, Rodeno said.

“People complain about the music, people complain about the rodeo,” Rodeno said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be at a place where they didn’t complain?”

Director Al Wagner said the fairgrounds on Third Street needs a huge capital investment to upgrade facilities for community rentals and to solve other infrastructure problems.

Yet the Expo’s ability to generate extra money to pay for upgrades is small, Wagner said.

“Now with a Ritz-Carlton opening up around the corner, I think people are coming to the realization we have to look at the future now,” Wagner said.

The 35-acre Expo sits in the heart of the city’s new Soscol Gateway redevelopment project. More intensive commercial and residential development is planned for the area, which might increase friction between the fairgrounds and neighbors, directors said.

This would be the Expo’s third major planning effort in a decade. In the late 1990s under CEO Dorothy Lind, the Expo put together a development plan that called for a hotel and conference center.

That plan was sabotaged by Gov. Gray Davis’ administration. The state has ultimate control over state-owned fairgrounds.

Early in this decade, a new fair board sketched out plans to upgrade the livestock area and pay for building improvements by sponsoring commercial development along Burnell Street, opposite a planned transit center and multi-use project planned by the Napa County Transportation and Planning Agency.

But nothing much can happen at the Expo as long as it is subject to heavy flooding from the Napa River and severe runoff from the eastern hills, board president Don Carr said.

Solutions to these dual flood threats could be as much as a decade away. Only then will the Expo attract developers who can help finance Expo improvement, he said.

Carr said he was “skeptical” that a deal could be worked out to move the Expo to Napa Pipe, but it is worthwhile to explore this idea, he said.

“It’s like buying a car,” he said. “You don’t know if you’re going to buy the car until you’ve gotten out and kicked the tires.”

Taking Carr’s car metaphor one step further, Director Marjorie Preston said talks with Rogal could end up being harmless window shopping. “It doesn’t mean you don’t decide your old car isn’t that bad and you’ll keep it anyway,” she said.

Director Myrna Abramowicz said she met with Rogal two years ago to talk about moving the Expo, but he showed little interest.

It’s fine to talk some more if Rogal has changed his position, but “I don’t want this board in the position of promoting a project before this board decides what it wants to do,” Abramowicz said.

The board will have a workshop on Nov. 18 to review the status of current fair facilities.