The Napa Pipe project is about to hit the headlines again in Napa, and I have been hearing rumblings in the background at big changes that are possible. Meetings have been going on behind closed doors for several months now and one of the strong possibilities emerging is that the city of Napa may take over the project in exchange for taking on the housing requirements of the county.

The city has all kinds of ideas about what to do with the project ... whether the developer will agree to them is another thing, but I know that all along the developer has been opposed to annexation to the city. That will require a vote of the people and whether that will happen and when is unknown. My sense is the real reason is to stifle the project, and I wonder if the real agenda is to deep six it altogether?

My concern as always has been that we are going to have to build housing somewhere, and where is better than Napa Pipe? 

Nowhere in the county.

One possibile location I am adamantly opposed to is Big Ranch Road, where the plan is to turn it into a four lane highway all the way to Salvador Road. To me, that is insanity and I plan to walk the neighborhood and pass out flyers to every single homeowner up there if I have to to stop it.

Between the city of Napa and the county they need north of 2500 units in the next seven years, and all that building on Big Ranch, besides ripping out vines to put the road in, is going to increase traffic on Trancas. Do we need more traffic on Trancas?

The trend is toward dense development, something everyone agrees is a good idea, but dense development without public transportation is a disaster. And there is no real public transportation in the city of Napa nor will any of these plans provide that.

The one place in the county where there is at least a possibility of dense development with public transportation is Napa Pipe.

There is a long list of other reasons why Napa Pipe makes the most sense, including the fact that if we create industry there, where in the heck are we going to put the workers? We need housing in order to reduce the negative impact of growth right now, not jobs. Right now, jobs will be more growth-inducing in Napa than housing.

People don't seem to get that, because creating jobs is like a mantra economically. Especially now, in times of economic distress the idea is jobs, jobs, jobs. But the fact is that Napa right now has far more jobs than places for workers to live, and more jobs means even more pressure to build even more housing over the long term. 

I plan to write about this in more detail soon, but my concern now is that with all the territorial battling between the city and county they are about to emerge with a done deal that will not have the general interest of the community as the first priority.

Instead, we might see a brokered negotiation that will serve the specific interests of the elected officials and government staff involved. We risk getting lost in the lower level specific concerns of those involved and losing track of the big picture.

And where are all the studies on water, traffic, and other environmental impacts we were supposed to see months ago?

What is going on needs to see the light of day to the public before any hard and fast decisions are made, and there needs to be a full public discussion of the various options being discussed behind closed doors before anything is settled on.