Negotiations between Napa and Napa County to have the city control development at Napa Pipe have broken down, leaving the county in charge of the 152-acre site’s future.

Now, the county will prepare an environmental impact report analyzing a developer’s proposal for 3,200 townhomes, 550,000 square feet of light industrial and office space, as well as a hotel, restaurants and retail.

City and county officials had been meeting behind closed doors for months, looking for a way to shift control of Napa Pipe, adjacent to the city’s southern border, to the city.

 Viewing the Napa Pipe proposal as urban sprawl, the city offered to accept 70 percent of the county’s housing requirements for the next 21 years if the former industrial site could be annexed, with planning restarting from scratch.

Until last week, it seemed that a deal could be reached, Supervisor Mark Luce said Wednesday. Indeed, the city and county had hoped to announce an agreement today, he said.

Serious legal hurdles surfaced at the last minute that made swapping Napa Pipe for future county housing needs impossible, Luce said.

“It really was an earnest effort on everyone’s part to do something that made sense for the community,” Luce said. “(The county) would have been happy to get out of the housing business.”

The city was willing to accept the county’s state housing allocations for the next 21 years, but lawyers for both sides discovered that this might be legally impossible, Luce said.

There is no legal precedent for a county and a city working out a long-range deal of this kind, officials said. Further, a study of the environmental implications likely would have been necessary.

“It became a kind of conundrum,” Supervisor Bill Dodd said Wednesday. 

Mayor Jill Techel said negotiations ran up against a June deadline for city and county to submit new housing plans to the state for approval. An environmental study of a 21-year housing swap could have taken a year and a half, she said.

County officials said they were willing to continue working on a housing transfer agreement, but in the meantime the development proposal by Napa Redevelopment Partners for Napa Pipe needs to proceed to the next step, an environmental analysis report.

“The county remains committed to addressing its state-mandated housing requirements in ways that preserve agriculture, prevent sprawl and protect the quality of life in Napa’s neighborhoods,” Nancy Watt, county chief executive officer, wrote to Parness on Wednesday.

The county expects the environmental report to take a year, with plenty of opportunity for people to comment, Watt said.

“Whatever the outcome, we expect the EIR process, public scrutiny and good planning will ultimately dictate the need for substantive changes to the developer’s initial proposal,” Watt said.

The Napa City Council called a special meeting for 6 tonight at City Hall to air concerns about Napa Pipe and discuss reports that analyze traffic, fiscal and water impacts.

“We can’t stay behind closed doors forever. We need to get the facts out there,” City Manager Mike Parness said Wednesday.

Because of the confidential negotiations with the county, city officials had “muzzled” themselves, Councilwoman Juliana Inman said. Now it’s time to speak out, she said.

Napa officials consider the Napa Pipe proposal fatally flawed, saying it would constitute a new city of 7,000 people on the edge of Napa. “The city and county don’t need 3,200 units. The developer needs 3,200 units to make a profit,” Parness said.

Keith Rogal, the Napa Pipe developer, announced earlier this week that the final plan would probably include fewer than 3,200 homes. “This plan was a starting point,” he said.

Rogal also said he was planning to reduce the industrial square footage and proposed uses to reduce traffic impacts. He is rebutting the city-county studies with his own traffic and water studies.

The developer is proposing to supply Napa Pipe with water from an underground aquifer. The preliminary city-county analysis said the project would not have negative fiscal impacts on the city or county, but that area traffic would swell with 26,000 new vehicle trips daily.

“I think these studies raise a whole lot more questions than they answer,” Assistant City Manager Dana Smith said Wednesday. The city will participate fully in the project’s environmental review, she said.

The city’s environmental concerns will be spelled out at tonight’s meeting, Parness said. Essentially, every major city thoroughfare within four miles of the project would need widening and intersection improvements to handle so much new traffic, he said.

If the city controlled the future of Napa Pipe, planning would not include Rogal’s 3,200 homes as the starting point, city officials said.

Given the year-long environmental review process that is about to begin and the depressed economy, Luce predicted that it would be years before anything was built at Napa Pipe.

The county’s draft housing plan calls for 800 units at Napa Pipe, enough to satisfy the unincorporated area’s housing allocation for the next seven years.