What is the Ag Preserve and how do you preserve it ?

By MICHAEL HALEY

Over the last several weeks a number of land use issues have surfaced into the local press and it all starts to seem like deja vu all over again listening to the protests.

They are characterized by a group that perpetually resists every possible land use other than farming, backed by a chorus of neighbors saying it violates the ag preserve. Finally it is punctuated by the Sierra Club demanding a CEQA review of the whole thing, hopefully leading to an EIR. CEQA and EIR are acronyms standing for " you can’t do it, whatever it is."

It doesn’t matter that the decisions revolve around legal processes that have been hashed over and over for decades now, every time something comes up everyone except the lonely land owner wants to change the rules in the middle of the game to "preserve the ag preserve".

Each of the recent issues has involved something that is perfectly legal, and the landowners involved were following the rules that have been laid down for them to follow. We tell people what the permitted uses are, then when they want to do it, the community does everything it can to not only try to stop it, but to smear them, propagandize, and spread misinformation.

The Lake Luciana project is a good case in point. Now we are hearing that it is good grape growing land. Gee, is that why hundreds of acres have lain fallow for fifteen years in a world class grape growing region? If it were good grape growing land it would already be growing grapes because the owners would want the money. And the people saying you can grow grapes there know that.

Also, the owners of that property are trying to use it the way they have been told by the county that is legal. Same with the Nords in their Yountville property, same with PUC in Angwin.

Last week in the Supervisors meeting a county code enforcement officer was reviewing the various code enforcement violations they have dealt with over the past year, and he was showing some photos of several large houses that had been illegally broken down into apartment units and reconstructed without permits. He happened to innocently mention that this happens a lot in Angwin because, as we all know, there is a shortage of housing in Angwin.

I’m sitting there thinking, this guy must not live in the County, because as we all know, SRA has told us again and again there are so many available units in Angwin the eco village won’t sell.

I will tell you what we all know. The people who want to stop any and every legal development in Napa County are major fabricators, and they have managed to entirely confuse most of the rest of the population.

Here’s a bit of truth for anyone left here that may be interested. Part of the ag preserve is two large zoning areas of forty and 160 acres respectively. But the rest of the ag preserve is designated for development, and each and every parcel has some legal development rights. That is just as much a part of the ag preserve as the parcel size limits, and we run over those rights at our peril.

People act like any development at all is somehow opposed to agriculture. You could not have agriculture here unless you allowed some development. People have to live somewhere. Good grief, you have to get your tractor fixed somewhere.

Those who instituted the ag preserve were wise enough to include some land for future development. That was a wise decision and we need to respect that and include that in any discussion of the ag preserve.

Here are the problems I see coming. Eventually there is going to be a backlash, we have actually had two backlashes already, one was over Measure P, the stream setback ordinance, the second backlash was from affordable housing advocates who filed suit and won.

The second problem is that we need the housing. The community needs the housing. We need the housing for workers, and we need the housing to take commuter traffic off the roads, and we need the housing for young people and to make Napa a livable community. We need something different than another 1000 mansions in the hills in the next ten years, because right now that is where we are heading.

Housing is going to be built, and what we need are denser more affordable developments for people who are less than multi millionaires living in huge mansions. The developments that we are opposing are mostly multi-unit denser developments. We issue 114 permits for houses a year, actually use between 70 and 100, and they are all for big houses on big lots.

Why not stop some of that by giving the permits to something like the eco village at PUC? In the time it will take to build less than 400 non millionaire units there, eight to ten years, if we block that instead we will build double that in big mansions in the hills. We are going to build housing, but we are not building the housing that the community actually needs.

Somewhere along the way in the late 80's or early 90's Napa made a decision as a whole to go for the economic development of the County via the wine industry. There is no turning back from that without huge negative consequences. Napa is not a totally rural place any more.

If you want to see a place that was like Napa in the 70's before the decision to develop economically was made, go to Willits up in Mendocino. Thousands of acres of undeveloped land, just open fields and trees -- and no jobs, that are legal anyway. In fact, if you want to live in a place without housing and jobs, move to Willits and stop trying to turn Napa into Willits.

Because Napa made the decision to grow economically, we have to have places for people who work here to live. Period. If we don’t, we will have enormous traffic, which we do already, but it will get even worse. See: Santa Barbara.

We will have pollution, we will have crowding into housing that is available, we will have high real estate prices, and we will have continually greater and greater pressure because of that to end the ag preserve and just build.

If you push things too far in one direction and try to perfectly control everything eventually that control effort explodes in your face, it is like having a pressure boiler without a release valve, eventually the pressure builds so high it just explodes. Those who try to save the ag preserve by blocking every legal use of land are making a mistake, because it is too dismissive of other people’s rights and needs, and of community needs. Sooner or later that will backfire.

As we try to lock down every square inch of land for grape growing, even land that has always been designated for development, we are creating a situation of trying to perfectly control everything, which WON’T work, it never does. Far better to let off a bit of steam here and there, meet at least some of our other needs, and in that way preserve what we have for the future.

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