War of words

Bill Kisliuk

On its best days, the letters section is my favorite part of the Register.

The letters page hit a high point a few weeks ago, as the crush of correspondence on the Lake Luciana golf resort proposal pushed everything else off the page in the days before the Napa County Board of Supervisors took up the project. The board voted 3-2 to block the Pope Valley proposal.

Longtime residents of Pope Valley wrote persuasive letters pleading for the project to be approved. Other longtime residents of Pope Valley wrote persuasive letters asking that it be rejected.

Knowledgeable viticulturists wrote to say the Lake Luciana site is unsuitable for grapes and therefore an acceptable one for putting greens. Other grapegrowers wrote to say the area is suitable for vineyards.

The political class weighed in, enumerating the broader arguments of land protection and the primacy of agriculture versus economic viability and the primacy of property rights.

It was a roaring, intelligent and engaging debate.

It is worth noting that we received far more letters about Lake Luciana than we did regarding the May 19 special election on the state’s precarious finances.

Before some elections, we have to publish notes warning readers to get their letters in by a predetermined deadline or risk seeing their missives left on the cutting room floor. This time, we didn’t bother.

The election stirred little passion. Recently, Napa County Registrar of Voters John Tuteur announced that Napa County had the third-highest voter turnout in the state for a county our size. It was an anemic 41 percent, but still much higher than the 25 percent turnout statewide.

One recent political letter prompted a phone call from the office of an elected official. On June 10 we published a letter slamming state Sen. Pat Wiggins, D-Santa Rosa, who has introduced legislation to stop those who hunt for minerals from using a technique called motorized suction dredging — essentially sucking up the sediment in river bottoms and then churning it back out, looking for gold and other precious metals.

Wiggins argues the practice is too destructive to the salmon habitat and riparian ecosystems. The letter writer disagreed, noted that several Native American tribes and groups are among the advocates of Wiggins’ legislation and then took a wild swing: “I assume all of these organizations must contribute to her political campaign as well as the rest of the state Senate.”

In fact, public records do not bear out the letter writer’s assumption. If we had it to do all over again, we’d ask the writer to support the assertion before we ran the letter.

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