For years developers have chafed against St. Helena’s caps on hotels and restaurants. Now there’s growing support among city leaders to scrap the caps and find another way to maintain economic diversity on Main Street.

The St. Helena City Council has raised the restaurant cap, originally set at 30, four times since last August: for a new café at the Culinary Institute of America and three spots along Main Street — a gelato shop, Long Meadow Ranch’s new Farmstead restaurant at Whiting Nursery and, most recently, Todd White’s proposed wine lounge, Vinu.

The caps, which can only be raised by the city council, were set in place shortly after the council adopted the 1993 General Plan for the city. But today’s council isn’t so fond of the idea.

“It puts the city council in a pretty tough situation,” said Councilmember Bonnie Schoch. “If we keep upping it, what’s the point?”

Planning commissioners had the same question when they reviewed Vinu. They wanted to get an idea of whether Vinu would compete with existing restaurants, which led to unusual questions from regulators about what, exactly, would be on the menu.

Planning Commissioner Peter McCrea said no one has articulated exactly why the cap exists, so there are no clear criteria for why it should or shouldn’t be raised.

“There’s really a deeper philosophical issue here: Should the city be attempting to influence the mix of businesses in the city?” said McCrea. “Unless something outrageous is proposed, I tend to come down on the side of letting the market take care of it.”

The goal of the caps is to give the council some control over the mix of businesses on Main Street. But a lot of the debates relating to economic diversity in town have centered on businesses like nail salons and real estate offices, which aren’t covered by caps.

Councilmember Eric Sklar agrees that caps “are not the right tool to solve the problem.”

“Every time there’s a vote on raising the cap, there’s a real discomfort,” said Sklar. Reconsidering the cap has to be part of a broader discussion about the diversity of businesses on Main Street, he said.

The planning commission made no recommendation about raising the cap for Vinu, instead asking the council for clarification on the cap. But the council is leaving the issue in the hands of the General Plan Update Steering Committee.

The committee seems to be moving away from the idea of strict caps in favor of a looser policy of encouraging a diverse mix of business types. They’ve asked consultants to report back on how similar cities have handled the issue.

The caps will probably come up again when consultants finish the next draft of the new General Plan’s Economic Sustainability element.

Bill Savidge, a former councilmember who serves on the committee, said that when he joined the council in 1994, back when John Brown was mayor, there was a strong anti-tourism sentiment on the council and a feeling that the council should “micromanage” businesses, even to the point of controlling what could be displayed in storefronts.

“Now that feeling is fading, and I think that’s being reflected in the new General Plan,” said Savidge.

Not surprisingly, the business community is eager to see the caps abandoned.

Bob Beckstrom chaired the joint city-Chamber of Commerce Economic Outlook Study Group, which recently issued a report on St. Helena’s long-term economic sustainability. Although the study group was primarily interested in big-picture issues, it saw the caps as an example of governmental interference that has sometimes held the economy back, he said.

“We tend to believe that the marketplace can sort out those things more readily and easily than some kind of closed cap,” he said.