The Ugly Truth





15 May 2011
Why Napa Sucks! Part Six: Expensive Boondoggle After Boondoggle



The Napa Valley is one of the most beautiful places in the world. It's that simple. Many extraordinary people live here, representing a range of talents. The finest food and wine are ubiquitous, and, for better or worse, Napa County might well be one of the world's most prolific venues for deeply personal architectural expressions, residential and commercial. Art, good, bad and indifferent, is everywhere. The same with every twist of culture.

All of this evolved on its own, and was already doing so before the activist bureaucrats began to flex their muscles. As a result, the Wine Country version of Carmel or Santa Barbara we might have become was superseded by a Wally's World of Wine forced on us by stupid civil service clerks with attitude.

The outside social planners started showing up in the '60s, chanting the mantra of slow, planned growth. To celebrate our rural heritage, preserve the environment and maintain the pleasant quality of life.

Instead, our public servants and managers warped every fine impulse or noble desire into another means of taking the citizens' money for their salaries and pensions.

They promote every ill-conceived project that comes along if there's money in it, and in the name of expert planning we got suburban sprawl, struggling strip malls, dying shopping centers and choking traffic. They look for more grants and free money to continue the spending and fatten their budgets, all the while harassing existing businesses and residents to distraction with Byzantine regulations and savage punishments.

Worse, they subjected this wonderful valley and its residents to every variety of publicly funded social engineering. They are determined to perfect the nature of our lives, as they see fit, whether we want it or not. They will help us whether we want it or not, they will dictate to us the terms of our lives down to the most intimate detail.

At its very worst, it all amounts to a sustained exercise in demographic cleansing. If you won't pay up and submit, the Managers of Napa County will drive you out or ruin you. A hardcore cadre of interchangeable Public Managers labor inexorably to increase the bureaucracy's power at your expense by creating such massive, complicated government that you have no power to resist it anymore. Napa County and its many municipal agencies have refined every strategy and tactic to use civil government in pursuit of their own ends.

Just look at the litany of debacles below, and tell yourself something isn't wrong here. Desperately wrong. One example after another demonstrates how average citizens are actively sabotaged and attacked. And a completely different set of examples explains why the Downtown features so many more dead businesses than alive.

The Fagiani Building Follies
Let's see...after sitting vacant for 30 years, someone buys it and proposes to renovate the old bar into a modern restaurant nightclub, perfectly consistent with the City's lust for yet more expensive eateries serving outside visitors. The current facade would be restored, a roof patio added, and Main Street graced with a brand new version of the building it had known for 70 years. It seems the City Planning Department, wonder of wonders, had no problems with the plans, approving them. Then some made-up Committee of Public Taste answering to the City Council stops the project because its members want the owner to revise his plans to conform to their desire to restore the building to its original 1910 design.

As winter approached last year, the owner lingered in a bureaucratic limbo, his construction stopped, his building exposed to the rain, and a table-full-of unelected officials mangling his every effort. Within the last month or so the Napa Register featured a headline suggesting that construction would soon commence. It is not at all clear as to how all of this is happening, why we have these citizens committees who over-ride the decisions of our elected representatives, who sponsor these same committees and then defer to them. Worst of all, these busybody activists enthusiastically use their powers to inflict their values, their wills, on the mass of their fellow citizens.

An artist and an architect on the committee teamed up with a bossy nag to demand the owner do the building their way, as if they owned it.

In this case, Napa's cock-eyed process has at the very least delayed the project a year, denied the construction jobs, denied the long-term jobs, for now. Unless, of course, the Process manages to kill it. The owner has been forced to spend hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, due to simple municipal harassment. And there's still plenty of opportunity for him to get disgusted and call it quits.

The Moore's Landing Mess
Out in the Carneros region on Cutting's Wharf Road, Moore's Landing sits along the riverside, a rural Napa institution. There's a diner bar with patio, and a couple of dozen cottages moved there from somewhere else after World War Two. It served as the town square for the few hundred residents in the surrounding area, many of whom especially appreciated the isolation of a self-contained little community where they could fish, boat or drink beer on the dock without being bothered.

They've also provided some of the lowest income housing of a particularly desirable sort for a certain kind of tenant, of which Moore's Landing was full; older singles on fixed incomes, with a few small families in the mix. Their rent seems to have ranged from three to four hundred dollars a month, and everyone was living happily ever after in a sleepy riverside haven.

Last summer, the Sheriff's Department started hanging around out there, deputies randomly annoying or citing people at every opportunity, going so far as to demand people explain their presence at the river on sunny afternoons. Then the County code enforcement functionaries swooped down on the place and condemned the cottages unless brought up to current regulatory demands. A figure of $50,000 per unit was mentioned, though each could easily be fixed up for a few thousand.

So the owner did the logical thing; he decided to close the place down, resulting in the eviction of all those low-income tenants. There was talk of the County seizing the property, of ordering the owner to make repairs, of making repairs on the County's authority, and then billing the owner. All of that was yet more bureaucratic over-reach, and the owner is a San Francisco attorney, unintimidated by the local municipal extortionists.

The majority of the elderly residents were cast out some months ago, nowhere to go in some cases, and certainly nowhere they liked as much. The newspaper recently reported that nine cottages still house people, and it seems there's another weird round to come, of the County trying to muscle the owner just for the sake of muscling the owner.

So, in the interests of quality low-income housing, and with its usual efficiency, the County effectively cast 30 or 40 people into the streets.

The Riverview Apartments Expulsion
These 50 or so units of "garden apartments" were built in the '50s or early '60s on Riverside Drive across the street from the river a few blocks south of the Napa River Inn. It housed a community of a couple of hundred people, mostly Mexican families with children, near a park on a tree-lined street. In this case, the City of Napa all of a sudden decided after 50 years that the dirt underneath the parking lots was not safe because of contamination by PG&E 60 or 70 years ago. As always in these creative City deals, the details are murky, but PG&E may take the land back to demolish the apartments, clean up the negligible toxic waste, and give it back to the City. Or something like that.

In order to protect these residents of low-income housing, the City drove them out, forcing another several hundred people to fight over the small local stock of modest family dwellings.

Furniture 4-Less, but Hell 4-Owner
The owner of this property bought it a decade ago, and he spent the majority of those years trying to get approval to expand his furniture store on the lot he owned. They tormented him with encouragement the whole time, giving him the impression that, eventually, he'd make it through the red tape and be able to build the strore he wanted. He gave up a year or so ago, after spending almost a million dollars trying to navigate the system. The mayor said she tried to help, and anyway, someone else in the City hierarchy wanted to see a few low-income housing units put on the busy commercial intersection instead.

More taxpayer money wasted on incompetent bureaucrats, and the taxpayer in question wasn't allowed to create new business, new construction jobs, new permanent jobs. There won't be aby low-cost housing either.

The Berryessa Removals
In this instance, Federal, State and County officials--and a gang of agencies you've never heard of--conspired to throw out the residents of 1,500 properties, housing several thousand people, and serving several thousand more during the season. These were owned by families going back 50 years, when the original residents of the area were expelled for the Napa County lake designed to supply water to surrounding counties, but not Napa.

The trailers and resort cabins provided homes to Napa retirees, and extended families routinely spent weekends and summer vacations with parents and grandparents. Perhaps as many as ten thousand people altogether lost a primary home or a holiday retreat in a county of 140,000.

Officialdom of every level seems to have agreed unanimously that they didn't want any scruffy locals around when they could redevelop Lake Berryessa into an expensive publicly-owned resort and plunder well-healed outsiders who can afford new exorbitant fees for everything. Lake Berryessa is one of our finest examples of exactly how the County looks out for its residents' best interests.

I wonder where all those people went?

The Berryessa Housing Tracts Blackmail
A few days ago, the Napa Register ran an article about how various communities around Lake Berryessa--the people who can't be driven out--recently suffered 70 percent rate increases for water and sewage services. But even that won't pay for the system. Before the problems are all straightened out, the County will have loaned the districts several million dollars, and then the County intends to forgive the loans.

This is most curious; the County Supervisors also serve as directors for these districts, so they're making deals with themselves to take several million from the general fund to subsidize expensive country housing built and bought by private parties.

Meanwhile, these same districts and residents are being sued by various State agencies for polluting Lake Berryessa with their rain runoff, even though said runoff tests as clean as the lake itself. County lawyers devote thousands of dollars worth of time fighting said law suits.

Most of these developments sprouted within the last thirty years, well after Napa had established its policies concerning slow, planned, environmental growth, well after all these factors of water and sewage and pollution were thoroughly understood. Since they were in the countryside, they presumably suffered withering scrutiny concerning their environmental impacts.

The County approved all of this after their myriad studies, and a completely predictable disaster evolved. Homes were built on unstable land and slipped away; so much for the environmental impact reports. Indeed, I know one of the engineers who predicted that outcome for many of the lots, so the developers hired another engineer after stiffing my friend.

But that's another wrinkle in the story of an ill-conceived project brought to you by greedy bureaucrats to expand the tax base and collect building fees, unsustainable disaster or not.

They allowed those homes to be built with substandard infrastructures for their own short-term concerns, and in the long-term, the taxpayers, yet again, are out millions. But that's not the bureaucrat's problem; he gets the benefits, and you get the bills. And the Napa homes closest to a great reservoir can't have the cheap water because their representatives are selling it to others.

Wine Train Giveaways
I like the Wine Train, except for the fact that the Powers-That-Be won't allow it to take passengers through the Valley unless they're dropping a hundred bucks apiece on brunch or dinner. But that didn't stop the local officialdom from tapping Federal transportation funds--transportation funds, mind you, having to do with transporting passengers--to the amount of around a hundred million or so dollars for a crossing at Trancas and Highway 29, and now, underway for a year, a simple crossing by the Oxbow Market.

This latter stage of the work will cost around $60 million, and some $20 million of that seems to have gone to a middleman in Alaska, a pay-to-play fee honoring contracts set aside for minority-owned "construction companies." One of the subcontractors, I noticed, is a giant construction entity that specializes in big government projects with substantial cost-overruns. I first became aware of them 15 years ago in Los Angeles, when they helped build the Hollywood subway system and it was discovered that someone neglected to join the large tube sections that went through earthquake-prone mountains. They tried to cover the joints with plaster. With plaster!

These outside companies don't hire much locally, either, so as a local jobs program the project's a failure, though these funds were supposed to boost the local economy somehow. Instead, the crossing has impeded traffic to the Oxbow Market, which in its three-and-a-half-year history has been blocked off most of that time.

Senator John McCain even raised the rail-crossing issue before the Senate, but to no avail. Just for a little perspective, consider that the justification was the 2005 flood that swamped the tracks for a few weeks, and presumably caused some damage. But it is, after all, a private company, using a rail right-of-way that's existed for 150 years and has managed so far without this kind of expenditure.

And why, after all, did the City, or the Flood Control District, allow the Wine Train Station to be built in the flood zone, if it wasn't to provide some kind of excuse to spend more of our money?

Why are the taxpayers picking up this $60 million tab, for a railroad operation that cost less than $20 million for the owners to buy? And just for comparison, look at the Castello Amorosa winery-castle by Calistoga, the size of a small renaissance town. That cost $30 million, yet a blob of concrete and some piles driven into the ground costs $60 million when the government's involved.

This is one of the best examples of how Napa public servants milk the Federal and State governments for any kind of money, for any kind of project. And that's how it came to be that a tenth-of-a-billion dollars of transportation money was spent on a high-priced amusement ride, seldom half-full, that doesn't really take passengers anywhere.

More Flood Control Boondoggles
In the last month the newspaper informed us that because of funding problems, other Flood Control District projects may be in trouble, specifically, whatever it is they're doing over by Pearl and Main streets. Since they're reconfiguring their last failed project at the same place, it probably doesn't matter if it proceeds or doesn't, but rest assured that the bureaucrats will dump as much money as they can on a half-finished project, leaving it in as miserable condition as possible, in the hopes that they'll be able to milk more money from somewhere with the help of any dupe who comes along to demand that the blight be fixed.

This is how they work; a big, expensive fix for a non-existent problem, and then even more money to repair the problems created by trying to fix the problem that wasn't.

Oddly, after all these decades of flood control work, the District has expanded the flood zone, diminishing the value of properties in the area, thus forcing them to buy flood insurance at premium rates. Just wait to see how long it is before they try to condemn the properties and take them over through eminent domain, displacing more local citizens to create another riverside hotel or commercial development for outsiders.

The Million Dollar Marsh Grass
Last year, the Napa wizards of smart allocated more than a million bucks to plant 700 marsh-grass clusters along the river. I watched the work for two weeks, some dozen or so hapless individuals working at a snail's pace, planting eight or nine clusters apiece per day.

If you figure there were 20 workers involved at a thousand bucks a week--that's a 50K a year salary for unskilled flunkies--you come to $40,000. If the little clumps of marsh grass cost a hundred each--a fruit tree, by the way, costs $20 or $30--you arrive at a cost of $70,000, for a grand sum of $110,000, grossly inflated, I believe, by my overestimates. Where did the rest of the million dollars go?

Regardless of cost, the geese ate most of the marsh grass immediately, and now a mere fraction remains.

The Empty Shuttles To Nowhere
Then there's the recently aborted shuttle from Downtown to the Outlet Shopping Center. That cost a million or so a year, and after it was demonstrated to be a failure, the Powers decided to continue it for the better part of another year. Seldom did any of these shuttles carry more than a few passengers at a time, and they were usually empty.

As with the marsh grass, the numbers don't add up either. A $200,000 shuttle bus and three drivers for $100,000 each per annum--more of my overestimates--leaves you with about $500,000 of inflated costs. How did it cost more than a million? Yet another bloated program that accomplished nothing.

Vineyard Worker Vanpool
This is a recent addition to local expenditures to make life a little easier for our immigrant population, another million-dollar remedy for a non-problem. Within a month of its implementation earlier this year, the Napa Register reported that no one was using the service. It is not clear if one has to have Mexican ID to ride, and proof that you're a field worker. Perhaps a clarification would raise the ridership: Can blacks and anglos ride that shuttle to get to a job in a restaurant or hotel? But then, maybe they're not. Could it be possible we're funding a program that discriminates based on race and ethnicity? Don't be surprised if that's exactly how it works in practical terms.

TARP Funds for Trash
TARP was that Federal program initiated in 2008 to keep the economy going after Federal regulators decided to let their Crony Capitalist friends ruin the world financial system. So, of course, they dumped trillions of dollars into local bureaucracies to feed the parasites. The public works projects went to the same contracting firms that always get the costly public business.

The most visible project is the transit center at Trancas and the frontage road by Highway 29. A huge pedestrian/passenger island was constructed, along with a wealth of parking for cars that never appear. That Vineyard Worker Van Pool that no one uses operates from this place as well. And the one time I saw workers on the job, I found they didn't speak English and showed every indication of being illegals. Jobs for the community, indeed.

I'm the only person I've ever seen getting on or off a bus there, and only a small fraction of the parking spots are filled; and that pedestrian island is bigger than anything I've seen at BART stations. But one day, presumably, hundreds of people will use the facility daily. Just don't hold your breath.

But the most visible manifestations of Federal money from TARP were the new cars the public servants bought for themselves, the biggest or trendiest, most expensive vehicles they could get, from Priuses for the parking police, to giant, shiny pickup trucks for the fire and police departments.

Just a few weeks ago, we learned that the fire department is dropping almost a million bucks on a state-of-the-art fire truck, just what's needed for more heroic rescues, as in that bathroom fire a month ago.

The money doesn't matter because we're not paying for it. Or are we?

Short-Changing Citizens for Immigrants at Napa College
A few months ago, it was reported in the Register that Napa College intended to do all it could to raise the Hispanic enrollment to 25 percent so it couild qualify for even more Federal funds. Local kids are already going to Santa Rosa and Solano community colleges because they can't get required courses at Napa College, and now the college intends to make it even more difficult for youngsters to graduate on time with this discriminatory recruitment effort. The County Hispanic population is already 40 percent; is there anything to keep Hispanics out of Napa College?

But this isn't about teaching our kids something useful and getting them an associate degree, or preparing them to move on to a real college after two years. The intention is to get as many bodies into the system as possible because the school gets free Federal money for every body sitting at a desk, whether they have a goal or not, whether they finish anything or not, whether they learn anything or not.

This began in the mid-'70s with the name change from "Junior College" to "Community College." The former concept was considered elitist, the idea that a youngster would use the chance to start college in a familiar low-cost environment to prepare for a more rigorous, more expensive institution, somehow offensive. Consequently, the college would serve the community as a whole, forever, because learning should be a lifelong process, subsidized by taxpayers.

That's how we ended up with a vast array of women's studies classes out there that essentially made student/wives feel like failures unless they left their families; hobby-media classes, as if we really need to train filmmakers; and every variety of basket-weaving, knitting and pottery class. All without clear purpose, goal or end.

So, aside from spending huge amounts of money on superficial gestures suggesting education that leave students as unemployable as ever, the school also dispenses Federal aid and loans so the youngsters can afford their studies. But they can't pay back the loans, because they never learn anything that will get them a job. Even worse, they don't get an education.

The Duelling Visitors' Centers
After the Powers destroyed Downtown with redevelopment, a decade later they contrived the Town Center to repair that Downtown. Hidden from the main streets, it was invisible to anyone who didn't know it was there, and it never stopped limping along. There was no place else to put a visitors' center since nothing was left of the Downtown, so the Town Center became its home.

I presume another one of those odd local public/private partnerships funded it at the outset, and more recently, it seems to have been run with private funds derived from the surrounding merchants. Even so, the Town Center is dying a slow death since the entire project, beginning to end, was doomed to failure just because all of it derived from the well-fertilized brains of our bureaucrats.

The Napa City Mothers had a solution, however. All they had to do to get people to come to the most disappointing "World Class" tourist town in America--a status earned by those same City Mothers--was to create a bigger, more expensive Visitors' Center. They funded it with a hotel room tax--again, no complaint from anyone, since it's not our money--and put it into the newest struggling project in town, the Riverfront.

They abandoned the last victims of civic failure to embrace another group of eventual victims of civic failure, but for a lot more money. Putting it across the street from the looming jail makes it even more sweetly ironic.

The people running the old Visitors' Center are justly annoyed, but the guys at the new one couldn't care less. They get publicly extorted funding, and they hired a director for a hundred grand a year, when they could've gotten any one of a hundred unemployed public relations/marketing types who proliferate here for 40k.

But that would presume that someone cared about saving money rather than wasting it. Such people don't exist in Napa governments.

More Theaters Than Patrons
Don't get me wrong, I actually like the Napa Opera House and the Lincoln Theater in Yountville, and I'm not opposed to Napa College having a decent theater. But how many theaters do we need in this Valley, and at what cost?

The college had a theater of some sort, and they staged plays there. Did the school really need to spend a $100 million, more or less, on that wonderful, new facility? It hardly matters, of course, since most of the money probably came from the State or Feds; local boosters would explain how we made money since the taxpayers of Napa paid a fraction of the total cost. Or something like that. Enough money to pay a thousand teachers a hundred grand a year was spent on what seems to me to be a non-essential building, especially considering that California has suffered a debt crisis ever since the start of the new millenium.

This is what happens to your hard-earned money after you succumb to shills for the teachers' unions suggesting you're cheating the Children if you don't pay up.

The Lincoln Theater at the Veterans' Home in Yountville was perfectly serviceable as well before its costly renovation a few years ago. I won't argue that it's an excellent showplace with the finest acoustics. But it used to be affordable, and ever since, I've been informed, it costs $3000 just to open the doors. However they figure those things.

A facility once available to a variety of cash strapped local organizations effectively shut its doors to them. Since it's on State property, I don't know how much local taxpayers put out for this, if anything. But that's beside the point; we lost something else we once had available. Meanwhile, wherever the money came from, the Vets' Home has been reducing services to residents, charging them outlandish fees, and then trying to confiscate their estates.

Private fund-raising built the Opera House, though one presumes the City and public money found their ways into the project. According to rumors at its completion, the showplace cost $15 million to build, half of it spent on fund-raising during its decade-long renovation. It presents narrow specialty acts that seldom fill the room--the Capitol Steps, Kris Kristoferson--and the tickets are pricey. Indeed, it's competing for the same audiences that go to the same sorts of acts at Lincoln Theater, also expensive.

These latter two venues will explain that they intend to draw from a regional audience, but they fail to mention that there are a dozen other like facilities within an hour's drive that also explain that they're regional attractions, the ubiquitous fallback story whenever locals don't show. A few months ago, news reports suggested that the Opera House will be in trouble without State money for support, and that seems unlikely given that budget crisis.

So the Napa Valley claims three great, new performance stages that can't support themselves, and their simple maintenance fees will eventually prove a financial burden to someone, whether they stay open or not.

The Powers-That-Be of Napa routinely exceed their mandates and authority because they don't need local taxpayers to fund the bulk of these projects, since they get so much free money elsewhere. Even so, the people of Napa still get stuck with unexpected bills, as often as not losing the services they pay for as well.

Whether these three survive remains to be seen, but the odds are stacked against them. This is Napa, after all.

Copia, The Great White Elephant
This started out as a private project with seed money from Robert Mondavi, and before it was completed tens of millions were raised from individuals; through a municipal bond; and whatever they could borrow, using cash in hand as collateral. Now that it's officially bankrupt, the total bill amounts to around $400 million.

This is the best example extant of how private aspirations in the form of individuals or non-profits morph into public policy and obligation. There are, no doubt, elements of this dynamic in the case of the three theaters, the Wine Train, the shuttle services, the various Berryessa hijinks.

Copia also revealed every World-Class pretension loose in this Valley, with our provincial Booboisie agreeing with slack jaws to every stupid idea high-priced consultants or experts might contrive. Architects gave us that eccentric facade with wavy lines and a mixture of facing, from corrugated metal to rocks to stucco, while creating grand outside balconies overlooking the parking lot, and ignoring the sunset views of the Mayacamas Mountains. It looks like a factory designed by a drunk

The curators created an art gallery devoted to cutting edge food art, comprising a worldwide audience of, perhaps, a few dozen. The first major art exhibition in the main gallery featured "Shit from Barcelona," a collection of scores of five-inch figurines, each squatting over the little pile of turds he had just deposited. They even featured one of the Pope taking a crap. All displayed in stainless steel refrigerators with glass doors. It's a Barcelona Thing, and it was supposed to be hip.

The bar outside the restaurant named after Julia Child had all the warmth of a warehouse, and the noise too, the deli coolers howling in the background. And the movie theater, otherwise well-done, started out with a small screen and bad projector.

Did I mention the executive director was paid $400,000 a year, a salary to be envied by people who run the greatest museums in the world? The recently arrested head of the International Monetary Fund also earns a mere $400,000 a year, and that's one of the most important financial jobs in the world. And Napa was willing to pay that for someone to run our tacky little museum.

No one seems to know what's going to happen to the place, and the big, prestigious anchor project that was supposed to support the Oxbow Market as an attraction, as well as the once-planned Ritz-Carlton hotel across the street, is now an empty shell.

A bankrupt Copia remains The Valley's greatest monument to itself and what the people of Napa stand for: a legacy of unrelenting community failure.



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