The Ugly Truth





25 March 2011
Why Napa Sucks! Part Two: Social Engineers, Big Ideas and Public Works



Out in Browns Valley about half-a-mile short of the market, a nice, old-fashioned stone monument stands between road and creek. Erected a hundred years ago this spring, it bears a dedication. I forget the exact words, but it lauds the public spirit of Browns Valley residents who decided to contrive a tax for themselves so they could pave the road, the first time any citizens had done such a thing in the history of the State.

That sounds so positive; until you think about it. Not many people lived out there, with the cows and prune orchards. If that road had been critical to the life of the County--it was outside the city limits then--presumably the County would have paved it, to the benefit of all, executed by the appropriate authorities, representing the will of the County as a whole.

I can't help suspecting that the ranch and orchard owners needed a road for their own commercial activities. After all, if residents unanimously wanted pavement, they could've paid for it. They didn't; some "majority" of the residents forced reluctant neighbors to finance this revolutionary act.

How was it possible to turn a privately concocted scheme for private interests into a mutual tax burden with the connivance of the County's election apparatus?

This kind of thing did not normally occur or that monument would not exist. I can't help believing this was one of the giant steps the County took in the name of a progressive spirit that now has us goose-stepping wherever the bureaucrats demand.

Now, the County and City of Napa, two separate entities, each conspires with impunity to steal residents' land, businesses and wealth. For our greater good.

And their lavish salaries and benefits and lust for control.

Here's a brief accounting of the last 50 years, a ceaseless record of over-reaching, failure and boondoggle.

Downtown Redevelopment

Once upon a time, Napa was a thriving town that could've doubled for a movie set for the 1890s. Full of stone buildings with elaborately cut facing, the town existed for the residents, and they patronized the merchants. People thronged Downtown on an average workday, and on Saturday mornings, the sidewalks overflowed with locals running errands. Thursday nights, stores stayed open till nine, and the cruising lasted to midnight. During the month of December, our Downtown had all the life of San Francisco's Union Square.

In the 1960s, the city fathers embraced the lure of Federal Urban Renewal money, meant to rebuild big-city ghettoes. For 30 million dollars, they obliterated Downtown Napa, destroying our most beloved buildings, replaced by parking lots or pavement.

The rationale was to guarantee a future for Downtown, to keep it alive by modernizing it. Oh yes...and the Jobs. They went to outside construction firms. After the redevelopment, more or less completed by the mid-'70s, there were a third as many businesses as before, and rents were five times as high.

The people of the town did not ask for this, and they went to court to stop it. They failed, informed that they voted for the bastards, so they had to accept the decisions. There was no recall; by the time residents saw what was happening, it was too late. Many, subject to Napa's rampant paranoia, tell you they feared getting involved. Something bad happens whenever you challenge the Powers-That-Be.

The Downtown did not die; Mayor Ralph Trower and his cronies killed it. In the 40 years since, it has remained killed. Every attempt to fix the disaster has failed; City and County offices fill the storefronts once claimed by citizens, and the parking lots meant for the public are filled with the bureaucrats' new cars, private and official. They get free parking, we get tickets.

The clocktower symbol of the New Napa was torn down to cheers 15 years ago, and the crappy fountain stopped running decades before, to be turned into a planter.

There's a plaque to Ralph Trower by that planter, and I never fail to spit on it whenever I walk by.

The County Offices Square

In the mid-'70s, right after the local Wizards of Smart finished gutting the Downtown, they went after a couple of blocks they'd initially missed, to build a massive jail and county building. This was another project no one in town wanted very much, but after the first rape, this one they took lying down.

It all seemed so inexplicable, so out of the blue at the time, no one knew what to think of it. The best, most pervasive rumors suggested that the presiding judges were behind this one, and they were somehow connected to the deal. And not long after finishing the new County building in the late-'70s or so, They needed another county building, so They built that. And then, a decade later, a new courthouse. None of these buildings, by the way, matches any other of these buildings. All designed that way, no doubt, in the interests of architecural eclecticism.

Just as that latest Darth Vader of a courthouse was finished in the late-'90s or so, they built a new Sheriff's headquarters halfway to Vallejo.

And now, less than a decade after four, new, expensive complexes were completed, we're informed they want a whole new County Complex and bigger jail, for $250 million dollars.

Presumably, as soon as They're done, They'll want to tear that down, too, when They find more public money to embezzle.

Maybe we could turn the whole Downtown into a State Prison. Think of the Jobs!

The Agricultural Preserve

This was another Napa anomaly, instituted in 1969, supposedly to maintain Napa's rural character. The first measure of its sort in the nation, the County drew up boundaries and restricted all activities within them to agriculture. Additionally, it mandated that you could not divide land into parcels of fewer than 40 acres; then it was raised to 80, 120, and now, 160 acres.

People who accumulated land with the expectation that they could sell some of it one day, or give some to their kids, discovered they were stuck. If you owned 60 acres with a house, you couldn't sell 20, say, to pay the taxes or supplement your retirement.

This was a decade before Proposition 13 passed, preventing rapacious property taxes from driving the elderly from their homes. Before that, people burdened with too much land who could not afford their taxes had to sell in a buyers' market. Afterward, the larger parcel sizes were dictated. Even if your taxes didn't go up more, they might have been high to begin with. You were still stuck paying high taxes if only because you had too much land, and you couldn't sell any of it unless you sold all of it.

The pain of selling, if it came to that, was eventually ameliorated by higher prices as the wine industry came back; at least there were potential buyers. But if the purpose of the Ag Preserve was to save the countryside, it was to be a greatly altered countryside.

Undulating oak-studded horse pastures, acres of orchards, large cattle ranches, all succumbed to the rigid rows of vines. Forested hillsides turned vineyard-desert, the eucalyptus wind breaks that lined our roads disappeared, birds evaporated from the Valley floor once full of them. When it rains, the creeks run with eco-friendly pesticides applied by men in space suits during the night, and they run dry in the summer now, as wineries deplete the water table.

Their once-sleepy lanes filled with tourist and wine-trucking traffic, country people found themselves living next to ever-busy grape factories. Every spring, the Valley sounds like an airport as giant propellers blow away the frost.

All this we owe to the Ag Preserve, dreamed up by Napa County to save the countryside and drive residents from their land and turn it over to outsiders who rape it. But it does expand the tax base.

Lake Berryessa

The Berryessa Valley was routinely described as one of the prettiest corners of Napa County in the old days. Drained by Putah Creek, it boasted good water, fertile soil, and its little village of Monticello amounted to a world unto itself. Aside from the rustic beauty, it also claimed the longest stone bridge west of the Mississippi, a three-span wonder of the mason's art.

Some time in the late-'50s, County, State and Federal minions dreamed up yet another of those odd local deals that so often happen in Napa. It was decided to dam the creek, flood the valley and obliterate Monticello. The several hundred residents were kicked out, paid whatever the bureaucrats decided.

Napa County most definitely did not want the water. Indeed, depriving the County of more water was apparently an early anti-growth strategy. No, we would sell the water to other counties. The lake would serve this part of the State as a recreation resource, for fishing and boating. The most direct routes led to Yolo and Solano counties, and the State and Federal governments would accrue some indefinable degree of control over the lake. But Napa County remained responsible for law enforcement and public services, along with the associated costs.

Over the decades the once pristine valley became a noise-filled waterworld of speed boats, trailer parks, gas stations and tacky resorts, the smell of car and boat exhaust wafting between lake and traffic snarls.

It became known for giant boat parties, sloppy young drunks, regular accidents and drownings and the occasional riot. Crackdowns were necessary, of course, providing the County with hundreds of new people to arrest, fine and jail.

Then, over the last five or so years, the powers decided to drive out all the people who replaced the last residents who were driven out. They lost the rights to their trailer parks and cabins, resort owners and concessionaires were told to get lost. They're going to bring in new, better, more expensive services.

That Berryessa deal went down fifty years ago, when the representatives of Napa County conspired with outsiders to sell off our heritage, to sell out hundreds of its own residents, to despoil the countryside.

It was done just for the money. And now the County's screwing a whole new generation since, and another one to come.

But that really doesn't matter anymore. The people of the County don't own the County. The County owns the County.

The bureaucrats just let you live here until they decide it's time for you to go.

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